By late Monday evening, Belfast football coach Chris Bartlett still didn’t have a complete statistical package available to explain his team’s Class C victory at Madison-Carrabec last Friday night.
But it’s reasonable in this case to cut the coach some slack. In one of the highest-scoring high school games in the state, at least of recent vintage, the Lions and Bulldogs combined for an astounding 142 points in Belfast’s 82-60 victory.
“I’m still trying to figure it out myself,” said Bartlett, whose team improved to 3-1. “There was a whole lot of offense, obviously, and very little defense.”
Occasionally a team will amass 80 or more points in a Maine high school football game — Maine Central Institute of Pittsfield scored 81 in its season opener this fall.
But rarely do both teams in a game virtually match touchdown for touchdown at such a pace for the full 48 minutes.
“We were up 76-60 with about four minutes left,” said Bartlett, “and I told [offensive coordinator] Butch Richards, ‘You’ve got to punch another one in,’ because that’s the way the game was going.”
The contest lasted three hours and 15 minutes — nearly an hour longer than a typical non-overtime game — but it started in fairly routine fashion with the teams locked in a modest 6-6 tie two minutes into the second quarter.
“It had the makings of a good football game — it was a good football game,” said Bartlett. “But it didn’t start out like an 82-60 game. And then the floodgates opened up.”
Madison-Carrabec took leads of 14-12 and 22-20 before Belfast scored the final two touchdowns of the first half for a 34-22 lead.
The scoring pace only picked up after the break, with the teams combining for 86 more points.
“In the second half, I was telling my coaches it was like the kids got together at halftime and told each other, ‘We’re not going to play defense,’” said Bartlett.
“The announcer was trying to keep track, and I think I remember him saying at one point that the two teams combined for seven or eight touchdowns in the first four minutes of the second half. It was a flurry,” he said.
And that all came with Belfast shortening up its offensive playbook in preparation for the contest.
“We were missing a few kids due to injury so we kept it as simple as possible for the kids filling in,” Bartlett said. “But both offenses were able to score basically at will. They attacked us on the outside, and they have three backs with great speed. We lost one of our defensive ends and a cornerback last week, and they found a weak spot and just kept hammering it.
“It was a combination of that and poor tackling.”
No one capitalized on the offensive opportunities more than Belfast senior Steven Davis. The transfer from Mount View of Thorndike scored eight touchdowns, including two on kickoff returns, and had two other touchdown runs called back because of penalties.
Drew Nealey and Alex Canning each added a pair of touchdowns for the Lions, Bartlett said, with one of Canning’s scores coming on a punt return.
“Both teams figured out what would work,” Bartlett said. “We scored in a number of different ways. We scored on a couple of special-teams plays, and then with Davis being a big-play type of kid, we just ran basic offensive plays and were able to score.”
While Belfast rarely passed the ball, Madison-Carrabec countered with an effective short-passing game that complemented its own rushing attack.
“I was looking at the film [on Monday] to get the defensive stats for the second half, and there weren’t any,” said Bartlett. “We’d score in two or three plays and then they’d score. It was that way for a majority of the game.”
Bartlett doesn’t anticipate a similar offensive scenario playing out Friday night when Belfast hosts undefeated Winslow, which has yielded just 29 points in its first four games.
“To be part of something like that, as coaches you hope you can chalk it up as one of those oddities, something that as a player or coach you can look back on one day and kind of chuckle about and say, ‘Holy cow, what an experience that was,’ and have some good campfire stories,” he said.
“We’re happy with the win, but that’s what I’m keeping my fingers crossed about, that it was just one of those nights,” he said.
Boyer breaks out for Ponies
Another monster performance during Week 4 was turned in by Foxcroft Academy’s Peter Boyer.
The 5-foot-10-inch, 200-pound senior halfback and linebacker rushed for 307 yards and six touchdowns on 20 carries during the Ponies’ come-from-behind 55-33 Class C victory at Old Town.
And that was just part of his story. Boyer was credited with 17 tackles on defense and had a 35-yard interception return for his seventh touchdown of the night.
Six of his touchdowns came during the second half as coach Danny White’s club outscored Old Town 41-8 after the Coyotes had taken a 25-14 lead.
Boyer’s TD runs were of 7, 28, 4, 38 and 27 yards with the sixth coming on defense as Foxcroft improved to 3-1 heading into Friday night’s homecoming game against Hermon.
Boyer has rushed for 624 yards and 10 touchdowns on 79 carries in four games, with 446 yards and seven rushing scores in the last two weeks since the switch of junior Hunter Smith — a first-team all-conference wide receiver last fall — to quarterback.
That move has enabled Foxcroft to get the ball in Smith’s hands more often. He rushed for 252 yards and four touchdowns during a 34-26 Week 3 win at Belfast. His efforts deterred opponents from keying solely on Boyer, as Waterville did during its 36-14 Week 1 win when the Purple Panthers limited the Foxcroft co-captain to 27 yards on 11 rushes.
