Bearcats, Hornets ready for quarterfinal rematch
DALTON VITT/DAILY FORUM
Senior cornerback Bryce Enyard comes up celebrating after wiping out a Humboldt State bubble screen on Saturday in Northwest’s 54-7 win in the second round of the Division II postseason.
After 13 weeks of play, with conference champions determined and all but eight teams eliminated in Division II football, the Super Region 3 champion will be determined by a rematch.
The Northwest football team, champion of the MIAA with an 11-0 regular-season record, will host league rival Emporia State for a second time this season with a spot in a national semifinal on the line. In Week 10, the Bearcats clinched their conference championship with a 44-10 victory over the Hornets behind career offensive days from multiple offensive players, a result head coach Adam Dorrel and his team certainly would like to repeat.
“It’s definitely challenging. It’s challenging whether you won the (first) game or whether you lost the game,” Dorrel said. “The psychology of sport plays into it. What we’ve always done is you go back and you review the tape and you try to learn from the tape. … Honestly, the second time you play a team, it’s probably a little bit more of a chess match than the first time around. Moving your pieces a little bit to try to fit what you’re doing, fit what they’re doing.”
One of the offensive performers who shined in the Week 10 win was junior running back Phil Jackson II, whose 19 carries for 108 yards and a touchdown paced Northwest’s ground game. Meanwhile, senior quarterback Brady Bolles went 24-of-32 for 362 yards and four touchdowns while hooking up with freshman receiver Shawn Bane Jr. seven times for 146 yards and a pair of scores.
Emporia State finished its season 8-2, snaring the seventh and final seed in Super Region 3 with its only losses coming to the Bearcats and Fort Hays State.
“When we played Emporia, we played a perfect game almost,” Jackson said. “We’re going to have to step our game up even more this coming week because we know they’re going to come back with a vengeance and they’re going to come back even harder than they did the first time. We’re going to look at their past three games and take what they’ve been doing differently and kind of feed off that.”
Northwest limited Hornets quarterback Brent Wilson, the MIAA’s top passer in the regular season, to 17-of-33 completions for 180 yards and no passing touchdowns. Wilson did come up with Emporia State’s lone trip to pay dirt, a three-yard scamper into the end zone in the second quarter.
The Bearcats reached this point in the postseason via a first-round bye coupled with a 54-7 rout of Humboldt State in the second round, Northwest’s largest margin of victory in program postseason history. After the game, Lumberjacks head coach Rob Smith described the Bearcat defense as “as good a Division II defense as I’ve seen.”
“To me, that’s a great compliment because to me, he’s saying our kids were physical and they played hard and they were a clean group. That’s what he said to me after the game,” Dorrel said. “I really appreciated that because that’s the type of football team we want to have here and that’s obviously the type of image, as a head coach, I want presented nationally to other teams.”
Emporia State upset Minnesota State-Mankato in round one, 51-49, as Wilson threw 27-of-47 for 437 yards, five touchdowns, and three interceptions. Three different receivers surpassed 100 yards in the game, as Morris Williams II pulled in eight catches for 159 yards, Kavaski Ervin came up with six receptions for 139, and Mitchell Foote grabbed eight passes for 116.
In a 29-3 win over Henderson State in the second round, the Hornet offense switched course. Wilson threw just 14 times, completing six passes for 63 yards, while running back Landon Nault rushed 28 times for 187 yards and one score. The difference came in the turnover margin, as Henderson State coughed up seven fumbles with Emporia State falling on four.
“They’re playing at a higher level,” Dorrel said of Emporia’s last two weeks. “The number of turnovers they’ve created and the points they’re generating off the turnovers, in my opinion, is the reason why they’ve played really good in their two playoff games.”
Kick-off is set for 1 p.m. Saturday at Bearcat Stadium between the top two finishers in the MIAA.
“To have two MIAA teams in the quarterfinals of the national playoffs is always big for our conference,” Jackson said. “I’m pretty sure everybody else in the conference is happy to see that we’re so far in the playoffs with each other.”
