Murphy scores 21 fourth-quarter points

PUYALLUP – The Archbishop Murphy High School football team has plenty of practice blowing opponents out. It’s the close ones the Wildcats aren’t accustomed to.

Saturday afternoon the Wildcats finally had the chance to find out how they would respond late in a game which was in the balance. Archbishop Murphy answered in a manner worthy of a defending state champion.

Archbishop Murphy scored 21 straight points in the fourth quarter and the Wildcats earned a berth in the Class 1A state semifinals by defeating the Tacoma Baptist Crusaders 35-6 in a game that was much closer than the final score indicated.

Quarterback Kyle Wilkins threw two touchdown passes and ran for another for the Wildcats (12-0), who extended their winning streak to 24. They play Cascade Christian next weekend in a rematch of last season’s semifinal.

“We just had to step it up and play our hardest,” Wilkins said. “Coach (Terry) Ennis always says, ‘It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.’ We were ready for this game because it’s playoff time and everybody’s out to win, so we knew we had to step it up in the fourth quarter.”

Tacoma Baptist finished its season 6-6.

People can be forgiven if they arrived at Sparks Stadium expecting to witness a rout. The top-ranked Wildcats were playing a team with five losses, and Archbishop Murphy clobbered Tacoma Baptist 70-20 during the regular season.

But the Crusaders, who were missing injured players in the regular-season contest, played Archbishop Murphy even for three quarters. The Wildcats held a slender 14-6 lead heading into the fourth quarter and that margin may have been wiped out if a Tacoma Baptist touchdown pass midway through the third quarter hadn’t been nullified by a holding penalty.

“It was exactly the kind of game we expected,” Ennis said. “We watched Tacoma Baptist on film over the course of the season and it was pretty clear they were starting to execute. Even after the first game, we said this is not a bad football team. I suspect that mentally our kids had it in the back of their minds that it might be easy, but our practices didn’t reflect that. We needed to care a great deal about winning this game because Tacoma Baptist came out fired up.”

The Crusaders also came out determined to stop Archbishop Murphy’s running game. Tacoma Baptist stacked all 11 defensive players into the box. As a result the Wildcats, who ran for 410 yards last week in a 47-6 opening-round win over Adna, managed just 91 yards on 21 carries in the first half.

But the Wildcats’ ground game finally began to take control after Tacoma Baptist’s potential score-tying TD was called back. Stan Smith’s 40-yard run on a fake punt set up a 9-yard TD pass from Wilkins to Ian Telge on the first play of the fourth quarter – the duo’s second TD hook-up of the game – giving Archbishop Murphy a 21-6 lead.

From there it was all Archbishop Murphy. Smith broke free for a 35-yard TD run with eight minutes, 34 seconds remaining in the game to make it 28-6 and Doug VanderWel scored on a 2-yard run with 1:43 left to seal the victory. In total, the Wildcats ran for 106 yards in the fourth quarter and finished with 289 in the game.

Smith finished with 104 yards on seven carries, Jevon Butler had 87 yards on 19 carries and Ben Waiss ran for 69 yards on 10 carries.

Tacoma Baptist quarterback Aaron Hunter finished 13-for-29 for 147 yards, but was picked off three times. The Crusaders also had a muffed punt late in the second quarter that allowed the Wildcats to break a 6-6 tie on Telge’s 30-yard TD reception.

“We played with a lot of passion and we matched blow-for-blow with them for quite a while,” Tacoma Baptist coach Mark Smith said.

“We knew we needed to play an error-free game and we didn’t play error free. That kind of sums up the game. I hope people who watched this game understand it was not a 35-6 score, we played them tough all the way.”

At Sparkes Stadium, Puyallup