SCREENED OUT

BEA UPENDS TYRONE TO HALT 5-GAME WINNING STREAK

Give Bald Eagle Area credit. It’s a team that knows exactly what it wants to do and precisely how to do it.

For the Bald Eagles, who have the horses to run up the middle with the best of them, the objective is to get the ball on the perimeter to a speedy cast of characters who go north-south in the blink of an eye. That’s why the screen game has been so vital to BEA’s offense.

While most teams have a screen or two they can throw out there when pressure on the quarterback calls for it, Bald Eagle has a litany of screens to a wide array of receivers, and stopping that is every bit as imperative as stopping the inside run.

So when undefeated Tyrone prepared for BEA last week, it knew what was coming. But when it came time to stop it, there wasn’t much the Golden Eagles could do.

Bald Eagle Area used three big screens to set up scores and added a fourth touchdown with a minute to play to deal Tyrone a humbling 31-7 loss at Gray-Veterans Memorial Field last night on Homecoming.

Through five games, Tyrone had built a reputation as an athletic team with speed to burn among its skill players, but against BEA, the edge in athleticism fell decisively to the Bald Eagles, who evened their overall record at 3-3 and pulled into a first place tie atop the Mountain League with Tyrone and Clearfield.

And BEA demonstrated its superior speed mostly through screens. Quarterback Carson Nagle completed 10 of 21 passes for 168 yards, but only one of those completions – a 25-yard bullet to Kahale Burns that gave Bald Eagle a 14-7 lead in the first quarter – went downfield. The rest were screens, and they were deadly.