Making a statement took precedence over style points for the Palo Duro Dons on Friday night at Dick Bivins Stadium, and on that score, they were more successful than the Canyon Eagles.
The Dons showed how good their defense has been for almost full four quarters, and their offense showed a new strength as well. It was no surprise that in the end, then, that they rolled to a 35-7 win over Canyon to improve to 2-1 on the season.
About the only real down side of things when all was said and done was that the Dons finally allowed the Eagles (2-1) in the end zone midway through the fourth quarter after the game was decided. They hadn’t allowed an opponent to cross the goal line since Tascosa did so at Bivins on the first drive on the season two weeks ago in a 10-0 Palo Duro loss.
Other than that, there was a lot to be happy about with the win, especially the way the Dons played in the first half.
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“The first half I thought we played complmentary football on both sides of the ball,” Palo Duro coach Eric Mims said. “We still had a couple of mistakes like a fumble on that first drive. There were still some things we didn’t do well but the score we were excited about. We’ve got to come out and put a complete game together.”
Palo Duro dominated the first half as the Dons continued their trend of keeping people out of the end zone. They did just as well when they had the ball in taking a 28-0 halftime lead.
Both teams saw promising opening drives end in turnovers in the other team’s territory. Palo Duro dealt with that better, as on their second possession, the Dons took advantage of a short field to conclude a scoring drive on a 1-yard run by Darien Lewis for a 7-0 lead.
Lewis had helped stop a drive after Canyon got the opening kickoff, as playing defense he intercepted Brox Hacker inside the PD 20-yard line to keep his team’s shutout streak going for the time.
“Our (defensive coordinator) Dannie Snyder does a really good job of helping us to play pass and makes sure we know what we’re doing,” said Lewis, who has committed to play at the University of North Carolina. “He’s very intense.”
On the final play of the quarter, quarterback Julian Reese II kept it and scampered 18 yards up the middle for a score and a 14-0 lead. That run was set up by a highly unorthodox play on third-and-eight, where Lewis took a screen pass and tried to break outside but was cut off, and as he scrambled back to the middle of the field he lateraled the ball to Reese, who gained eight yards for the first down.
In the second half the duo tried a similar play with Lewis taking the pass and lateraling back to Reese, but that time it lost 13 yards.
“That’s definitely a thing of just being an athlete and seeing the field,” Lewis said. “Sometimes it will go good and sometimes it will go bad and tonight we saw both of that.”
Palo Duro ran for 183 yards in the first half and finished the game with 273 yards rushing.
The Dons used two big plays to score in the second quarter for their 28-0 lead. Wide receiver Kyron Brown took the ball on a reverse and ran 63 yards for a score, and PD resorted to a flea-flicker later, with Reese finding a wide-open Lewis up the sideline for an easy 43-yard scoring pass on a far more conventional hook-up.
Palo Duro hung up 268 yards in the first half and held Canyon to 91. It didn’t help the Eagles that they had four turnovers, including a fumble deep in PD territory midway through the second quarter.
“We knew it was a great defense,” said Canyon coach Todd Winfrey of the Dons. “They’re physical, athletic and super talented. You just can’t make mistakes against them and we made a bunch tonight. Some of that is us not running the right plays and at the end of the day that’s on us as coaches.”
The Eagles did manage to do something that nobody had done against the Dons in 11 quarters, when they averted a shutout on a 4-yard scoring run by Rudy Flores with under eight minutes left in the game.
“Playing good defense puts us in position to win,” Mims said. “They’ve played three solid games. They’re busting their butts and they’re flying around. We’re not always perfect in our alignment or out communication in coverage but they’ve made up for a lot of it just by playing hard.”
Palo Duro ran the ball by committee as the Dons had four runners go for over 40 yards. Raymond Johnson IV led the way with 87 yards on 13 carries as the Dons ran for 15 first downs.
If nothing else, that showed that defenses can’t sit on a one-dimensional offensive attack by the Dons. After throwing for 241 yards in the previous week’s 48-0 win over Caprock, Palo Duro threw for only 85 against Canyon, but the rushing attack more than compensated.
“We want to win football games and we’re going to throw it and we’re going to run it,” Mims said. “We’ve just got to keep the sticks moving and we don’t really care how we do it. We’re a quote-unquote Air Raid team but we’ve some dynamic running backs and we try to play those guys at the right times.”