Tea Area won the battle of the trenches Friday night and ended up winning the battle on the scoreboard as well.
The Titans held Aberdeen Central to just one yard of total rushing on the way to a 25-7 Eastern South Dakota Conference football victory at Brown Activities Complex.
“Give credit to Tea. They’re a good team defensively,” said Central coach Justin Briese. “They made plays when they needed to and at the same time we didn’t make plays when we needed to offensively, so that makes things pretty hard.”
With the run game shut down, the Golden Eagles were forced to throw the football, which added more pressure on the Central offense.
“When they know they can pin their ears back on the defensive line and come at you, that makes things pretty difficult,” Briese said. “We tried getting things going with the run game. They’re just an aggressive team. They fly fast to the ball and it’s hard to get anything going offensively.”
Still, the Golden Eagles did some damage in the pass game throughout the contest. Quarterback Brayden Bowman threw for more than 200 yards and a touchdown. His favorite target on the night was Karson Borge, who finished with a career high 123 yards receiving, including a 63-yard reception down the sideline in the third quarter.
“We knew we were going to be open on the deep ball, because I had been open on it early in the game,” Borge said, “so we just kind of kept going back to it until we hit it.”
It appeared the senior might be able to score on the play, but he was tackled just outside of the Tea Area red zone.
“I tried to beat the safety,” Borge said, “but he took a good angle on it.”
Central eventually found the end zone on a 26-yard touchdown pass from Bowman to Carter Lust in the final quarter.
While the Golden Eagles gave up 25 points in the game, it is a bit deceiving. One of the touchdowns came on a 77-yard interception return.
“We just have to match their phsyciality, which I kind of thought we did,” said Central senior Joey Dallmann, “but the scoreboard didn’t reflect how I think we played on defense.”
Dallmann was around the ball all evening for Central’s defense. He talked about trying to slow down the Tea Area offense.
“You just have to keep on reading your gaps, and shooting gaps and just making tackles,” Dallmann said. “That’s what our guys were doing all night.”
While Central has shown the ability to move the ball this season, the Golden Eagles have just 13 combined points in two games to show for it.
“We’re struggling in the red zone right now,” Borge said, “but we’ll get it figured out over the next couple of weeks and hopefully we’ll start capitalizing in the red zone.”
Despite the setback, Dallmann said the Golden Eagles took away some positivies that will help them in future games.
“We learned some things that we have to work on on offense and defense,” Dallmann said, “and I think that we’ll got those things squared away and become better.”
Briese said the Golden Eagles are moving in the right direction as they head into next week’s road contest at Brookings.
“I think we’re still finding ourselves offensively. We’re getting going in the right direction, finding guys that can make plays, putting them in the right positions to do that,” Briese said, “and defensively just continue doing what we’re doing, making teams earn what they get and at the same time taking things away from them.”
Borge said the team’s passing game with Bowman at the helm will continue to keep better as the season progresses.
“We’ll keep going week by week and he’ll keep making adjustments, and we’ll keep making adjustments and it will just get better from there,” Borge said.
There is still a lot of football left to be played, and the Golden Eagles are going to do what they can to game some momentum.
“We just got to bounce back,” Dallmann said, “start getting some wins under our belt, and just keep on improving from there and then make a playoff push.”
Tea Area (2-0) 7 0 12 6 – 25
Aberdeen Central (0-2) 0 0 0 7 – 7
First Quarter
TA – Mitch Grant 1 run (Cameron Hillestad kick), 2:55.
Third Quarter
TA – Grant 26 run (kick blocked), 7:57.
TA – Grifin Wiebenga 77 pass interception return (kick blocked), 6:40.
Fourth Quarter
TA – Kade Korleski 2 run (kick failed), 7:15.
AC – Carter Lust 25 pass from Brayden Bowman (Joey Dallman kick), 3:53.
OFFENSE: Tea Area, rushing 43-213 (Grant 9-93, Korleski 15-69, Carter Brown 7-27, Braeden Gniffke 6-26), passing 7-15-0 for 83 (Daschle Lowery 3-2-0 for 45, Grant 5-12-0 for 38), receiving (Giebenga 3-52, Korleski 2-25, Caden Bohnenberger 1-5), first downs 16; Aberdeen Central, rushing 17-1 (Dallmann 3-3, Ridley Waldo 8-2), passing 16-28-2 for 201 (Bowman 26-28-1 for 201), receiving (Karson 6-123, Paxton Ewing 3-35, Lust 2-26), first downs 7.
DEFENSE: Tea Area, Leyton Moran 9 tackles, Emmett DeGeest 8 tackles, Brown 7 tackles, Hayden Bialas 4 tackles and 1 sack); Aberdeen Central, Bennett Eisenbeisz 6 tackles, Jaxon Henley 6 tackles, Owen Ward 5 tackles, Felipe Gonzalez 4 tackles.
