When I was looking over Friday's slate of local Football games my eyes fell on Bismarck at Davies and in no time the storylines started to come into focus.
✔ Fargo school versus Bismarck school
✔ NDSU recruit on the local team
✔ Start the year with a win by the school that I'm biased toward
Here's the problem about stories that are written before things happen - THINGS HAPPEN. The old cliche in sports, "this is why you play the games," fits last night's proceedings to a tee. I'm going to lay it out flat, Bismarck took the Eagles behind the woodshed and then left em in a ditch. It was a beating the likes of which justified all the fans that drove over from the capital city but that I did not see coming.
I don't want to get too effusive about the drubbing because it's not like the visitors won the state championship last night or anything. They just took care of business and left little doubt about their chances to compete for one from the Western Dakota after the first twelve minutes had been played. In case you want some concrete proof, Bismarck was up 14 - 0 after 1 and 35 - 6 at the half.
Like I said, it was a whoopin.
To their credit, Davies got some breaks and tried to at least make it competitive but when they pushed in the second half the Bismarck coaching staff took the gloves back off and started airing the ball again. I wasn't overly impressed with what I heard from those coaches while taking pictures on their sideline but they at least had the class to try to just run out the clock with the lead that they had. In blow outs like this, I'm always going to be in favor of teams not running up the score unnecessarily. When Davies put up some points, they changed their approach again and made sure that the score never got within a trio of touchdowns.
So it didn't go the way that I anticipated but isn't that what makes sports so great - the unpredictability. Bismarck was clearly the better team and is worth watching if you get the chance! Maybe Davies will bounce back and better utilize their future national champion who plays both ways (and other quality offensive and defensive players as well) to win some games and lose their others in less decisive fashion.
As far as right now goes though, there's something that I'm quite pleased with. I was fortunate enough to capture an image that summed up the game about as well as any picture could. Check it out below if you don't believe me (& the rest of the gallery while you're at it! (The picture is the link)).
