A week after missed opportunities cost the Fernley High School football team a chance to win in Bishop, last Saturday’s trip to Elko turned into another verse of the same song.
The Vaqueros scored on just two of the five possessions on which they drove inside the Elko 20-yard line, turned the ball over twice and wound up on the short end of a 28-15 score.
“There's several opportunities that we had that we could have taken advantage of, but we should have put the hammer in the door and kind of walked away with it,” coach Anfernee Sloan said.
Like they did at Bishop, the Vaqueros controlled the ball for long stretches, running 51 offensive plays, not counting penalties. But unlike in Bishop, Elko matched the Vaqueros in that category, and then some. Elko ran the ball 59 times for 297 yards and also attempted 14 passes, accounting for another 105 yards.
Counting special teams and plays that were nullified by penalties, the teams played more than 160 plays in the game.
“That's a lot of snaps to play in a high school football game, considering that we only play technically 48 minutes of football,” Sloan said. “You know, the average high school football game is about 110, 120 plays.”
Sloan said both teams seemed to wear down late in the game, but by then Elko had a two-touchdown advantage.
“You can totally see the shift and not just our guys, but even their guys, everybody's kind of losing a step, and now it's kind of coming down to who can make the big play and make the big stop, who can continue to finish the game while the other ones start to run out of gas a little bit,” he said.
The Vaqueros seemed to be getting the better of things in the early going. After stopping the first two Elko drives, Fernley took its second possession 78 yards in seven plays to score first on a 5-yard run by quarterback Elijah Devold.
Elko’s answer was an 11-play drive for 68 yards and a 4-yard touchdown run by Hagen Robinson, but the Vaqueros blocked the extra point, and led 7-6.
Fernley fumbled and punted on its next two drives, and Elko threatened to take the lead before halftime, but on the 14th play of the Indians’ drive, Fernley’s Kaenan Foster sacked Elko quarterback Adan De Jesus to preserve the lead.
Refreshed by the halftime break, the Vaqueros marched to the Elko 4-yard line on their first drive of the second half, but were stuffed three plays in a row and turned the ball over on downs. Elko drove 80 yards in 14 plays to the Fernley 16-yard line, but a touchdown run by De Jesus was called back because of a penalty, and the Indians had to settle for a field goal to take the lead 9-7.
Things then began to snowball on the Vaqueros. Elko capitalized on a Fernley fumble with a 13-yard touchdown by Riott Duke to extend its lead to 21-7.
Fernley answered quickly, aided by a 15-yard penalty on Elko and a 28-yard pass from Devold to Vance Swindlehurst leading to a 1-yard touchdown by Jayden Esparza, but after an onside kick was unsuccessful, Duke ran in from 6 yards to make it 28-13.
Fernley got the ball back twice, reaching the Elko 11-yard line and the Elko 15-yard line, but couldn’t score either time.
“There's just a little bit of inconsistency with being able to execute the little things, which is stuff that we can control,” Sloan said. “I think we're good at sustaining drives and making drives happen, which is huge. Now we gotta be able to finish them.”
The Vaqueros will try to get back on track this week at Sparks, the last of four consecutive road games to start the season. A win would even their overall and league record with their first home game, and homecoming, against South Tahoe on tap next week.
Sloan said the Vaqueros’ focus is to get back in the win column, and to do that he said they have to eliminate missed tackles, missed opportunities and turnovers.
“We can tackle better. We can win earlier downs. We gotta be able to protect the football. We gotta score the football,” he said. “That's a football game in a nutshell, but there's things that we also do to ourselves that we’ve got to be able to control.”
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