John Evans Jr. gave all the credit to his offensive line.
Evans Jr., a sophomore running back at Reagan, put on a show in a 44-8 runaway win at Reynolds on Friday night, handing the Demons their first loss of the season. He finished with 280 rushing yards and four touchdowns on 25 carries, his second game with 200-plus rushing yards this season.
Evans Jr. led the Central Piedmont 8A/7A Conference with 994 rushing yards entering Friday night’s game on the turf field at M. Douglas Crater Field & Stadium.
“I like this place,” Evans said with a broad smile. “It’s really nice.”
It certainly was to the Raiders on Friday night.
Reagan dominated the line of scrimmage. All six of the touchdowns the Raiders scored were on runs, and they had two others called back because of penalties–a 16-yard run in the second quarter and a 35-yard run in the third quarter, both by Elijah Davis, were negated by holding calls.
Evans Jr. had scoring runs of 4, 11, 19 and 5 yards, respectively and Davis had a 28-yard scoring run in the third quarter that helped give Reagan a 44-8 lead and a running clock for the rest of the game with 4 minutes, 21 seconds left in the third quarter.
Reagan quarterback Jacob Smith tacked on a 1-yard scoring run on Reagan’s first possession of the second half to cap a scoring drive of 68 yards.
Just for good measure, Reagan also picked up a safety when the defense brought down Reynolds running back Antonio Samuels in the third quarter.
Davis finished with 52 rushing yards and freshman Caleb Smith had a couple of big runs in the fourth quarter.
The Raiders offensive line of tackles Eisa Evans, who has committed to Appalachian State, Harry Simpson, who has committed to East Tennessee State, center Lucas Tabacca, and a cast of rotating guards in Thomas Caldwell, Dax Beck and Davin Phillips were doing their part to keep the running lanes wide.
“Without those guys, none of this is even possible,” Evans Jr. said. “Without them opening those holes, I’m not even getting to the line of scrimmage. Week in and week out, they are the strong part of the team and the MVPs every week. They just always do their job. They open the gap, I make the first guy miss, and then I go.”
Reagan Coach Josh McGee was effusive in his praise of Evans Jr. and the offensive line.
“That’s just what he does,” McGee said. “He’s just ‘Steady Eddie.’ He ran through some arm tackles and broke some runs, but those guys up front do such a great job for him. He’s got such a great mix of balance, power, vision and speed. He’s just a great player and is having a great season.”
Here are three observations from the game:
Run the ball, play great defense
In addition to Reagan’s dominant rushing attack and offensive line plan, the defense had another solid night.
The Raiders had allowed just 75 points through the first six games entering Friday’s game against the Demons and surrendered a lone touchdown in the second quarter on an 18-yard touchdown pass from Tommy Elrod to Antonio Samuels, who entered the game as the second leading rusher in the CPC behind Evans.
Samuels was bottled up for the most part and finished with 60 rushing yards.
“Our defense has been dominant all year long,” McGee said. “Even in our loss this year, we’ve been really good all year long. When we’re able to play complementary football, our defense feeds off our offense and our offense feeds off our defense.
“All things were kind of working together tonight with the run game and then on special teams, giving them a long field on most of their possession and also recovering that pooch kick in the third quarter. That’s what we like to see at this point of the season,” McGee said.
Dominant third quarter
McGee was a little frustrated with his team in the second quarter for making too many mistakes, namely personal foul penalties, holding penalties and pre-snap penalties.
After racing to a 21-0 lead after the first play of the second quarter, McGee felt like his team took its foot off the gas the rest of the half and let the Demons back in the game, going into the locker room with a 21-8 lead.
“We challenged them at halftime,” McGee said. “If we lose to better football teams, I can go to sleep at night. But if Reagan beats Reagan, that’s a tough pill to swallow. That last five minutes of the first half, we beat ourselves. We score to go up 27-0 and it gets called back. We get the unsportsmanlike penalty, we get the late hit penalty, the roughing the passer penalty. So we challenged them not to let that last five minutes get them into a funk.”
Reagan responded. It received the kickoff to open the second half and drove 68 yards in six plays, with Evans Jr. getting his third touchdown run of the game. The Raiders scored two more times in the third quarter and added a safety – 23 unanswered points – while holding the Demons scoreless to force a running clock.
Demons holding their heads up
Despite the first loss of the season, Reynolds Coach Joe Davidyock came away from the game with plenty of positives from his team’s performance.
“I thought we played tough until the very end,” Davidyock said. “We still have a lot of ball left at 6-1. We can’t put our head down and forget what got us here. We’ve earned the right to be in the position that we’re in and we’ve got to remember that.
“We’ll get another ball to bounce our way,” he said. “I think the biggest factor tonight was that they were more physical than us. We’re a team that’s going to be outsized when we walk in the stadium. Physicality is a big thing that we look at–we were even outsized last week against Parkland. But we definitely lost that battle in the trenches tonight. Our effort was there, though. We were just a little outmatched.”
mpruitt@wsournal.com
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