No. 13 over No. 4: Marquette overpowers Rushville-Industry in Class 1A opener

RUSHVILLE – The Rushville-Industry football program prides itself on running the football, and it’s good enough at it that it only passed the ball 15 times the entire regular season.

But it took a 10th week for a team to show it what rushing the ball really means.

The Marquette Crusaders showed they were clearly the master at the ground game, carrying 39 times for a whopping 453 yards and six touchdowns on their way to a 44-6 victory in the first round of the Class 1A playoffs at Bob Wixom Field.

Payton Gutierrez ran 17 times for 167 yards and two touchdowns, Jaxsen Higgins added 165 yards and a score on just seven tries, and Grant Dose turned in 88 yards and three TDs on 11 attempts to pace the Crusaders into the second round against the winner of Saturday’s first-rounder between No. 12 Galena at No. 5 Stark County. If Stark County wins, the game would be played in Ottawa.

The Cru (6-4) dominated Friday’s contest from the very start, going 64 yards in the first four plays to a 35-yard scoring burst by Gutierrez to set a tone it would maintain throughout.

“That first touchdown was huge for us getting us off on the right foot right away,” Gutierrez said.

“We had some losses when we didn’t play as well, but even those games tell a lot about us as a team. We just keep getting better, doing our assignments and doing what we’re supposed to do. We focus on our finish grades, finishing every play giving 100%.”

“That first touchdown was huge for us getting us off on the right foot right away.”

—  Marquette running back Payton Gutierrez

When Dose got his first score – at the 10:10 mark in the second quarter, the same time as Gutierrez’s TD in the first – it appeared the Crusaders would go into halftime with a 13-0 edge. The Rockets’ Rylan Reimold had other ideas.

The home team’s 1,000-plus yard rusher – held to 45 yards to that point – broke free for a 47-yard score with just 20.6 second left in the second quarter.

“In the second quarter we got a little shaggy, but we tightened that up and finished,” MA coach Tom Jobst said. “That (first score) really set the tone, and we didn’t let up after that.

“They didn’t do anything that surprised us, and I’m sure we didn’t do anything that surprised them. We just executed very well tonight – good, hard-nosed football – and didn’t make many mistakes. That’s what comes from just drilling and drilling and drilling.”

That drilling paid off with a pair of Dose scores. After a fumble recovery by Anthony Couch at the Rushville 28-yard line ended the Rockets’ first series of the second half, the fullback netted a 7-yarder and later added a 1-yard burst, running in the conversion after both TDs to widen the Cru advantage to 29-6.

In the fourth quarter, Higgins got into the scoring act by bursting free for a 39-yard scoring jaunt, then Gutierrez capped the night with an 8-yard touchdown.

Defensively the Cru ended up surrendering just 233 yards – 110 on 14 carries by Reimold – and so frustrated in the lack of progress in the run game, the Rockets actually resorted to trying three passes.

“Easily, that was the best football team we’ve played this year,” Rushville coach Brian Lafferty said.

“They play with good fundamentals, they’re well-coached, play with good pad level and do a lot of the things we try to do. Tonight they were more physical than us, and they did a better job of executing than we did.

“They’re just a better football team than us this year, and we’ll try to learn from that.”