Mountain Ridge 42, Davis 7.
Three games into the season the Sentinels have scored 41, 42 and 42. That is not a hot night. That is a team that knows exactly what it is.
They led 21-0 at halftime and 35-0 heading into the fourth quarter, and the number that explained the night was the zero.
Mountain Ridge came in having allowed 26 points all season, all of them to Skyridge in the opener. It shut out Lehi 42-0 a week ago. By the time the fourth quarter started it had gone seven straight quarters without giving up a point, and the last three of those came against a Davis team that had put 56 on Fremont on the road six days earlier.
The defense was the story before the offense was
Both sides got stops early. That part looked like the game everybody wanted.
Then Mountain Ridge drove and scored on an early possession and never eased off.
Twice Davis got inside the ten with the night still there to be changed, and twice it came away with nothing. Mountain Ridge stopped it on downs from the three in the second quarter and again from the five in the third. Those two stands are the game. A team that converts one of them is down two scores and still breathing.
Easton Stubbs took the ball away twice on his own, intercepting a pass in the first quarter and forcing a fumble in the third.
The front has been worth watching since the opener and it was again. The linebackers come downhill and they arrive with intent. There were several plays in this one the Davis sideline will feel on Friday.
Jaxon Hunt did not have to force anything
The senior quarterback threw three touchdown passes and played a clean game, and clean is the right word for it.
There were a couple of throws in the first half he would want back, and there is a gunslinger in there that shows up now and then. Beyond that he made the right reads, put the ball where his receivers could catch it, and threw those touchdowns without ever looking like he was pressing for them. On a night when his defense kept handing the offense the ball in good order, he did not waste any of it.
Bradley Foster did the early damage on the ground with two rushing touchdowns before halftime. His receivers helped too. They caught what came their way, which is the sentence that separates this offense from the one on the other sideline. Xander Thayer got into the end zone.
Bode Sparrow was the one thing that worked for Davis
Davis got on the board in the fourth, and Sparrow was the whole drive. Two receptions of more than 40 yards moved it the length of the field, and most of what made them work happened after the catch.
It is the second week running that Sparrow has been the best answer Davis has. He scored through the air against Fremont and took a kickoff 80 yards for another one. On a night when very little went right for his team, he was still competing in the fourth quarter of a five-score game. That counts for something, and around here it counts for a lot.
Mountain Ridge coach Nick Robins said afterward that the plan was to avoid throwing at Sparrow altogether, which is a compliment a defense pays roughly once a season.
Davis did not help itself
Not all of this was done to Davis. Some of it Davis did.
There were drops, and they were catchable. Against a defense playing like this one, a possession you end yourself is a possession you do not get back. Two of them ended inside the ten.
The quarterback has not settled in yet, and that is the honest read on where this team is. It will come. It has not come.
The other moment that deserved better belonged to Jaxton Itaaehau. The senior went up and pulled in a one-handed catch as good as anything we have seen in the first three weeks of this season anywhere. It was ruled out of bounds. From our seat the elbow looked like it might have been in, and it was close enough that people were still arguing about it a series later.
That was the kind of night it was for Davis. One of the best things that happened to them did not count.
This was a measuring stick and only one team measured
Davis is sixth in Utah and the two results now look like a pattern rather than a split. It lost 51-14 to Corner Canyon and it spent Thursday getting handled by the team ranked directly above that game on our board. Against the good ones, this team has not yet found what it is.
That is not the Davis of a year ago and there is no use pretending otherwise.
Mountain Ridge is for real
This is Nick Robins in his second season, and the second year is usually where you find out whether a coach is building something or just inherited a good roster. Three games in, 41, 42 and 42, with a defense that has surrendered one touchdown since the opener. That is building something.
We watched Corner Canyon put up its explosion of points earlier this month and wrote that nobody in Utah had been within four touchdowns of the Chargers. Mountain Ridge against Corner Canyon would be a real football game right now. In August nobody was saying that.
They are saying it now.
