ONALASKA — All of the jokes and cliches about the Onalaska power-run offense being one-dimensional are generally wrong. It may sound tongue-in-cheek, but the Loggers have a couple different weapons to give it to on the ground, and a couple different directions to go on every play.
Friday night, the Loggers were one-dimensional.
They ran the ball.
They ran the ball to the left.
They ran the ball to the left with Rodrigo Rodriguez
And that was all they needed to do all night, grinding their way to a 20-7 win over Forks in a district crossover game.
“(Rodriguez) ran hard,” Onalaska coach Mazen Saade said. “We went to the left side and were able to find some things that were working on that side and took advantage of it. Went to work, and did our things.”
All three of Onalaska’s touchdowns came courtesy of Rodriguez, all three on big plays early in drives. In the first quarter, after the Loggers went three-and-out on their first drive and fumbled the ball away on their second, the junior took a handoff on the second play of the third past the left side of the line and burst through for a 70-yard strike, quick as that.
In the second quarter, Rodriguez took a pitch to the left and hit the sideline, navigating a few blocks, breaking a couple of would-be tacklers and outrunning the rest on a 44-yard sprint.
And in the third quarter, Rodriguez got things started fast, getting the ball on the Loggers’ first drive and outrunning the pack — once again up the left, behind Cooper Lawrence, Thomas Rupprecht and Justin Jacoby — for a 66-yard touchdown.
“It all starts with the line,” Rodriguez said. “The linemen, they do everything, they do the hard work. They’ve been working all week in practice, and it’s crazy to see where they’ve gotten now from the start of the season.”
Those three touchdown runs accounted for 180 of Rodriguez’s 246 yards. Aside from them, the Loggers averaged under 4 yards per carry, with the Spartans doing a good job of bottling quarterback Kayden Mozingo up for most of the night.
But the wide angles worked better, including a toss sweep that got a fair bit more run than usual Friday evening.
“I thought with Rodrigo, we had a good angle and we had numbers there,” Saade said. “We were able to get to the outside. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.”
Those pitches were the closest thing to success either team had throwing the ball. Mozingo finished 0 for 5 through the air while Forks — chasing points for the whole second half — completed just 10 of its 21 passes for 72 yards, a good chunk of which came on a 30-yard completion in the final 15 seconds of the first half that was rendered moot when the Loggers got a sack on the next play to wind the clock down to the buzzer.
Not that the Loggers had many issues playing a mud-spattered, slippery, ground-focused game of football at all.
“We love it,” Saade said. “Forks used to love to play in it, until they got turf.”
The win puts Onalaska back in the 2B state tournament for the fifth consecutive postseason. The Loggers will learn their seeding Sunday, with a top-eight seed in the 12-team tournament giving them a home matchup in the first round and a top- four earning them a first-round bye.
“They’re ecstatic, and I want them to celebrate it and enjoy it,” Saade said. “That’s a great thing. We’ll take the next couple of days, and Sunday find out where we stack up, and go to work.”
