The old saying goes that if you have two starting quarterbacks, you have no starting quarterbacks. Apparently, if you have six feature tailbacks, you have the offense for the top-ranked team in the state.
A year after an uncharacteristic first-round exit at State, the Tumwater football team is back atop the rankings heading into this year’s 2A tournament, with a first-round matchup against Port Angeles coming Friday at 7 p.m. at Sid Otton Field.
The Thunderbirds are 10-0 thus far, in large part thanks to an offense that has only been held under 35 points once this year — by North Kitsap, which comes into the tournament with the No. 4 seed. That output is primarily thanks to a veritable stable in the backfield, with no fewer than six tailbacks in the rotation for the Tumwater Wing-T offense and, according to first-year head coach Willaim Garrow, no plans to change that any time soon.
“All of those guys are good at certain things or certain series that we do,” Garrow said. “We’re better when they’re all healthy, and when they’re all rotating in. So absolutely the plan is to continue that on as much as we can.”
Garrow said that the extra-wide rotation helps the Tumwater coaches keep everybody fresh — especially with a few of them featuring on the defensive side of the ball as well — and ride the hot hand at any particular time.
Though so far, just about everybody’s hands in the T-Bird backfield have been scorching.
Senior Kooper Clark leads the group with 69 carries and 744 yards, and has scored 13 touchdowns. Fellow senior Logan Cole has a team-high 14 touchdowns and 572 yards. Junior Mathias Rodriguez has eight touchdowns of his own with 344 yards gained,Jaylin Nixon has gone for 498 yards, Peyton Davis — the lone sophomore in the group — has 445 and Derek Thompson, who leads the group with 14.9 yards per carry, has 239.
“They all do things a little differently from one another, bring a little different skillsets,” Garrow said.
Ten games into the season, all six of the Thunderbirds’ feature tailbacks are averaging at least 10 yards per carry. As a team, Tumwater is gaining nearly 11 yards per rush, and getting into the end zone on nearly 20 percent of its run plays.
Then again, as Garrow was happy to point out, stats to this point in the season — and a No. 1 ranking — matter little when Friday comes and it’s time to put a product on the field again with everything on the line.
“It’s a cool thing to have that recognition, but it really doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “It means you get to play another week. For us, it’s just about getting to the next week at this point. That’s the only way we can really approach it.”
To get to next week, the Thunderbirds will have to take down a Port Angeles team that’s a bit of a wild card, making its first trip to the state tournament in 12 years. The Roughriders come south to Thurston County with a 7-3 record, though all three of the teams they lost to — Anacortes, North Kitsap and Bremerton — are in the bracket themselves.
