It wasn’t a perfect performance by the Canyon Eagles on Thursday night at Happy State Bank Stadium, but it was about as good as it could get from start to finish.
Canyon was in control most of the time against a game but challenged Lubbock-Cooper squad, but the Eagles didn’t fully put their stamp on the contest until the final quarter-and-a-half. They scored 28 unanswered points to soar away from Cooper 49-24 and improve to 3-1 on the season.
Coming a week after an even more dominant 37-7 win at Caprock, Canyon was at least as impressive on both sides of the ball in a game which might not have been as close as the final score indicated.
“I thought our defense did a lot of good things and I know people will look at the offense putting up 49 points,” Canyon coach Matt Lovorn said. “There are some things that happened in the first half that we had to adjust to try to stop. We just kept fighting and sure enough it paid off for us. We’ve got some guys with a lot of confidence and what we talked about a lot at the end was consistency.”
Despite appearing overmatched, Cooper (0-4) didn’t go quietly for the first two and a half quarters. When Zayden Echols slipped out of the backfield and caught short pass from Jayden Ramirez and turned it into a 54-yard touchdown midway through the third quarter, Cooper had cut Canyon’s lead to 21-17 and a tense ball game seemed to be brewing.
All that seemed to do to the Eagles, though, was wake them up. They were already highly aware on offense, as they didn’t punt once.
They immediately got back to the ground using a run-oriented attack to move the ball on the ensuing drive, which Tripp Miller finished with his second scoring run of the night from 18 yards to make it 28-17.
If there was a turning point, it came on the ensuing kickoff, when the Pirates didn’t field it cleanly and Canyon pounced on the loose ball inside the Cooper 30-yard line. That set up a short drive with Austin Turner scoring on an 8-yard run with 1:08 left in the quarter to make it 35-17. Turner finished with a game-high123 yards and two touchdowns on 21 carries.
The Eagles piled up 285 yards rushing and didn’t punt once. It seems like almost an aside that Brox Hacker had a perfect night throwing the ball, completing 10-of-10 for 194 yards and a 62-yard touchdown pass to Rudy Sattler in the fourth quarter.
“Ten passes is not very many with what we do, but the thing is we preach efficiency and that’s exactly how these guys execute the offense,” Lovorn said.
The Eagles opened in patented offensive fashion, taking the opening kickoff and taking over 6 minutes off the clock for a 13-play 70-yard scoring drive to take a 7-0 lead, as Turner cashed in on a 1-yard run to get Canyon on the board.
Canyon then had a self-inflicted wound which resulted in Cooper tying the game. The Pirates had to punt, but the kick hit a member of Canyon’s receiving team in the back and Cooper recovered to maintain possession. Cooper took advantage when Echols scored on a 16-yard run to tie it 7-7 with 27 seconds left in the first quarter.
The Eagles continued to produce offensively on their next possession and they reclaimed the lead with a balanced drive, as Miller scored on a 2-yard run for a 14-7 lead.
However, that was it offensively for Canyon in the first half. On their only other possession late in the second quarter, the Eagles were stopped on downs inside Cooper’s 30-yard line.
The Pirates got on the board again on the final play of the half, as Aaron Fenelon’s 26-yard field goal made it 14-10 going into the locker room.
Photo gallery by Marlee McDonald:
