As he and a few of his assistants who were still waiting for him left the field last Friday night in Bishop, CA, Fernley High School football coach Anfernee Sloan couldn’t wait to watch the game film during the 4-hour ride home, even though he knew that doing so would probably drive him crazy.
In a game they dominated statistically, running twice as many offensive plays and gaining almost twice as many total yards, the Vaqueros somehow trailed most of the game and came away with 27-20 loss to the Broncos.
Adding insult to injury, the game ended in controversy on the final play, when the officials ruled that Fernley quarterback Elijah Devold fumbled at the Bishop 1-yard line when he was trying to spike the ball on third and goal with 8 seconds left.
“He told me that it was a fumble,” Sloan said of the referee. “I argued that being the head white hat, you should know in your mind in this situation, the kid is trying to spike the football. And he clearly threw his hands forward, he clearly threw the ball forward, which is considered a forward pass.”
Sloan argued to no avail, as he did two plays earlier when Fernley’s Jayse Jones was ruled down short of the goal line on a play where Sloan believed he had hit the pylon for a touchdown.
As frustrated as he was with the calls, Sloan was equal parts pleased with the way his team responded to adversity throughout the game and aware that much of that adversity was self-inflicted.
“Excuses or results, you can’t have both,” Sloan said. “I’m going to accept the result. There’s a lot of facets of the game that we can be better about.”
Two minutes into the second quarter, the Vaqueros found themselves trailing 13-0, even though to that point they had run 24 offensive plays to Bishop’s nine.
After recovering a Bishop fumble on the first play of the game, the Vaqueros held the ball for nearly eight minutes, moving from the Bishop 46-yard line to 1st-and-goal at the 1, only to lose five yards on the next two plays and then had a touchdown pass nullified by a holding penalty. They ultimately turned the ball over on downs when they were unable to convert on 4th-and-goal from the 16-yard line.
Two plays later, Bishop running back Hunter Dailey ran 76 yards for a touchdown.
Fernley went 39 yards in 10 plays on its second possession but again turned the ball over on downs, and Biship made it a 13-0 game with a 53-yard pass from Dom Barlow to Devaun Mitchell.
Fernley struck back in one play, an 80-yard touchdown pass from Devold to Keaunue Tolliver, then after forcing a Bishop punt, they drove 58 yards in seven plays to go ahead 14-13 on a 5-yard touchdown run by Jayden Esparza with 4:34 left in the first half.
“By that point, they had already battled so much adversity,” Sloan said. “That’s why I said, I think it’s going to kind of kill me when I watch this, because I’m just going to be like, wow.”
The adversity was just beginning, however.
A 4-yard touchdown run by Dailey put Bishop back on top 19-14 with 43.9 seconds left in the half, and, knowing the Vaqueros were going to receive the second-half kickoff and were moving the ball well offensively, Sloan opted to take a knee and regroup.
When the Vaqueros took that first second half possession 80 yards in 13 plays on a drive that lasted more than seven minutes, capped by a 20-yard touchdown run by Esparza, the Vaqueros seemed to have things under control with a 20-19 lead. They felt even better when they forced a 3-and-out by the Broncos. With a chance to extend the lead, the Vaqueros drove from their own 47 to the Bishop 20 before coming up short again on 4th-and-1.
But facing 2nd-and-20 from their own 25, the Broncos got a 45-yard run by Dailey, and on the next play he covered the remaining 30 yards for a touchdown that put the Broncos back up 27-20.
When Fernley again couldn’t convert on a fourth down, Bishop took possession needed just two first downs to put the game away.
Instead, after a 9-yard run on first down by Oscar Henriquez, the Vaqueros stopped the Broncos three straight times on 2nd-and-1, 3rd-and-1, and 4th-and-1. After an agonizing debate between the officials and a measurement that proved the ball was about 6 inches shot of a first down, the Vaqueros had one last chance with a little over three minutes left.
A 20-yard scramble by Devold and a 23-yard run by Esparza got them to the Bishop 22, and with a little over a minute remaining, Jones picked 3 yards and a few inches on 4th-and-3. A pass from Devold to Jones took the ball to the 2, and on 1st-and-goal, Jones was ruled down at the 1-yard line.
During a timeout for an injured player, Sloan instructed Devold that if the Vaqueros didn’t get in the end zone on second down, they needed to line up in a hurry and spike the ball on third down. Devold was tackled for no gain on second down and the Vaqueros quickly lined up, but his attempt at a spike was instead ruled a fumble.
The last call was the topic of conversation, but Sloan said that wasn’t what he was thinking the most about.
“We can’t give up the big third downs. We can’t mis-execute on fourth down right here, where if we get that we probably seal it because we’re going to go up two scores,” he said. “I mean, there’s just other factors that play a role in that game.”
Sloan’s said his message to his dejected team afterward was that he liked the way they fought back and gave themselves a chance time and time again.
“Sometimes you are going to be dealt some cards that you don’t want to deal with, that you don’t want to have to face, but you have to get through it and it’s not going to just go away,” he said. “And I told them, tonight you learned a little about yourselves, not because you got punched in the face, by any means, but because you guys learned when things get hard, we can move past this.”
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