The scoreboard at ten o'clock on Saturday morning read 7-5, which is not a football score anybody wakes up early for. The people who showed up anyway got the best finish of Nevada's opening week.
Friday night, Mater Academy East and Faith Lutheran, two Las Vegas programs, played one quarter of football before the lightning that chewed up the whole Southern Nevada slate arrived and would not leave. The game stopped there, 7-5, Mater East in front. It resumed Saturday at 10 a.m. and took nearly three more hours, per the Review-Journal, which is how Nevada's week one came to be completed in daylight.
The twelve combined points from Friday became seventy-eight by Saturday lunch. Final: Mater East 43, Faith Lutheran 35.
The winning touchdown belonged to a lineman
The Review-Journal's story gives the game a finish worth the wait. With Faith Lutheran pressing and the score tight, Mater East running back Marcus Williams, who finished with 146 rushing yards, broke a 74-yard run to set up the winner. The ball then went to Rayshawn Brown, a lineman, who plunged in from a yard out with 1 minute, 16 seconds left. Quarterback Rajahn Butler barely needed to throw: 5 of 6 for 114 yards and two touchdowns.
Faith Lutheran's Dominick Folino threw for 245 yards and two scores, and it bought his team a shootout instead of a win.
There is something fitting about a lineman ending a game like this. A weekend that made everybody wait, finished by the position that never gets to hurry.
What the loss means in Las Vegas
Faith Lutheran is No. 6 in the Nevada rankings, and this is the fourth loss the ranked tier has taken in week one, after the Nos. 2, 3 and 5 fell between Thursday and Friday. Max has the full Nevada picture in today's Sunday extra.
There is a second layer, and the Review-Journal's Adam Hill supplied it on Saturday. With Clark County's public schools having gone independent, Hill writes, Nevada's Open Division is down to three eligible teams: Bishop Gorman, Faith Lutheran and Somerset-Losee. Our own Nevada board article noted the same fault line when it published: thirty CCSD programs, ineligible for a state title by their own vote.
Read those two paragraphs together. If Hill's arithmetic holds, one of the three teams that can win Nevada's biggest trophy just lost a two-day game to a team that cannot play for it. In August that is no crisis. By November it might sound like one.
The Crusaders get a season to change the ending. The scoreboard operator, presumably, gets a nap.
