Cedar Rapids Jefferson oh, so agonizingly close to a win

CEDAR RAPIDS — Many players walked off the field Thursday night and to their Kingston Stadium locker room with tears in their eyes and rolling down their cheeks.

Coaches muttered to each other “Damn, this was the one,” when they weren’t consoling and trying to emotionally lift up their crestfallen players.

This one hurt for everyone. Bad.

“A loss like this absolutely sucks,” Cedar Rapids Jefferson first-year football coach Ed Miles said, after his team fell in overtime to Davenport Central, 19-12. “It’s easy to harp on the negatives.”

The biggest negative, of course, is the school’s losing streak, which has reached an even 20. There were other negatives: a go-ahead touchdown in the fourth quarter taken off the board because of a penalty, a flag for unsportsmanlike conduct on the final play of regulation, which was a simple quarterback sneak by Central to make sure it got the ball safely away from its own goal line.

That gave the Blue Devils a first-and-goal at the 5 instead of the 10 to open OT. Quarterback Tatum Roselle eventually scored what turned out to be the winning touchdown on a fourth-down 1-yard sneak.

Jefferson faced a fourth-and-2 on its overtime possession. It lined up with a full-house backfield look, but quarterback Jeremiah Peiffer turned and found he had no one to hand off to, soon smothered back at the 9-yard-line on a broken play that ended the game.

“Against a comparable team, we had a lot of moments where we’ve got to find a way to fix those and execute,” Miles said. “Those little small things that people usually take for granted, they don’t come easy. The only way you’re going to get better at those is going out there and executing them and practicing those situations.

“We’ll learn from this, that’s for sure. We’ll definitely learn from this.”

Now let’s talk about the good the J-Hawks (0-3) did here.

First and foremost, they competed heads up for four quarters-plus against someone, which is a great first step. They got their first two offensive TDs of the season: on a Ishara Kalolero 4-yard run to open the scoring in the first quarter and a Peiffer 6-yard QB sneak with 7:10 left in the third to make it 12-all.

Jefferson got to the Central 33 in the dying seconds of regulation, but a potential game-winning 50-yard field-goal attempt by Bertin Gisubizo came up well short, the ball actually downed at the Central 2. The clock mistakenly stopped at just under three seconds when the football landed shy of the end zone, when it should have been allowed to run out.

That led to the superfluous QB sneak that led to the unsportsmanlike penalty that gave Central a free 5 yards to begin overtime.

“I think we competed,” Miles said. “I thought for the first time, we went out here and competed. It just didn’t go our way. There were a lot of missed opportunities on our part, and that’s part of learning. You take this one on the chin, you learn from it, and you move on to the next week, the next game. Nobody’s going to feel sorry for us, though. We’ve got to go out and execute the next time.”

“We’ve got something going. We can do it,” said Jefferson senior lineman Clayton Bockhoven. “We can get us out of this losing streak. We can do it. That’s what I’m taking out of this game.”

Roselle had 171 combined yards passing and rushing for Central (1-2), scoring the winning touchdown and throwing for two 7-yard TDs in regulation. Peiffer, one of so many underclassmen in the Jeff starting lineup, including a batch of sophomores, completed 10 of 26 passes for 121 yards.

He was picked off twice.

“(Miles) was just ‘We’ve got to keep our heads up, we’ve got to keep pushing.’ Because if we just sit there and curl into a ball, we’re not going to get any better,” Bockhoven said. “We’ve got to get up and keep fighting, otherwise we’re going to be going nowhere ... But we’ve got something going this year. Something’s going to happen this year.”

Jefferson plays Cedar Rapids Kennedy next week and Linn-Mar the week after that.

DAVENPORT CENTRAL 19, CEDAR RAPIDS JEFFERSON 12 (OT)

At Kingston Stadium

Davenport Central 0 12 0 0 7-19

C.R. Jefferson 6 0 6 0 0-12

Team Statistics

First downs - Central 13, Jefferson 17. Rushes-yards - Central 49-159, Jefferson 28-33. Passing - Central 8-12-0-59, Jefferson 10-26-2-121. Punts-avg. - Central 4-33.0, Jefferson 5-26.5. Penalties - Central 11-90, Jefferson 7-36. Fumbles-lost - Central 1-0, Jefferson 1-0.

Individual Statistics

Rushing - Central: Tatum Roselle 28-112, Jake Jantzi 13-53, Ty Harmsen 2-18, Charles Jones 1-12, Cadence McDowell 1-7, Wyatt Hillyer 2-(minus) 3, Team 2-(minus) 40. Jefferson: Ishara Kalolero 12-45, A.J. White 8-30, Jeremiah Peiffer 8-(minus) 35.

Passing - Central: Tatum Roselle 8-12-0-60. Jefferson: Jeremiah Peiffer 10-26-2-121.

Receiving - Central: Jake Jantzi 5-38, Ben Strang 3-21. Jefferson: Ishara Kalolero 2-26, Carter Bronson 3-24, Chadrac Elese 1-24, Tyler Huston 1-20, A.J. White 2-19, Bradley Cable 1-8.

Comments: (319)-398-8258, jeff.johnson@thegazette.com