Ending its regular season last week, the W.F. West football team made a bit of a surprising move, switching starting quarterback Gage Brumfield out to receiver — where he began his high school career — and slotting freshman Wyatt Hoffman in behind center. It wasn’t a punishment or changing of the guard; rather, it was one more look WFW coach Dan Hill wanted future opponents to think about.
“Just adding tools to the toolbox,” Hill said. “You never know when you’re going to need something. We’ve got a lot of tools, and we can do a lot of things with it.”
Saturday at Tiger Stadium, in the 2A State Round of 32, the Bearcats went back to their main tool, and got everything they could have asked out of him in a 56-3 rout of Sequim.
Even if Brumfield himself didn’t expect to get the call back to quarterback.
“I thought we were going to roll with Wyatt again this week,” he said. “And then today, [Hill] told me that we’re going with me and we’re going to do our normal stuff.”
W.F. West’s “normal stuff” diced the Wolves’ defense to pieces again and again, with Brumfield leading the charge. The senior, opening up his final postseason run, finished his day 16-for-20 through the air for 225 yards and five passing touchdowns, and added a team-high 74 yards on the ground, along with two more scores, despite only playing the first two quarters.
“He was excited to get back and throw the ball,” Hill said. “Throwing the ball was part of the plan, but I wasn’t expecting to be able to do what we did.”
W.F. West got the opening kickoff and chipped and chunked its way down the field, capping a five-minute possession with a 10-yard Brumfield run. The Bearcats tried an onside kick and recovered, and after getting into the red zone on a 42-yard pass to Tucker Land, they scored again on a 5-yard strike to Grady Westlund.
That made it 14-0 before the visitors got their hands on the ball. It would be 28-0 before Brumfield threw an incompletion.
Brumfield spread the ball out to five different receivers on the day. Aside from the score to Westlund, he hit Ross Kelley — who led the way with 122 receiving yards — for a pair of touchdowns, and Land and Carson White each scored once.
“We’ve got six receivers that can all do really, really good stuff — seven if you want to throw Gage in that mix and put Wyatt at quarterback,” Hill said. “When the defense is able to take one thing away, we’ve got guys to make an answer. Not a lot of teams have that, but we’ve got it.”
On defense, the Bearcats recovered three fumbles in the first half, all three of which turned into touchdowns within three plays.
“The momentum kept building and building and building,” Brumfield said. “It was like a snowball. We just kept running, and we took off with it.”
W.F. West will learn its postseason future Sunday, when the 2A state bracket is unveiled.
“I still don’t think that we’ve hit our ceiling yet,” Brumfield said. “Coach Hill says that all the time. We can grow a lot more and become a better football team than we are right now.”
