HATTIESBURG - The outlook looked about as bleak as the weather for MRA’s football team early on here Friday night. The Patriots trailed PCS 14-0 deep into the first half. On the road. In a hostile environment. Against the No. 5 ranked team in the state. Arguably the team’s best offensive lineman had already been questionably ejected in the first quarter, leaving a makeshift, already-thin O-line even thinner. The offense was sputtering. The defense had given up a couple of big scoring plays… Costly penalties were mounting. Quarterback Hayden Davis looked bruised, battered and exhausted. And the rest of the team looked emotionally spent from a trying week that included going to the funeral of Jackson Prep football player Walker Wilbanks earlier in the day. Things just didn’t look good. At all. Then a somewhat inexplicable, quirky change of events took place. Just when it looked as if the Bobcats were going to run away with the game, momentum switched to MRA’s side late in the first half and the Patriots never let go. Instead of folding, they persevered. Led by the terrific trio of Clint Moses, Karter Bounds and Davis, MRA flipped the script, scoring 42 unanswered points – including 35 straight in a 12-minute stretch spanning the third and fourth quarters – to pull away for an impressive, didnt see-that-coming 42-14 victory. The Patriots, ranked No. 3 in The Clarion-Ledger Academy AAA poll, improved to 2-0 under first-year head coach Herbert Davis. “We knew we had to keep working hard as a team and bounce back like we’ve been taught,” said MRA wideout Karter Bounds, who produced two of the game’s biggest plays to help spark the turnaround. “We weren’t going to lay down. We were killing ourselves with penalties and stuff like that in the first half. We knew if we could stop making the mental errors we could get it done.” And they did thanks in large part to Hayden Davis, a tough as nails competitor who engineered the comeback by running for three touchdowns and throwing for another one. Moses, a hard-running junior, bullied his way for a pair of touchdown runs and provided the much-needed power element to MRA’s up-tempo, spread-it-out offensive attack. “Coach (Davis) got on us pretty good at halftime,” Moses said. “All we needed was a spark, and once we got that spark we were able to turn it around.” That spark came in the form of Bounds, a dynamic playmaker who is capable of housing it every time he touches the ball. With his team trailing 14-0, Bounds hauled in a 6-yard touchdown pass with just one minute, seven seconds left before halftime capping a long and much-needed scoring drive. Not only did the Davis-to-Bounds touchdown stop the bleeding, it proved to be the start of the at-the-time, seemingly improbably comeback. “No doubt that touchdown was huge,” Bounds said. “It gave us the momentum we needed going into the second half. After that we really came together as a team.” After MRA fumbled at the PCS 22-yard line on its opening possession of the second half, it was Bounds who once again came up with the big play on the Patriots’ second drive of the half. With Davis sidelined for one play after taking a hard hit and his team facing a 3rd and 6 from its own 25-yard line, Bounds stepped in at quarterback and raced 63 yards down the middle of the field. He was dragged down from behind by a pair of PCS defenders, but not before he had reached the 12-yard line. Two plays later, Moses added the first of his two second-half touchdowns – a 10-yarder – to pull MRA to within 14-13. Despite the blocked PAT, it was all Patriots after that. “Once we saw Karter take off on that long run that was a big ,” Moses said. Said Bounds: “The coaches are always telling us we have to be ready to step up. You never know when your time is going to come. And when it does you have to be ready. It worked out pretty good for us.” MRA took the lead for good, 21-14, less than three minutes later when Davis, following a 50-yard pass to Nathan Barr, scored on a 1-yard run and then added the 2-point conversion run. PCS fumbled the ensuing kickoff, leading to Moses’ second touchdown run – a 1-yarder three seconds into the fourth quarter – to make it 28-14. MRA recovered yet another fumble on the kickoff, leading to the first of Davis’ last two touchdown runs. The last – a 3-yarder with just over 6 minutes remaining – was also set up by a PCS fumble forced by one of the many bone-jarring hits administered by the MRA defense throughout the game. And just like that, a 14-point deficit had been turned into a 28-point advantage. As the late “Dandy Don” Meredith used to sing near the end of Monday Night Football broadcasts back in the day; turn out the lights the party’s over. On this night, MRA proved to be the more physical, tougher, well-conditioned football team. Although it didn’t look like that early on. Far from it. PCS, which won its season-opener 45-13 over St. Patrick a week ago, jumped out to a 14-0 lead on this soggy night and appeared to be on the verge of putting the game on ice. Fate Eiland, the best of PCS’s three fleet-footed running backs, scampered 67 yards to make it 7-0 PCS late in the first quarter. Then after a failed punt fake by MRA, the Bobcats went up 14-0 on a 30-yard run by Cameron Scott on a 4th-and-2 play. That, however, was the last time PCS would score. It was a far cry from MRA’s season-opener a week ago in which the Patriots hung 42 first-quarter points on visiting Glenbrook en route to a 56-0 victory. The elder Davis knew this game was going to be much tougher. And it was, although the Patriots once again displayed spurtability and explosiveness on offense and ball-hawking tackling on defense to win going away. Afterward, MRA’s players ran over in front of the visitor’s stands to celebrate with the contingent of Patriot fans who made the trek to the Hub City. “It was great,” Bounds said. “Everybody was jumping around, excited. It feels really good to win a game like this. Everybody’s happy.”
Posted on: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 07:23:18 +0000
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