Tyrone defeated Huntingdon 39-7 at Gray-Veterans Memorial Field on Friday to secure its third straight victory and move over the .500 mark for the first time this season.
In a steady downpour, the Eagles turned to their ground game and running back Brady Ronan, who rushed for a career-high 194 yards.
Here are 4 takeaways from the game.
FIRST DOWN: RONAN IN A GROOVE
Senior Brady Ronan has produced for the Eagles’ offense all season. Starting with Clearfield, when he put up 145 total yards, to Johnstown, when he recorded his first 100-yard game, he’s been a reliable player who generates numbers. And he’s done so in many ways.
Against Bald Eagle Area in Week 3, Ronan was more or less bottled up as a rusher, but he had 99 receiving yards, so he’s not a one-trick pony. Far from it.
But the ideal feature back in Coach John Franco’s system balances out the passing attack with big numbers on the ground, and over the last two weeks Ronan has done that as well as anyone in almost a decade.
Two weeks ago, in a 28-27 win over Bishop Guilfoyle, Ronan had 187 yards on 20 carries, and he followed that up against Huntingdon with 194 yards on 23 carries. Ronan scored four rushing touchdowns and added a fifth on a 28-yard screen pass from Ashton Walk.
Other runners have had streaks as hot or hotter than the one Ronan is on now, but it’s been a while. In 2014, a season when Aleic Hunter had 10 100-yard games, the diminutive senior had 220 yards in the first round of the playoffs against Forest Hills, 157 in the semis against Huntingdon, and a career-best 302 in the championship against Mount Union. A year later, Gary Weaver closed out the regular season with 226 against Chestnut Ridge and came back with 236 a week later in the playoffs against Huntingdon.
Since then, there have been backs here and there who have produced the isolated 100-yard game, but no one has approached the dominance of backs at Tyrone through 2015. That is until Ronan turned it up this season.
Following his two big performances, Ronan now has 653 yards on 100 carries, and with three weeks left in the season plus the playoffs he has a legitimate shot at becoming Tyrone’s first 1,000-yard rusher since Weaver in 2015.
Ronan’s production has certainly helped the team, which is 3-0 and averaging 34 points per game when he runs for more than 100 yards.
SECOND DOWN: FAST START
Huntingdon entered the game Friday 1-5, but it was widely accepted that the ‘Cats were much better than their record would have indicated. Since they had played Tyrone so tightly last season in the Eagles’ 14-6 win, Franco, for one, was expecting a dogfight.
That never materialized, and a big reason was the first quarter, when Tyrone blitzed Huntingdon with 19 points.
It was the most productive first quarter of the season for the Golden Eagles, who have been a relatively slow starting team.
What it ultimately came down to was big plays. Sophomore Eli Woomer had the first of them, intercepting Eric Mykut on the first play of the game and returning it 38 yards to set up a short scoring run by Ronan. Later, on Tyrone’s second play from scrimmage, Ronan broke loose for a 62-yard touchdown run.
Tyrone made it 19-0 on the 28-yard screen Ronan took from Walk, and the route was on early.
The Golden Eagles finished with 6 plays of 20 yards or more, and all of them came in the first half, when Tyrone built a 39-0 lead.
THIRD DOWN: WALK CONTINUES TO RISE
Tyrone didn’t need too may passes on Friday, and Walk, after a couple weeks of intensive duty, threw only 7 passes. He completed 4 of them and finished 86 yards through the air, the first time he was held below 100 yards this season.
But even with the lightened workload, Walk continued to climb Tyrone’s passing charts. His touchdown pass to Ronan gave him 47 for his career, solidly in second place all time behind Steve Franco and 17 off the leader (64).
Walk upped his career yardage to 4,155, well ahead of third-place Leonard Wilson, who threw for 3,482 from 2003-2005.
Currently sitting at 1,255 yards for the season, Walk is in the rarified company of Steve Franco as the only two quarterbacks from Tyrone to throw for 1,000 yards in a season three times.
FOURTH DOWN: TAKEAWAYS
Coach Franco was frustrated following Tyrone’s loss to BEA that the Eagles were turning the ball over at an alarming rate while failing to get takeaways themselves.
Heading into the Backyard Brawl against Bellwood-Antis in Week 5, the Eagles had twice the number of turnovers as takeaways, coughing the ball up 8 times.
That’s changed over the last three weeks as Tyrone has found a way to win the turnover battle, and its played a big part in the team’s resurgence.
The Eagles held a 2-1 edge in the turnover ratio against the Devils and stayed even with Guilfoyle a week later at 2-2. So heading into the Huntingdon game Tyrone had was still down in the turnover margin with 11 turnovers to 8 takeaways.
However, a big game against the ‘Cats got Tyrone on the plus side of the ledger. Following his game-opening interception, Woomer added two more takeaways, including a third-quarter pick 6, and Andrew Weaver recovered a fumble. On the other side of the ball, the Eagles never turned the ball over in spite of the nasty weather.
Tyrone is now ahead in the margin 12-11. In some ways, it’s a sign of comfort, especially for defensive players fitting into new roles, but either way the boost has helped the Eagles, and it couldn’t come at a better time. This week, when the team travels to Ebensburg, it will be facing a Central Cambria team that’s turned the ball over 16 times, including 10 by way of fumble.
ORANGE AND BLACK 