Receiver Marcus Camp ran the hitch-and-go route and turned up the sideline as the MEDDAC defender bit on a pump fake by quarterback Philip Richards.
Richards threw to the wide-open receiver for a 65-yard touchdown pass that lifted 1st Battalion, 19th Infantry Regiment, to a 13-6 win over MEDDAC and the Commander’s Cup Postseason Flag Football Tournament title. “We knew they kept playing tight and kept biting on our slants,” Richards said. “We hadn’t been able to get off the ball fast enough so we did a quick hitch-and-go and they bit on it.”
Richards said MEDDAC had been the team in recent history that gave 1/19 the most trouble. 1/19 lost to MEDDAC in last year’s tournament championship round.
“It was finally nice to overcome that hurdle,” he said.
MEDDAC had a chance to tie the game in the last two minutes as the offense drove to within the 1/19 20-yard line, but quarterback Casey Osbey took a sack on fourth down to turn the ball back over with under 20 seconds remaining.
As the team has done in several other sports this year, MEDDAC came out on top of the loser’s bracket by defeating the 11th Engineer Battalion Team 1, 7-0.
Needing two wins over 1/19 to become champions, MEDDAC dominated the first game 25-6. 1/19 scored first on its opening drive but struggled on offense and defense in the second half.
“The first game, we weren’t meshing as a team,” Richards said. “We figured out what wasn’t working for us and what was and we stuck to what was working.”
1/19 opened the second game with an 11-play drive that resulted in a 6-yard touchdown pass from Richards to tight end Michael Boganowski. Richards credited his offensive line as one of the differences in the second game.
“We switched up on the offensive line,” Richards said. “I only had a second in the first game, but in the second game I had two or three seconds, so we were throwing the ball a lot better in the second game.” After the opening drive, MEDDAC appeared fatigued.
“They’ve got a much larger team,” MEDDAC coach Phillip Moore said. “Their opening drive took about 10 minutes and just wore us down.”
MEDDAC opened the second half with a 12-play touchdown drive, capped off by a 5-yard pass from Osbey to Jonathan McKinney. MEDDAC failed on the one-point conversion that would have tied the game and Richards hit Camp with the long touchdown pass on the next drive.
The CC Preseason Basketball Tournament will begin in early December and the regular season will be in early January. The 2011 Commander’s Cup champion will be announced at the CG Breakfast in late January.
