By David Rogers. BOONE, N.C. — When a football game is decided by a failed 2-point conversion with no time remaining at the end of the fourth quarter, you have to figure it was a good football game. Watauga’s 13-12, season-opening win over T C Roberson (Asheville) at Jack Groce Stadium on Aug. 18 was an edge-of-your-seat thriller, but hardly a well-played game. Truth be told, it was more of a well-deserved “escape,” even if a victory.
The Pioneers’ football culture is built around three acronyms: WTW (work to win), TBM (team before me) and GPE (give perfect effort). Credit the third, by the Pioneer defense, for preserving the positive outcome.
Watauga head coach Ryan Habich said after the game that whatever else had transpired during the struggles leading up to the Rams’s 2-point conversion attempt (that would have won the game for the Rams, if successful), he asked them to remember GPE just before the final, decisive play. And, to be sure, in that moment they gave perfect effort to stop the Rams’ run up the middle, linebacker Jackson Pryor credited with leading the tackling brigade.
Early in the game, Watauga’s young offense (heavily sprinkled with sophomores and juniors having very little previous varsity experience) appeared to take control with Habich’s grinding, ball control rushing attack that serves two purposes: take time off the clock while keeping the opposition offense off the field.
Both of the Pioneers’ touchdowns came in the first half. The first one came came at the end of a series featuring sophomore running back Everett Gryder bulldozing his way up the middle or QB Maddox Greene slashing off tackle on keepers. They got the ball to the Rams’ 18-yard line before Greene found senior wide receiver Jackson Pryor curling toward the right side of the end zone. He lofted a high, arching pass that Pryor caught, leaping over the outstretched hands of Ram defenders as he backpedaled across the goal line. The PAT kick came up short, leaving the score, 6-0.
As it turned out, the Watauga student section’s early chant of “That’s too easy” was a bit premature. The visiting Rams responded with a march of their own, finished off with a 1-yard keeper by senior QB Lex Dinwiddie for the TD (kick failed), knotting the score at 6-6.
Before the opening quarter ended, Watauga tallied another scoring possession, capped off with a 2-yard run by Gryder for a TD and a successful Matthew Leon PAT kick to give the Pioneers a 13-6 lead.
The remaining three quarters of play were, for the most part, ugly football. There were fumbles, penalties and failed, short-yardage conversion attempts by both sides. On Watauga’s last possession, Greene (who is also a starting defensive back) took a hard hit and was forced to the sidelines on Roberson’s last, desperation drive.
The Rams quickly established momentum and took the ball inside Watauga territory, inside the 5-yard line. The Pioneers stopped Roberson’s third down effort, leaving the Rams with 4th-and-goal from the one-yard line and only a couple of seconds on the clock. Nearly everyone in the stadium expected the Rams to run senior running back Reno Jeter up the middle or perhaps Dinwiddie with a keeper off tackle. Watauga expected it, too, and loaded up the box.
It was one of those classic, good coaching decisions executed perfectly by the Rams. Instead of handing off the ball to a crashing Jeter, Dinwiddie faked the handoff and dropped back to find senior tight end Maurice Metz-Sacricson floating left, all alone in the endzone.
No one among the 2,000-plus fans packing the grandstands left their seats as Roberson head coach JD Dinwiddie and his staff pondered their next, win-or-lose decision: try for a PAT kick for a tie or go for two and win.
Coach Dinwiddie told High Country Sports after the game, “I thought we had the right call, but I will probably try to kick myself in the rear end at some point.”
And who among the onlookers could argue with the decision after the Rams’ last drive covered some 75 yards in less than two minutes? The Rams were moving the ball with relative ease, the best they had done all game.
Fortunately, for the Pioneer faithful, Pryor filled that gap in the line of scrimmage and the Watauga defense came through. The 2-point conversion attempt came with no time on the clock and after it failed, the triumphantly raised arms of junior defensive lineman Carson Gunnell-Beck as he looked back toward the Pioneer sideline and grandstands said it all: Watauga escaped with a win to open the team’s 2023 gridiron campaign.
“That was two really good football teams going head to head,” said Roberson head coach Dinwiddie. “We gambled on the two-point conversion and came up a half-yard short. We have a team that we feel can make some noise. It is always a challenge to play Watauga. Coach Habich and I are longtime friends, going back some 20 years. We like to hookup in the early part of the year and test each other out. Both of us have teams that can do really good things this year. Habich has created a championship caliber culture here. Tonight, both teams had some ball security issues. It was a game that could have gone either way.”
Habich was thankful for the win but knows his team has work to do.
“Roberson has a number of senior and returning players and we have a lot of neophytes within our program — and it showed with just two weeks of preparation,” said Habich in speaking with reporters after the game. “Even our upperclassmen guys are not experienced and that showed on the field. We did not play well. We played awful and you can quote me on that.”
That said, Habich suggested that he and his staff were prepared to see lackluster execution.
“I didn’t think we were going to be crisp offensively or defensively. But before the game, I challenged our kids to play with unbelievable effort even where mistakes were made, to give perfect effort and play with a great attitude. Roberson was favored to win but I challenged our guys to make it a fourth quarter game and we would find a way to win it. That is what we do here at Watauga,” said Habich. “As far as execution on the field, we have to clean things up. We have to build our depth at certain positions. Some of our guys have to figure out what they are doing because we had too many false-start penalties, too many times not lining up correctly, too many fumbles. We have to clean those up if we want to compete for a conference championship.”
Ever the mentor about life, too, Habich summed things up in saying, “The great thing about football is that there are teachable lessons. We are teaching 16-, 17- and 18 year-olds about how to respond to adversity and challenges. There may be 2,000 people in the stands who think they know everything, but 16- and 17-year olds are making the plays on the field, competing. There are teachable lessons. Every Monday at 7:15 a.m. the team meets and we address the mistakes, we erase them, then we move on to the next week. They will enjoy their weekend, then at 7:15 on Monday morning we will watch our mistakes. But at 4:00 p.m. on Monday our focus is on the huge rivalry game next week against Avery County.”
TEAM STATS
- Total Plays: WAT 56, TCR 47
- Total Yards: WAT 299, TCR 196
- Passing Yards: WAT 94, TCR 71
- Rushing Yards: WAT 205, TCR 125
- First Downs: WAT 17, TCR 10
- 3rd Down Efficiency: WAT 6-10 (60%), TCR 1-7 (14%)
- 4th Down Efficiency: WAT 1-3 (33%), TCR 2-4 (50%)
- Turnovers: WAT 2, TCR 1
- Fumbles Lost: WAT 2, TCR 1
- Interceptions Thrown: WAT 0, TCR 0
- Penalties: WAT 5, TCR 5
- Penalty Yards: WAT 42, TCR 17
SELECTED INDIVIDUAL STATS
Passing
- WAT – Maddox Greene: 5/7, 94 yards, 1 TD
- TCR – Lex Dinwiddie: 7/10, 71 yards, 1 TD
Rushing
- WAT – Everett Gryder: 28 carries, 126 yards, 1 TD
- TCR – Reno Jeter: 16 carries, 108 yards
- WAT – Maddox Greene: 15 carries, 67 yards, 1 fumble
- TCR – Lex Dinwiddie: 9 carries, 15 yards, 1 TD, 1 fumble
- WAT – Evan Burroughs: 1 carry, 12 yards
Receiving
- WAT – Jackson Pryor: 4 catches, 91 yards, 1 TD
- TCR – Maurice Metz-Sacricson: 5 catches, 41 yards, 1 TD
- TCR – Reno Jeter: 1 catch, 18 yards
- WAT – Morgan Henry: 1 catch, 3 yards
