Smith, Knights offense have historic night in win over Bryan
It was a historic night for quarterback Morgan Smith and the West Holmes offense against Bryan on Oct. 27.
The junior threw a school-record-tying seven touchdown passes to lead the Knights to a 70-50 win in Division IV, Region 14 first-round football action.
West Holmes (9-2) advanced to play Galion (8-3), a 36-6 first-round winner over Firelands, in a regional quarterfinal on Nov. 3.
WH’s 70 points were the fourth most all-time and the most in a game since scoring 72 against Loudonville in week eight of the 1999 season.
Smith tossed four touchdown passes to Kyle Maltarich (nine catches for 179 yards), two to Nate Fair (10-147) and one to Lynn Cline (5-78). He finished with 406 yards on 27-of-36 passing.
“It feels great (to tie the school record) because we’ve had a lot of great quarterbacks in the past,” said Smith, who also rushed for 57 yards and two TDs on 14 carries. “(Former Knights QBs) Mason (Wolfe) and Noah (Clark) were really good. It just feels nice to pass them even though I watched them play in high school. I just thought that would be me in a few years, and I guess it is now.”
Smith said the Golden Bears (5-6) started out the game playing man — a coverage he saw them playing in all of the game tapes he watched of them earlier in the week — but they switched to a zone coverage in the second quarter, something they don’t have a ton of experience playing.
“Their defense started out in man coverage, and you don’t want to play that against our offense because we’ll just toast you,” Smith said. “All of our receivers are fast. They finally switched it up, but they hadn’t played zone all year, so we just kept lighting them up.”
“We have certain plays for zone and certain plays for man, so once we noticed it was zone, we started switching around, and we’ve been running those plays since July, so we picked up on that and used it to our advantage,” Fair said.
Statistically, Smith is having the best season ever by a Knights quarterback. He threw for a school single-game record 553 yards against Licking Valley in week three and has already broken the school single-season passing yards and completions records. He’s tied for the single-season passing touchdown record — a record he’ll surely break in WH’s next game — and if his current completion percentage holds for the rest of the season, he’ll also break that record.
Not too bad for someone in their first year as a varsity starter.
“The sky is the limit for Morgan,” West Holmes coach Zach Gardner said. “He came out and executed the game plan to a T. He got rid of the ball quickly and read the defense well. Every snap that young man takes he gets better, and that’s pretty scary going forward.”
Key sequence
Bryan scored with just under a minute left in the first half to cut its deficit to 35-28. Cline then returned the ensuing kickoff 94 yards for a touchdown to put the Knights ahead by two possessions heading into halftime.
West Holmes got the ball to start the second half and quickly scored, extending its lead to 49-28. Although the Golden Bears scored a touchdown on their next possession and rushed for a two-point conversion to make it 49-36, they never got any closer than two possessions the rest of the game.
“Anytime you can double-dip them and score right before the half and score on the first drive of the third quarter, that’s a 14-point swing,” Gardner said. “That was huge for us.”
Battling until the end
After falling behind 14-0 early in the first quarter, it would have been easy for Bryan to throw in the towel and go through the motions the rest of the game. Instead, the Golden Bears kept fighting and ended up scoring the most points on a Knights defense since Wooster put up 55 in week six of the 2017 season.
“(West Holmes is) a really good football team, and we’re not that bad,” Bryan coach Grant Redhead said. “We’ve had some shootouts this year and struggled on the defensive side. We just came up short. I don’t know if those first 14 points we were still on the bus from a 4 1/2 hour (bus ride) because we got stopped by a train. The kids played hard on both sides. It was a clean game. I wish (West Holmes) the best of luck.”
Redhead said Maltarich, a Yale commit, was the key to WH’s offensive success against them.
“We don’t have anybody that can keep up with (Maltarich),” Redhead said. “He killed us. He’s done that all year. He’s a special player.”
Playing for a teammate
West Holmes junior wide receiver Logan Zollars suffered what appeared to be a significant leg injury late in the first quarter. He was injured near the West Holmes sideline and was taken off the field on a stretcher.
“We all knew that when he went down, it didn’t look great,” Fair said. “We had to take a minute, take a breath, get locked back into that game and know that we need to finish the job for him.”