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Football in Rutherford County has seen its share of a rollercoaster type season. This past Friday, all four county teams fell, but East Rutherford had the bright spot in a sense with a tough game from Burns.
Lovell Robinson scored twice with his final touchdown run pushing East to a 28-27 lead in the fourth quarter.
However, they couldn’t withhold quarterback Chris Montgomery from scoring a touchdown on the next Burns possession as Tylan Ruff added over 200 yards rushing on the night in a 33-28 Bulldog victory.
Burns (5-3, 3-0), who has beaten the likes of King Mountain and Freedom, plus narrowly lost to Crest earlier in the season, is a solid football team. Despite being 4-4, 2-1, the close Burns loss shows that they are getting better every week. East played a very good Providence Day team from the week before, so maybe that helped in retrospect.
It doesn’t get any easier for East Rutherford (4-4, 3-1) as they will go to Freedom on Friday, which is now tied with East for second in the conference.
Thomas Jefferson (6-2, 2-2) has now lost two in a row as Mountain Heritage surprised the Gryphons with a 54-36 defeat on the road.
I expected Thomas Jefferson to have a close game with Mountain Heritage, but nobody probably saw 54 points coming from the Cougars. The Gryphons had allowed just 27 points to an opponent all season long. Still, they are in good shape playoff wise and will host rival Polk this coming weekend.
Meanwhile, R-S Central took the lead against Patton on a magnificent grab by Matt Atchley in the end zone for and 11-yard score with under two minutes remaining, but they couldn’t hold that 14-7 advantage.
Patton goes 92-yards in 36 second time frame on a couple of breaks and resiliency. Patton gets half that yardage on a crazy completion that bounced off two players before finally scoring a touchdown just three plays later. Tyler Bias pushed ahead for the two-point conversion as Central lost 15-14.
Central’s defense did a good job of bottlenecking Bias, who had just 74 rushing yards on the night as he will go over a 1,000 yards rushing easily on the season.
Central had three sacks, but Hunter McSwain and Jared Foster-Smith were the defensive players of the week in containing the run. Foster-Smith even had a fumble recovery despite the loss.
The sickening thing about the whole outcome is that Central really did what it needed to do. They controlled time of possession the entire game and posted 38 plays to Patton’s 17 in the half. Central also allowed just 185 yards before the final Patton game-winning drive.
The Hilltoppers now face a confident Shelby at home for senior night this Friday. In recent history, Central usually plays Shelby well at home, but it’s up to the kids to show up, since playoff hopes are dashing away each week.
After taking down R-S Central in overtime a couple of weeks ago, Chase has now lost two straight.
This past week, it was Shelby, who started the season 1-4 has now won three in a row as they hurriedly downed Chase 49-7.
On Friday, Chase (4-4, 2-2) will step out of conference and host South Oak Charter as the Trojans look to get back into the win column before hosting Freedom and East Rutherford during the final two weeks.
As for what might have been, it’s irrelevant now for the Atlanta Braves as they lost in a one-game playoff series with St. Louis last week.
The weird part is that the Braves had a chance down 6-3 in the eighth inning with one out and two on base. Then the umpires call the infield fly rule off the bat of Simmons after both Cardinals fielders lost the ball in the Atlanta lights in shallow left field. Everybody knows that it should have went for a single. Although it was a bad call, The Braves only have themselves to blame with some errors and bad defense in the contest.
I still don’t like the one-game playoff series since series consist of more than one game. Everything riding on a game of baseball when you have played 162 to get there is injustice.
Anyhow, Chipper Jones ended his career in the Majors with the loss to the Cards. He actually was the first pick by the Braves in 1990, but didn’t debut in the majors until three years later. Many Braves and baseball fans alike will miss Jones who retires with a career batting average of .303, with over 2,700 hits, who was voted to eight All-Star teams over the years. The 1999 National League MVP also helped Atlanta win its only World Series back in 1995.
