Marquette players back to their old selves in rout of downstate Madison

OTTAWA – Less than a minute after Marquette fullback Jacob Smith dragged three Madison defenders the final 10 yards of a 26-yard touchdown run to give the Crusaders a 28-0 lead at the start of the second quarter, he was saying what every member of his team was thinking throughout.

“Week 1 doesn’t matter,” the 5-foot-6, 170-pound senior said as he walked through the high-fives from his teammates. “This is our game. This is how we play.”

And play they did. A week after dropping its season opener at Aurora Christian by the first running-clock loss in 12 years, Marquette showed how uncharacteristic that was by turning the tables on Madison, taking down the young Trojans by a lopsided 56-6 margin at Gould Stadium.

“This game, we felt like a team,” said Smith, who finished with a team-best 108 yards and two touchdowns on just 10 carries. “Last week, we were a little disorganized, a little unsure of ourselves. We didn’t know how to react, but this week we were a team looking for a fresh start and that’s what we got. Last week wasn’t us. Tonight was us. This is who we are. We may not have the biggest players, but we have heart and aggressiveness when we take the field.

“When we have that, we’re a winning football team, one week at a time.”

Fullback Grant Dose added 90 yards and three TDs on eight tries for the Cru, while Pete McGrath contributed 70 yards and a score on only four attempts, and Payton Gutierrez 65 yards on seven rushes as the Crusaders (1-1) as a team finished with 36 carries for 376 yards.

That’s one less rush than the week before and 330 more yards than in last week’s 42-0 loss at Aurora Christian.

Add Anthony Couch’s one completion to Charlie Mullen for 35 yards and a touchdown and the hosts ended up with 411 yards of total offense.

The Marquette defense shined every bit as brightly, holding the Trojans to negative-1 yard rushing and 84 yards of offense on the night.

“This week the biggest difference was our crispness,” Marquette coach Tom Jobst said. “Our execution was much better. We were more confident, more sure of what we were doing, where last week we were a little iffy, a little tentative, just feeling our way through. This week, we were not tentative and that made a big difference.

“The line play was good, the backs were good and we didn’t make silly mistakes. It was just the nice step forward you always hope you’re going to get.”

Smith capped Marquette’s first series with a seven-yard score that, with Sam Mitre adding the first of his six conversion kicks, made it 7-0.

After Jaxsen Higgins recovered a Madison fumble, the Couch to Mullen connection for 35 yards made it 13-0, before a 45-yard TD burst by Pete McGrath and a Couch to Mullen PAT pass widened the gap to 21-0 through one quarter.

That’s when Smith bulled his way to his second score from 26 yards out. That was followed by two scores from Dose, the first from 26 yards away and the second from nine with just 1:20 left in the second period, making it 42-0 and setting up the running-clock second half.

After a scoreless third, Higgins raced 25 yards to paydirt. Though the Trojans broke the shutout on an 11-yard TD run by Isaiah Williams (team-best 40 yards on 10 carries), Dose finished the scoring for Marquette with a 40-yard scoring run.

For the visitors – like Marquette, a Class 1A playoff team a year ago – sophomore quarterback Dallas Gardner finished 8-of-19 passing for 85 yards.

“Marquette obviously wanted to make atone for their game last week and they played very physical football,” Madison coach Tavares Young said. “They wanted it more and they set the tone right from the outset, playing fast and physical, and they’re just so much more experienced than we are.

“We’re a pretty young team. We were hit by the transfer bug – seven of our top eight skill players transferred to 5A and 7A schools – and around 65% of our team has never played football before, so we’re learning as we go. We’ll get better.”