Vintage ends regular season with blowout win over Napa in Big Game LI, takes momentum into playoffs
By Kyle Foster, photo courtesy of Eric Thompson (Shamboozled.com)
Twitter: @NapaKyle @NapaSportsNews
With playoffs on the horizon, it’s always nice to go in on a winning streak. Don’t look now but the Vintage football team has won four straight.
To put a punctuation mark on the regular season, they beat crosstown rival Napa 42-14 in Big Game LI (51) on Friday night at Memorial Stadium. The win means the Crushers have won the last six contests as the series is now 29-20-2 in favor of Napa.
One of the main reasons this was the case was the fact that the Crushers opened up all the plays in their playbook before playoffs. Part of that included the usage of Matt Ackman. In the contest, Ackman was used in a variety of different ways.
This led Ackman to be named the 2022 Great American Rivalry Series MVP and the Napa Valley Register’s Vintage MVP.
“I just felt like we wanted to showcase what Matt Ackan can do,” Vintage head coach Dylan Leach said. “He’s been a rock for us all year, and actually all four years that he’s been here. We just felt like we wanted to get the ball in his hands and let him do his thing. We kind of came out and let him be the star of the night.”
Ackman accounted for the first two scores of the game. His first of the game when Vintage lined the 6-foot-2 280-pound tight end up in the backfield and he rumbled into the end zone with 8:27 left in the first quarter.
Just a few minutes later with 5:30 remaining in the first quarter, Elias Alvarez found Ackman in the back of the end zone for a 23-yard scoring connection to put the Crushers up 14-0 early.
Ackman’s final score of the game came on a 16-yard rush with 5:21 left until the half. Ackman ended the night with just 64 total yards from scrimmage. He brought in two catches for 30 yards and rushes three times for 34 yards.
“It feels great,” Ackman said of taking the direct snap for a pair of scores. “We’ve been practicing that for two weeks, me just at quarterback running it up. It feels great, a great adrenaline rush there, and just really want to run the ball in there.”
In between the last Ackman score, Si Sabbagha took a pitch from Elias Alvarez and found Josiah Flynn for an 83-yard scoring connection with 11:36 left in the first half, which gave Vintage a 21-0 edge early.
Jefferey Page also found the end zone twice in the contest. His first score came with just 36.1 ticks left until half when he rumbled into the end zone from five yards away. Then out of the half, he scored again on a 13-yard carry with 7:37 left in the third quarter. Page ended the night with 105 yards on 8 rushes.
Though the Crushers (6-4 overall, 5-1 Vine Valley Athletic League) got the victory quite handily there was certainly a fair share of penalties that gave Napa plenty of yardage. It wasn’t something Leach was too pleased with.
“We jumped offsides every time they went on two,” Leach explained. “It’s something we’ve got to work on, and I told them at halftime ‘we’re playing so undisciplined and it’s a bad product and I don’t want my name behind it.’ In the second half, we shaped up and we didn’t have those offsides penalties and I think a lot of it is just anxiousness, the Big Game, and just wanting to get going, and they jumped offsides. But hopefully, we’ll be better than that in the future.”
The Grizzlies (2-7, 0-5 VVAL) finally scored with 10:43 left in the game when Yovanni Palma found Napa Valley Register Napa High MVP Donovan Sander for a 13-yard connection to get Napa on the board. Palma completed 9 of 16 passes for 101 yards in the game. Sander had two receptions for 24 yards as well.
“Yovanni, he played well,” Napa High head coach Askari Adams said of the junior signal-callers game. “The line did well a couple of times giving him a pocket.”
Then with 55.2 left, Carlos Mata plunged into the end zone on a rush up the middle to make it 42-14. Mata carried the rock 18 times for 54 yards.
Next week, Napa will end its season with a trip to Sonoma Valley.
Meanwhile, Vintage will have a bye week before finding out where they’ll slide into the CIF North Coast Section playoffs that start November 11th.
This is Vintage’s sixth straight Big Game victory. This moves the all-time series a tad bit closer as Napa now leads 29-20-2.
In the only other VVAL game Friday night, American Canyon beat Justin-Siena 35-0.
