Down 30-13 at the end of the third quarter on Sept. 18, the Mount Vernon football team rallied to within a score of visiting Wooster midway through the fourth quarter before falling 33-23.
The Yellow Jackets are hoping that fourth-quarter momentum follows them to Mansfield where Madison awaits for an Ohio Cardinal Conference clash Friday night.
“We competed all the way up to the very end with Wooster,” Mount Vernon coach Mike Kerr said. “I think they’re one of the best teams— if not the best team— we’ll face all year and we were right there with them the whole time.”
The loss to Wooster was Mount Vernon’s second in a row, split by a bye week on Sept. 11.
“We had the rough game against Ashland (a 39-6 loss on Sept. 4),” Mount Vernon senior defensive end Easton Groom said. “I think we learned from our mistakes. One that was really big for us was getting too deep in the backfield, which was taking us out of the play. So we practiced staying at the heels of the offensive linemen when we got past them and staying in the play. (Against Wooster), not a lot of our D-linemen got deep. We had good depth all game.”
Madison offensive tackle Gavin Conn, who stands 6-foot-3 and weighs 371 pounds, really stood out on film. The Ram rushing attack is a three-headed monster of Ethan Spillman, Caden Clapper and Trenton Osborne.
“They like to run the ball and they got some good-sized linemen,” Groom said. “I think we’ve got one of the best D-line’s we’ve had in years, and I think we have the upper hand at the line of scrimmage. I think that we’ll be able to shut down the run early in the game and that will force them to go out of their comfort zone and hopefully throw the ball.”
Madison enters the game 0-4 overall and in the OCC with losses to Wooster (48-6 on Aug. 29), West Holmes (63-0 on Sept. 4), Ashland (45-7 on Sept. 11) and Marion Harding (14-7 on Sept. 18).
“They’re a 4-4 defense and they play it pretty well,” Kerr said. “They’ve had some bad luck against some of these teams that they’ve played. Athlete-for-athlete— at times, they’ve been out-manned. But they play really hard and fundamentally sound.”
Against the Generals, AJ Keen ran for 148 yards and two touchdowns on 24 carries.
“We really opened it up and did some things,” Kerr said. “We’re still a run-first team. We want to establish the run. But I was really happy that our kids were able to adapt and we were able to throw the ball a little bit and get the ball into some other people’s hands. I thought that was a nice twist to what we do.”
Keen scored on a 1-yard plunge to pull the Jackets within 30-21. A snap over punter Andrew Rader’s head led to a safety that pulled Mount Vernon within one score at 30-23 with 7:28 remaining.
“(The passing game) opened up some more holes that wouldn’t be there normally,” Keen said. “Teams normally bite on all the run plays. It allowed them to respect the pass so I could do my thing up front.”
