Seventy-nine seconds. Twenty points. Three onside kicks.
That first quarter finale was the focal point of Glendale’s 85-44 win over Ozark Friday night. In many ways it was peak Glendale. It’s what they’ve been letting the entire state know could happen if they ever got this good. Well, there it was.
I watched all of it, and it didn’t feel right.
Glendale wasn’t just executing to perfection (they were). They dialed up deep ball after deep ball after deep ball. Then once they finished a drive they’d ignite another with an onside kick. It was almost gruesome. But, that’s what Glendale’s offense is designed to do so well.
At the end of the day, what is acceptable when your season’s existence is on the line?
It’s a fascinating case study. Coaches have told me before that halftime is considered the shifting point in a game like this. Anything before that is fair game, they say.
It’s possible to explain away the onside kicks and deep shots. Ozark’s kick return unit was spitting their offense out near the 50 in the first quarter regularly. Coach Chad Depee used his team’s lock-down secondary to stifle short and intermediate routes. Ozark scored 44 points when all was said and done, so Glendale needed nearly all 49 that they hung in the first quarter.
And yet…
Maybe what makes it seem worse is that Glendale has no off switch. They’ve run the ball 109 times all season long, and their quarterback is responsible for the vast majority of those carries. They’re so great at passing that it can come across as running up the score when they connected on their third bomb in the last 1:19 of clock.
So at the end of the first quarter, Glendale had a 40 point lead. I’ve never seen that in six years of covering football in three states. I’m guessing most people in the crowd that night hadn’t either. So how do you make sense of it?
In the moment it felt wrong. It felt like Glendale was trying to break a record. How can you go for three onside kicks, the last two when you had leads of 28 and 34 points 11 minutes into the game? With 0:02.5 left in the quarter on first down, was there not a screen pass in the playbook that could’ve run the clock down a little bit instead of throwing yet another bomb?
But on the other hand, how can you tell a football team not to do whatever it can to win a playoff game? What if your quarterback gets hurt? If they burn your kickoff coverage enough, isn’t it on you to adjust your strategy? If the short stuff isn’t available, are you supposed to throw it into coverage just so you can spare their feelings? Isn’t the game still “on” in the first quarter regardless of the score?
And of course, isn’t it up to the other team to stop what you’re doing?
I don’t have solid answers to any of those questions, and I can talk myself into each side of the argument. Ozark head coach Chad Depee didn’t cry foul after the game. He told our reporter, “We had a lot of things that didn’t go Ozark’s way in that first half and they can expose you that fast.”
Glendale did. Credit to them for being the better team that night and proving that a 41-point win can still trigger merited debate.
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