The Toledo football team proved Pete Carroll right Friday night in South Bend. You can’t win a game in the first quarter, or the second quarter or the third quarter.
But you can win a game in the fourth quarter, and that’s just what the Riverhawks did, coming back from a seven-point halftime deficit to beat Raymond-South Bend 36-14 in a 2B district crossover.
“What I really learned about our guys was in the way we responded in the second half,” Toledo coach Mike Christensen said. “They’ve got a lot of pride in each other and our program, and they’ve got a lot of heart.”
The win sends Toledo back to the 2B state tournament for the ninth straight year, after finishing third out of four teams in the Central 2B League’s South Division and having to haul 75 miles out to the coast for a crossover matchup.
The Riverhawks got the scoring started with an Eli Weeks touchdown in the first quarter, but fell behind 14-7 after a one-sided second that sent them into the locker room on the back foot.
“The second quarter was really just an energy-suck for us,” Christensen said. “We had that early touchdown but they took it to us in that second … They kind of drove it down our throats and momentum-wise it was not good for us. But booking at our guys, we knew what we needed to do.”
A few tweaks to the blocking scheme helped power the Riverhawks back to the end zone in the third quarter on a short touchdown run by Jake Nef. Then in the fourth, the ground game really got going with Weeks breaking free for a 53-yard scamper and Ethen Carver icing things with two touchdowns of his own.
Carver finished his night with a team-high 226 yards on 22 carries.
“He ran hard, he ran really hard,” Christensen said. “Probably one of his better performances of the year in terms of breaking tackles and running hard.”
On the other side of things, the Toledo defense shored just about everything up, bouncing back from allowing two touchdowns in the second quarter to put up a pair of goose eggs in the second half.
Weeks, who threw an interception on offense for Toledo, made up for it with a pick on defense, and the Riverhawks also recovered a fumble, and turned the Ravens on downs inside the red zone on a huge play by Leland McCree at the end of the second quarter that kept RSB from stretching its lead any further.
It was a huge second half at a huge time for Toledo, which had struggled after halftime in both its losses to Kalama and Onalaska and its harrowing non-league win over Pe Ell-Willapa Valley.
“We kind of flipped the switch this time,” Christensen said. “That gives me confidence that we can maybe go on a little run here.”
