BREMERTON — Everything is magnified when a football game is only 16 minutes long.
“It’s tight. It’s about possession and it’s about, you know, who ends up being on the field last, I guess, and making mistakes,” Port Angeles coach Tom Wahl said.
“It’s all accentuated, because you don’t have time to recover.
“It was, like I told the guys, it’s going to be, which it usually is in football, the team that makes the least mistakes.
“You know, just any kind of mistake it just kills you.”
Port Angeles saw both sides in its three-team tiebreaker with Sequim and Kingston on Tuesday at Silverdale Stadium.
In the first game — the games consisted of two eight-minute quarters — the Roughriders defeated the Wolves 6-0.
That earned them the right to move on — after a 20-minute “halftime” — to face the Buccaneers.
Bucs score late
Kingston quarterback Jack Colletto ran in a 5-yard touchdown with 44 seconds remaining to beat the Riders 7-0 and earn a spot in the district playoffs. There the Buccaneers will face Franklin Pierce.
“You’ve got 16 minutes, which is four minutes extra than a usual quarter. We usually play [three] times that much in a normal game,” Port Angeles senior Nathan Angevine said after Tuesday’s games.
“Everything had to be perfect, and all three teams, we all kind of came out kind of slow a little bit, nothing was firing at first.
“But that’s how it’s got to be, you can’t play two 48-minute games on a night like this.”
The three teams were forced into the three-way playoff because they all finished tied for fourth in the Olympic League with 2-4 records.
“You could tell we were all three pretty evenly matched,” Wahl said of Tuesday’s games.
Sequim had the ball first in the opening game and drove from its own 39-yard line to the Roughriders’ 29 before quarterback Miguel Moroles was intercepted by Port Angeles’ Kellen Landry.
The Riders used a heavy dose of runs to drive to the Sequim 34, but quarterback Ryan Rodocker’s first pass of the game was picked off by Sequim’s Ethan Richmond.
The Wolves drove to the Port Angeles 37 before their drive stalled and they turned the ball over on downs with 1:18 left in the first period.
The Riders went 63 yards on eight plays, draining over five minutes of precious game clock, with Angevine capping the drive with a 1-yard touchdown run.
The PAT was blocked, leaving the Riders with a 6-0 lead with 4:14 to play.
Sequim’s next drive went nowhere, with Moroles throwing three incomplete passes before being intercepted by Port Angeles’ Caleb West on fourth down.
Port Angeles’ ran as much clock as it could on its next drive before being forced to punt the ball back to the Wolves with 1:14 remaining.
Sequim freshman Gavin Velarde fielded the punt at the Wolves’ 15 and returned it to the Riders’ 34, putting Sequim within striking distance.
But three more incompletions by Moroles and a fumble that was recovered by Port Angeles’ Kris Seierup ended the Wolves hopes and, after a knee by Rodocker, their season.
Port Angeles has won three straight meetings between the rivals.
The Roughriders ran for 108 yards on 17 carries, an average of 6.4 yards per run.
“I know that we had them in the backfield a ton of times and missed a lot of tackles, more than them destroying us,” Sequim coach Erik Wiker said.
“They do have a great line; they’re big, we are not big, but we had a lot of opportunities missed by missing a lot of tackles in the backfield.”
The Wolves were held to 54 yards of total offense with three turnovers and a turnover on downs.
Kingston 7, Port Angeles 0
The Roughriders won the coin toss before the second game and drove to their own 45-yard line before Kellen Landry was stuffed on a fourth-and-1.
The Buccaneers drove inside the Riders’ 20 before the drive stalled and Ryan Fick missed a 36-yard field goal with 1:52 remaining in the first period.
Port Angeles punted and then forced a turnover on downs at their own 41-yard line with 2:44 to play.
The Riders’ good field position turned into even better field position for Kingston when Rodocker threw an interception that was returned to the Buccaneers’ 36-yard line with 1:50 remaining.
A 24-yard run by Garrett Rouser advanced the ball to the 5, and Colleto scored on the fourth play of the drive to give Kingston a 7-0 lead with 44 seconds to play.
Rodocker passed to Landry for a 12-yard gain and then to Angevine for 15 more yards to move the ball into Kingston territory.
A sack pushed the Riders back to their own 46 with 17 second left, forcing Rodocker to try a pair of long passes, with the second being intercepted by Kingston’s Adam Wright.
In the two games, Angevine carried 13 times for 87 yards, while Landry had seven carries for 46 yards and caught three passes for 30 yards.
“It sucks, but we were playing more football than we were scheduled to, and that was our goal to get to a postseason opportunity,” Angevine said, “and this was the postseason, we were playing extra football.
“It sucks to come out like that, to get that win over Sequim and then come out against Kingston and lose with 40 seconds left, but we played hard all season.”
Including Tuesday’s games, Port Angeles ends the season with a 5-6 record, which is a nice step forward after going winless in 2012 and winning only two games last year.
“I’m super proud of them, of course,” Wahl said.
“We’ve had a couple of tough years. These guys have kind of brought us back and we had a few more wins this year.
“I think these guys played with a lot of pride — and pride, perseverance and character, that’s one of our team themes.
“And these guys, they did that, they played with pride, they didn’t complain, they persevered, they never gave up and they have good character.”
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Sports Editor Lee Horton can be reached at 360-417-3525 or at lhorton@peninsuladailynews.com.
