Defense took charge in D2 football finale

The numbers were staggering all season for the St. Thomas High School football team's offense.

Through the first 10 games of the season, the Saints had put up more points than anyone in the division, averaging 46.5 per game, including the playoffs.

In its 28-7 win over Monadnock in the quarterfinals, St. Thomas was held to its lowest total of the season to that point - 10 points lower than its previous low. But in the semifinals, the Saints bounced back by hanging 51 on a Milford team that had allowed an average of 16.8 all year.

While facing Windham in the Division II championship appeared to be the Saints' biggest challenge of the season, it wasn't because of the Jaguars defense.

Going in, Windham had allowed 18.9 points in its first 10 games, including more than 20 during the regular season. The question seemed to be would the Jaguars be able to keep pace, but Windham coach Bill Raycraft was confident going into the game.

"All week, we were talking about it, we didn't think that we weren't the better team," he said. "We woke up this morning, felt like we were going to win. Everybody kept talking about their high-power offense and we knew we had a good plan defensively."

Across the board, the Jaguars had the better stats, picking up more first downs, gaining more yards and leading in time of possession.

The Saints had just one drive that gained more than 30 yards, and that didn't come until midway through the fourth quarter. St. Thomas turned the ball over twice and was forced to punt four times, while its offense was shut out.

"They didn't play a conventional defense," St. Thomas coach Eric Cumba said. "They put kids in spots that we wanted to attack. You couldn't call it a 4-3 defense or anything like that. I'm sure if you looked at film you could break it down, and they beat us to the spots we wanted to go to. Credit to them. Eventually, we started spreading things even wider than normal and running between the tackles."

St. Thomas seemed to dip into its bag of tricks early, and on the game-winning drive, lined up in four receiver sets with two on each side of the ball, stacked as far away from the center as possible.

"To keep a team like that out of the end zone, that speaks volumes for the kids and our coaching staff," Raycraft said. "It's mixing it up. There were x-factors out there so we were putting pressure on certain players and not the same ones every time. We knew they had some tendencies and we knew we could attack those, so it was about putting ourselves in the right position to make a play."

Unfortunately for the Jaguars, they struggled to make plays of their own on offense, turning the ball over three times while going 2 of 10 on third down.

"It was bend-but-don't-break," Cumba said of his defense. "When we had to make the play on the money downs, we did. We came in averaging nine points allowed and we gave up six. We held them below our average.

"We showed some backbone and some toughness. It's one thing people may have questioned about us for years, is can we be physical enough to win a game if we have to. It looks different than the way most teams do it, but the result in the end was what we wanted."