MT. IRON- A young North Woods football team didn’t have the horses to run with 2022 state champion Mt. Iron-Buhl on Friday, as the Rangers scored at will in a 76-0 romp over the Grizzlies.
A North Woods offense that ran rampant in their first outing of the season was shut down handily by the athletic Rangers, who didn’t allow a sustained drive all evening. They shut down the Grizzlies’ leading rusher, Kaden Gornick, who had just 20 yards on 13 attempts, and running mate Nick Abramson fared little better, gaining just 28 yards on 11 tries.
On defense, the Grizzlies were a step or two slower than the Rangers, who ran through numerous tackles and romped through the defense for long scores. MIB went on top early after forcing a Grizzlies punt by connecting on a 61-yard pass play from MiCaden Clines to Colton Gallus, and put up two more first-quarter touchdowns of 45 yards and 37 yards.
Winners of 15 straight games coming into the contest, the Rangers left no room for doubt that they would extend the streak to 16 by adding on four more touchdowns in the second quarter. Big gainers contributed to the first three second-quarter scores, while a Grizzlies fumble recovered by MIB at the North Woods 15 gave the Rangers their easiest scoring opportunity of the night.
Trailing 48-0 at the half, the Grizzlies didn’t quit, but couldn’t make up any ground against the state’s No. 1 ranked nine-man team, either on the field or on the scoreboard. The Rangers crossed the goal line three times in the third quarter, twice on passes of 20-plus yards and once on a 42-yard run by Trey Niska. With a running clock in the fourth quarter, MIB tacked on one more touchdown for the 76-0 drubbing.
With MIB having the ball for most of the game, the Grizzlies had plenty of opportunities to make tackles but didn’t collect many. Gornick led the Grizzlies with three unassisted tackles and four assists. Four Grizzlies had two tackles each.
Head Coach Joel Anderson had nothing but praise for the Raingers.
“MIB is a very complete team, and they’re very well coached,” he said. “You can see why they’re the defending state champions. I’ve coached a lot of high school fooball and I’ve been part of very good teams and coached against very good teams. That one Friday night might be one of the best disciplined teams I’ve seen. They didn’t miss a read.”
And despite the lopsided score, Anderson saw some positives for his young Grizzlies team as well.
“Mentally, we played a very good game,” he said. “A lot of our struggles where that we just weren’t fast enough, we just weren’t strong enough. But we had the right guys making the right reads. They had a lot of things that were scripted that they tried and they did not work against us, so they had to go to Plan B and Plan C. Offensively we did open holes up, but they were just faster and stronger than us and closed them down much quicker than we could get through them.”
“I looked at the film we had and we did have a lot of positives on our end that we can build off of,” Anderson continued. “You kind of pick your poison with them and the poison we picked was trying to make their quarterback beat us with his legs, and he did. But we took away the deep ball. I was happy with the fact that we took them out of what their desired preference to go to was.”
The path doesn’t get much easier this week when the Grizzlies host Littlefork-Big Falls, rated ninth in nine-main with a 3-0 record. However, the Vikings barely squeaked by Cook County last week 18-16.