Perhaps it was a full-moon, Friday the 13th thing Lee’s Summit West experienced in the third quarter when it missed two field goals and had a penalty negate a touchdown pass.
With a well-balanced offense and a smash-mouth defense, those things were easily overcome.
That was about the only time LS West stumbled as it rolled to a 37-14 victory over Blue Springs South at the Jaguars’ home field. Save for that one quarter – and two BS South scoring drives – the Titans were almost flawless in the Suburban Gold Conference showdown.
LS West (2-1, 1-1) tallied 453 total yards of offense – 258 on the ground and 195 in the air. Running back Taylor Wilson rushed for 158 yards with two touchdowns and caught one of quarterback Sammy Cooper’s two TD passes.
And backing all this was a Titan defense that held BS South (0-3, 0-2) to one rushing yard on 19 attempts.
“Our front did very well,” LS West coach Vinny Careswell said. “I was very impressed with how they got after it with our front seven.”
BS South planned on taking to the air for most of its yards, and quarterback Max Conard did throw for 305 yards and a touchdown. But with its running game stymied, BS South managed only two drives of 10 or more plays the entire game.
The first one came the first time BS South had the ball. Conard completed four of six passes after the Jaguars took the opening kickoff, and a 1-yard touchdown run by running back M.J. Overstreet capped the 11-play, 81-yard march.
“They came out and punched us in the mouth,” Careswell said. “They showed us some things we hadn’t seen before. “We decided we were going to bring more pressure and we weren’t going to sit back.”
LS West’s Cole Stewart kicked a 25-yard field goal to make it 7-3 later in the first quarter and on the Titans’ next possession, Wilson blasted through a big hole up the middle and sprinted untouched 57 yards into the end zone and put the Titans in front for good.
“The O-line was blocking great and the receivers were running good crisp routes,” said Taylor, who tallied his final two TDs in the fourth quarter. “The receivers in the run game were even blocking too. That’s what I love about our receivers – they aren’t prima donnas who don’t want to block, they get down to business.”
Taylor’s long TD run came during a 24-point run for the Titans. Jackson Surratt added a 5-yard TD run, and Cooper completed a 27-yard screen pass late in the second quarter for a 24-7 lead.
BS South, after managing only three first downs after its opening drive, put together a six-play, 74-yard drive capped by a 20-yard TD pass from Conard to Cortes Essex in the final seconds of the first half.
But with its running game nonexistent, the Jaguars wouldn’t come close to scoring in the second half. A 19-play, 80-yard march from the late third to early fourth quarter ended with a missed field goal.
“They pretty well made us one-dimensional,” BS South coach Matt Klein said. “We couldn’t get any push up front or get our run game going. We had some good drives when the pass game was working but we weren’t able to put some more consistency together.”
LS West put it away with Cooper’s 3-yard TD shovel pass to Wilson and a 6-yard run by Wilson in the fourth quarter, but it could have been over before that. The Titans had two TD passes called back by penalties, one them sandwiched between blocked and missed field goals.
Didn’t matter. But it might somewhere down the line.
“We’ve just got to clean it up.” Careswell said. “That’s what we’re going to work on next week.”
