Aidan Wyzard’s kickoff return helps Sycamore hold off Mahomet-Seymour

MAHOMET – The Sycamore offense ran only 11 plays in the second half Friday against Mahomet-Seymour.

Thanks to the Spartans’ defense and special teams, they didn’t need more than that.

Aidan Wyzard returned a kick 89 yards in the third quarter for a touchdown, and Kyle Prebil and Anthony Verdone downed a Thatcher Friedrichs punt at the 2-yard line as the Spartans held on for a 21-13 win.

“You know, this team is honestly special,” said Wyzard as the Spartans won their third straight game to start the season by a single score. “We’re very senior heavy, and I feel like we really work together as one.

“We know how to win and it comes to crunch time, we always know how to stay on top of it.”

Normally a pass-heavy team that had scored 110 points in their first two games, the Bulldogs (2-1) switched to a run-first attack after standout receiver Trey Peters left the game in the second quarter. He picked up a third-and-17 but seemed to collide with a teammate at the end of the run and did not return.

Quarterback Lucas Dyer attempted 12 passes to that point but only four more the rest of the game. The offense switched to Cade Ashby, who ran 39 times for 164 yards.

“I definitely feel we came out strong against all their deep plays, because that’s what we had in practice all week,” Prebil said. “And then they came out and had to do something different. As a defense, you just kind of laugh and just go all right, now we’re just going to kick you in this.”

Ashby led an 18-play, 77-yard drive in the third quarter that cut the Sycamore (3-0) lead to 14-7. But Wyzard and the Spartans answered back with the 89-yard return. Wyzard started left then cut back right to daylight, only needing to beat the kicker for the score with 0:40 left in the third and a 21-7 lead.

“Return left was the call, and it was a pretty far kick all the way to the right,” Wyzard said. “I tried to go outside, and there’s two guys just out in containment. So I’m like, ‘OK this isn’t looking good.’ So I hit a juke move inside, and next thing you know all blocking is right on top of me, I find an edge to get out, and there was only one person to beat, and I ended up beating them.”

The Bulldogs rattled off another long drive, this one ending on a 3-yard scramble by Dyer, cutting the lead to 21-13 with 7:27 left.

The Spartans went 3-and-out on their next drive, but still ate off about 2 minutes. Friedrichs punted from the 45, when Verdone and Perbil got to the punt at the 2-yard line. The Bulldogs only got as far as the 26, needing 10 plays to make that far.

Caden Wicks got a third-down sack to bring up fourth-and-14 from the 22, then Jakob Shipley batted down a ball over the middle with 1:40 left. The Spartans picked up the first down they needed to run out the clock.

“Obviously we had two big special teams play in the second half,” Sycamore coach Joe Ryan said. “You have to win in all three phases, especially against a really good team. And they’re really good. So we held them, they were scoring 50 points a game, basically, and we held them to 13 and forced them to do some things they didn’t want to do, which was to run.”

Mahomet-Seymour marched downfield on the first drive of the game, but York intercepted Dyer in the end zone. Later in the quarter, York caught a 55-yard bomb from quarterback Burke Gautcher as Sycamore went up 7-0.

Prebil, who plays on both sides of the ball, said the strong defense leads to some big offensive plays.

“Our defense rallies our offense to have some confidence to be able to calling big shots like the one to Carter,” Prebil said. “That comes from our defense, because it gives us the confidence we can come back out and keep them scoreless, even when we take the big shots.”

Another defensive stop and Sycamore put together a 60-yard scoring drive, capped by a Kevin Lee run from 2 yards out and a 14-0 lead. The Bulldogs drove on the next drive, but the Peters injury stymied the progress.

The Spartans ran 11 plays in the second half, finishing the game with 187 yards of total offense on 40 plays. The Bulldogs gained 352 yards, including 241 on the ground but only 111 in the air.

Ryan said the plan was to stop the big plays of an offense that had averaged 400 yards of passing per game to start the year, and at that they succeeded.

“We didn’t defend the run as well as I’d like, but we didn’t want to give up the big shot, give them the big play,” Ryan said. “We kept them from that all night long.”