WACO – Richmond Randle broke open a close game with a strong second half to defeat the Boerne football team in last Friday’s 5A-DII state semifinal game at McLane Stadium in Waco.
At the break, the Lions were up 14-7, but Randle tallied four second half touchdowns – three of them in the third quarter – on its way to a 42-7 victory.
Randle (15-0) plays for the state title Friday night against South Oak Cliff, while Boerne ends the year at 11-4.
At one point this season, the Hounds were 2-3 but won nine straight to make it to last Friday’s game in Waco.
Jaxon Baize, one of 37 seniors, said the team never doubted they could turn around the season when they were sitting at 2-3 and 0-1 in district.
“Nobody had us making it this far and we proved everybody wrong,” he said. “We’ve known that we could do this. We just had to put a few pieces together and figure it out.”
One thing the Greyhounds figured out was how to slow down Randle running back Landen Williams – Callis, who came into the game with almost 2,000 rushing yards.
Williams-Callis scored a late TD but the game was already decided by then and BHS held the talented back to 61 yards on 14 carries.
The Greyhounds also did a good job of limiting five-star recruit Michael Terry from Alamo Heights to 16 yards in their district game.
Coach Che Hendrix said their defense did a good job of stopping the run this year.
“We had a great front seven this year, we had a lot of experience up front,” he said. “We didn’t let (Williams-Callis) get outside, we set good edges.”
With Boerne limiting the Randle run game, the Lions went to the air for its first TD of the game on a 32-yard Tyler Skrabanek pass to Keilan Sweeny late in the first quarter.
After four punts the Greyhounds finally answered in the middle of the second quarter.
Randle was backed up to their own 11 and punted on 4th and 15. It was a short punt – only 24 yards – and on top of that, the Lions were flagged for a personal foul, which gave Boerne the ball at the Randle 20-yard line.
After two incompletions, BHS QB, Hank Hendrix, who was sacked on 3rd down, tossed a scoring strike to Eli Nikolas on a 4th and 17 to tie it up at 7-7 after the Diego Jimenez PAT.
It stayed knotted up until the Lions got a break late in the first half. One of the Boerne players was flagged for a late hit, but he was, in fact, blocked into the Randle ball carrier near the sideline the replay showed.
That gave the Lions a 1st and 10 at the BHS 36 and they capitalized on it with another Skrabanek touchdown toss, this time to Da’Shawn Burton that went for 32 yards and it was 14-7 going into the break.
“We felt good about where we were at halftime,” Coach Hendrix said. “I thought we had a chance but they got going in the second half.”
Randle scored on its opening possession of the third quarter and capped an 11-play, 78-yard drive with a 4-yard run from Sweeny to make it 21-7.
Boerne punted on its next possession and the Lions scored again, this time on a trick play after Sweeny took the handoff from the wide receiver spot and tossed it to a wide-open Mason Mixon.
Randle used a few of those type plays and they all worked.
“They got us on those plays,” Hendrix said. “I wouldn’t have thought they needed to do that to score on us, but they did. It was a good battle.”
At that point it was 28-7 and then the Lions started to pull away even more with an interception Sh’Rhod Revis returned 26 yards for a score and the lead bumped to 35-7 with their third touchdown of the quarter.
Their last two scores in the period, the Mixon catch and Revis Pick-6, came 17 seconds apart and put the Lions in control. Boerne didn’t record its first, first down in the third period until there was 2:48 left in the stanza.
Randle added one more score in the fourth quarter, a Williams-Callis run, with eight minutes left in the game. The Lions scored 35 straight after it was tied at 7-7.
Afterwards, Hendrix tipped his hat to the Lions for playing a strong second half.
“We ran into a really good team; we knew they were good and it was going to be tough,” he said about the Lions team that has not surrendered more than 14 points in a game this season.
Hendrix said he expressed appreciation to the seniors for the legacy they left with two regional titles in three seasons.
“I just told them ‘thank you,’” he said. “We’re going to walk out of here with our heads held high, what a run by the seniors.”
Comment
Comments