MARYSVILLE — Neah Bay wasted little time on the second leg of its eight-man football playoff gauntlet Tuesday afternoon.
The Red Devils scored 60 points in less than two quarters to roll over Lopez Island 60-20 in a Class 1B pigtail playoff at Marysville-Pilchuck High School.
After going down by as much as 20-8 early on, the Red Devils exploded with 52 unanswered points to move within one win of their third straight trip to the 1B state playoffs.
“I think we scored on every possession that we had,” Red Devils head coach Tony McCaulley said. “Their defense just couldn’t stop us.”
The win puts Neah Bay (8-2 overall) into a 1B preliminary state playoff with District IV second seed Mary M. Knight at Tumwater High School on Saturday at 6 p.m.
It will be the Red Devils’ third game in eight days.
The Owls (7-1), on the other hand, will have had the entire week to prepare by the time the two teams meet in the South Sound region.
“They are waiting for us, it could be to their advantage a bit,” McCaulley said. “We’ve had some pretty good luck down in the south the last couple of years, though.”
The winner will move on to state and a first-round matchup with defending 1B champion Lummi (11-0) in Bellingham.
That’s the same Blackhawk team that’s knocked the Red Devils out of the 1B semifinals each of the past two seasons and beaten them seven times in a row.
“We’ve got to get through them if we’re going to where we want to go, so one way or another we’ve got to get them,” McCaulley said of Lummi.
“Whoever wins that quarterfinal up in Bellingham is going to have a really good chance to make the final.”
Lopez (8-1) came into Tuesday afternoon’s game as the second seed out of the Northwest Football League.
Having avoided Northwest football powers Lummi and Neah Bay during the league schedule, the Lobos managed to go through the regular season undefeated.
Lopez took an early lead thanks in part to an onside kick and a spread offense that caught coach McCaulley’s Red Devils by surprise. That was short-lived, however.
Titus Pascua returned a punt and a kickoff for touchdowns, Josiah Green returned a fumble for a score, and the Red Devils took control to move to 5-2 in playoff games under McCaulley.
“They spread the field all over and threw the ball on us at the beginning,” McCaulley said.
“We had such a short time to prepare for this game that we just kind of had to prepare on the fly. They had a really good running back and we focused more on him.
“Once we figured out the coverage on their spread, then we took control of the game.”
McCaulley pointed to the play of Pascua and Josiah Greene as important to the offense.
He said Michael Dulik, Pete Greene and Tyler McCaulley came up big defensively as well.
By the time the Red Devils had scored their final touchdown to trigger the 40-point mercy rule there was still 2:23 left in the first half.
“We scored quick when we got the ball. Our offense executed really well,” coach McCaulley said.
Stats for this game were unavailable.
