A record was set in Sudbury Saturday night in game two of the NFC’s Sudbury Spartans – North Bay Bulldogs’ three-game series.
The game was expected to be a defensive battle as was the first game two weeks ago which ended in double overtime with the Spartans finally winning 9-6.
Saturday night was a similar story, but this time the Spartans did all the scoring necessary as the Sudbury squad rolled to a 21-1 win.
Last week against the Oakville Longhorns, the Bulldogs offense put together drives and gained close to 300 yards.
But the Dogs defense was not ready for the deep threats from the Longhorns who scored 3 TDs on long passes and capitalized on two very short drives resulting from a blocked punt and a fumble inside the Dogs own 10-yard line.
These 5 plays accounted for 35 points in their 40–16 loss to the Longhorns.
This week the Bulldogs defense tightened up tremendously, not allowing any long passes to be caught for scores and limiting the Spartans to only 2 receptions in the entire game. The Bulldogs defense played as hard as any defense in the NFC limiting the Spartans to only 109 yards total offense, but it was the punishing hits on Spartans players that produced many Dogs highlight plays.
“I can’t say enough about this whole crew of players….we have great people on this team and the defense is playing very well,” said head coach Marc Mathon.
All the Spartans points came off of turnovers with the first one resulting in a fumbled snap at the Dogs 12-yard line. The other two are what set an NFC record for Sudbury.
Spartans Defensive Back Konnor Gillis basically single-handedly won the game for the Spartans by intercepting the ball 3 times, running 2 of them back for TDs.
“The first interception was miscommunication between the QB and the WR," said Mathon.
"Our young offense needs to adapt to the higher game speed and there are still too many questions about assignments… these are things that we can fix in practice… and that’s our goal for next week. We have very young and capable people on this team in a building year. They simply need to execute better and a little faster.”
The Bulldogs outperformed the Spartans on both sides of the ball. Only slightly on offense, outgaining them by only a few yards, but the Dogs defense forced 4 fumbles recovering all 4 while defensive back Russ Burns intercepted Spartans QB twice in the game for 6 turnovers and the Dogs defense allowed the Spartans inside their 40 yard line only once all game resulting in a missed field goal attempt. Meanwhile, the Dogs were deep inside Spartans territory 4 times but were unable to score. One pass resulted in a 103 yd scoring interception return, another was intercepted and two missed field goals.
“We have to give credit where it is due, #6 for the Spartans had a career night scoring twice on interceptions… he won them the game. Our defense clearly played well enough to win, our offense had too many miscues. Our guys have fight in them…. our O-Line yielded zero sacks in 37 pass plays! We will be focused on fixing the miscues this week” said Coach Mathon.
Adam Jeanneault led the defense with 5 tackles and 3 more tackle for losses and a fumble recovery.
Russ Burns caught 2 interceptions and made 4 tackles.
