H.S. Football: Deep pass plays power NFA over Ledyard
MARC ALLARD
NORWICH — If there was a concern that Ledyard coach Jim Buonocore voiced in the preseason, it was about his defensive secondary.
Due to injuries, the unit hadn't been able to practice together as a whole and Buonocore worried about what that would mean when the real tests came.
He found out on Saturday.
Norwich Free Academy took advantage of the Colonels' porous pass defense by throwing three passes of 49 yards or more and all three either accounted for or led to a touchdown in a 34-20 win for the Wildcats.
None was bigger than the last of those three bombs, an 81-yard completion to Colin Smith with four minutes, 34 seconds to play.
NFA (2-0) had just yielded a touchdown to Ledyard on an eight-play, 80-yard drive that had pulled the Colonels to within a touchdown. The Wildcats got the ball back on their own 35-yard line but a pair of holding calls and a two-yard loss on a running play saddled them with a 3rd-and-26 from their own 19.
The easy call would have been to try a running play and punt the football to Ledyard but it wasn't the option that NFA coach Jemal Davis chose.
"We were setting up the play," Davis said. "We were running our outside zone play. We had put Colin at tight end to lull (his defender) to sleep. We knew they would come down on Tony (Facchini), that was their key, and we knew we had play-action pass all day."
Play action
NFA quarterback Erik Washburn used that play action to freeze the Ledyard defense and fired a perfect strike over the middle to Smith in one-on-one coverage and the senior took it the 81 yards for the score.
"To be honest, yeah I was," Washburn said when asked if he was surprised just how open Smith was. "That free safety came hard, because it was third down and they were thinking we would try and run out the clock."
It marked redemption for Washburn, who completed five of six passes for 205 yards after going just for 1-for-5 against Windham last week for only one yard.
"That's not me, that's not who I am," Washburn said of last week's performance, a 25-14 NFA win. "I made up for it (Saturday)."
Much to the chagrin of Buonocore.
"We had some breakdowns playing zone cover and that's disappointing," the Ledyard coach said.
The 81-yard touchdown was the last disappointment, but there were others.
Down by just a point, a blown coverage on a wheel route by Facchini out of the backfield wound up with him being wide open on the right sideline and he ran 49 yards to give NFA a 14-6 lead at the half.
The Colonels (1-1) pulled to within two on a five-yard pass from quarterback John Trudel (10-for-21 passing, 165 yards) to Alex Manwaring.
But NFA was up to the challenges and no sooner had the Ledyard score gone up on the board, Facchini was bolting downfield en route to his first-ever kickoff return for a score, a 93-yard return in the scorching heat on the artificial turf at NFA.
"I'm not really one to break up the field, but we had great blocks and I broke a few arm tackles and just took off," Facchini said after the game, which featured temperatures in the mid-to-upper 80s, only enhanced by the turf.
"He's a game changer," Davis said of Facchini. "They had the momentum in terms of coming back and feeling good and then he hits that."