By Brennan Stebbins (For OzarksSportsZone.com)
Webb City continues to embrace its underdog role.
First it was the district championship game at second-ranked Carthage, against an undefeated Tigers team that had beaten Webb City by 28 points in the regular season. The Cardinals won the rematch 28-21.
On Saturday in the Class 5 semifinals, the Cardinals entertained top-ranked Jackson, which entered with a 12-0 record and an average margin of victory of 40 points.
The Cardinals won, 35-21.
Now Webb City (10-3) will face Holt (13-0) at 7 p.m. Friday in Columbia seeking the school’s 16th state championship.
“I’m just glad I didn’t start bawling like a baby,” Cardinals coach John Roderique said Saturday. “I was going over some emotions. Just such an unlikely thing for this team, from where we started and how the season progressed. If you just keep reminding the kids to have faith and keep battling, keep fighting, anything can happen. We’ve gotten a lot better here as of late. Hats off to our coaches, they’ve done a fantastic job getting our kids in this position and the kids, what great effort we’ve been playing with.”
“This is great, man,” said senior running back Cade Wilson, who rushed for 141 yards and scored four touchdowns. “This is all we wanted, and now that we’re going to state… we just wanted to beat them so bad because no one thought we had a chance. No one. Absolutely no one in the state.”
Jackson entered the game averaging 49 points per game and allowing just nine. The Indians had outscored their three other playoff opponents 160-35.
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But by halftime, Webb City had built a 28-6 lead and Cardinal Stadium was rocking. It was all Cardinals from the start.
Webb City marched 80 yards in nine plays on its first drive and scored on a 35-yard Wilson run. The Cardinals went 71 yards in eight plays on their second, scoring on a 2-yard Wilson run. By that point, they had out-gained the Indians 151 to 3 and racked up six first downs.
Even when Jackson scored, on a fourth-and-goal rush from the 2-yard line by quarterback Cameron Marchi, the Cardinals blocked the extra point to give themselves something to celebrate.
Then they marched another 80 yards in 11 plays and made it 21-6 on another short touchdown run by Wilson.
“We had nothing to lose,” he said. “I mean honestly, if anything they had all the pressure because they had to come into this game and we had nothing to lose so we put it all on the line and it paid off.”
“I don’t know if they played anyone like us,” he said. “I mean we are just like bulldogs down there. When you haven’t played anyone like that and that’s all we do, and this week of practice we had was great. We came out and just did our thing.”
Webb City stopped Jackson on fourth-and-1 near the 50 on the team’s third possession of the game and added a 51-yard drive and a 2-yard touchdown by senior Dupree Jackson just before the half.
The lead grew to 35-6 after Jackson went three-and-out to start the third quarter; Webb City got the ball back at the 46 and later scored on a 21-yard run by Wilson with 7:50 left. The drive included a huge play on fourth-and-9 when quarterback Cohl Vaden threw back across his body and found Wilson wide open for a 15-yard gain.
Jackson’s offense got going after that, but it was too little, too late. The Indians scored on a 6-yard pass with 4:51 left in the third and converted the two-point try, then forced a pair of Webb City punts. Jackson went 96 yards to open the fourth, scoring on a 9-yard run that made it 35-21.
The Indians had new life when Webb City fumbled at the 43, but Marchi was stopped short on a fourth-down scramble at the 11.
“I thought Webb City won the line of scrimmage,” Jackson coach Brent Eckley said. “That was pretty critical. On both sides of the ball I thought they did a good job there. Coach Roderique would never admit it but scheme-wise they do a great job of finding what’s soft and then exploiting that and I thought they did a really good job with that again. Defensively they were very multiple and kept us off balance, especially throughout the first half.”
“I felt like we were playing maybe above our ability and maybe they weren’t, I don’t know,” Roderique said. “I can’t answer the question for them. That happens sometimes, one team plays up, the other team doesn’t play as well. I don’t really know, I just know our guys played like fire in that first half.”
“Until we got the ball back at the end and started kneeling on it, we were pretty nervous about the whole deal,” he said.
Webb City, which out-gained Jackson by more than 200 yards in the first half, finished with a 397 to 338 advantage in total offense, and ran 20 fewer plays. The Cardinals rushed 48 times for 268 yards and Vaden completed 6 of 10 passes for 129 yards. He added 60 yards and Jackson rushed for 59 in addition to Wilson’s 141.
Roderique said Wilson is “just a tough ‘ol kid” who’s emblematic of Webb City’s program.
“He’s exactly our program,” he said. “A kid who’s been in our program for a long time, he’s not big enough, he’s not strong enough, he’s not fast enough but he plays really hard and shows up and he’s a great kid, to boot.”
Dante Washington had three catches for 71 yards and Billy Hayes added one for 32. Quade Eilenstein led the team with seven tackles and Billy Wolf added two for a loss. Webb City led in time of possession, 26:42 to 21:18.
