In what first appeared to be a contest of two evenly matched teams the Davis County, Knights of Northridge High School proved to be too much for the Sky View Bobcats in Friday night’s gridiron battle.

On their first possession, with just less than five minutes off the clock, the Bobcats struck first with a sixty five yard Gabe Anderson to Brady Martin pass to go up 7-0 following the Josh Egbert extra point.

The Bobcats didn’t enjoy the lead for long when Northridge’s Trent Buckley unloaded a seventy two yard pass to Alex Trotter with 10:33 left in the first quarter. Austin Gottschalck punched through the extra point to tie up the game.

With 7:59 left in the first quarter the Knights forced the first turn over of the game intercepting a Gabe Anderson pass. The Bobcat’s kept the Knights from capitalizing on the turn over, and a mishandled third down snap forced a punt. On the Bobcat’s next possession the Knights defense held strong and forced the Bobcat’s to punt. The opening quarter closed with the score tied up at seven.

The Knights scored first in the second quarter when Austin Gottschalk’s thirty five yard field goal just cleared the uprights. As the clock ticked down to just more than six minutes left in the second quarter the Bobcat’s answered with a twenty five yard Josh Egbert field goal that tied the game at ten each.

With 20.3 seconds to go in the second quarter the Knight’s scored on a Marcus Matautia two yard run and Gottschalk extra point to take a 17-10 lead heading into half time.

The near capacity crowd was entertained at halftime by Sky View’s Cheer Squad, followed by the Vistaun’s who performed to Lady GaGa’s Telephone.

Northridge coughed up the ball in the first part of the third quarter and Sky View recovered the fumble. Two plays later Sky View lost their grip on the ball and gave it back to Northridge. It only took one play for the Knights to capitalize on the Bobcat mistake when they scored on an eighteen yard Trent Buckley to Shaymus Bertagnolli pass. Gottschalck’s third extra point of the night would put the Knights up 24-10.

Gottschalck added three more points with a sixteen yard field goal following their second interception of an Anderson pass and the score was 27-10. They added seven more points on a twenty five yard run by Brock Johnson that put the Knights up 34-10.

The Bobcat’s showed some signs of life in the fourth quarter scoring on a four yard Gabe Anderson to Brady Martin pass that was quickly followed by Egbert’s third extra point of the night. The game ended with a final score of 34-17.

Northridge’s Trent Buckley put up 235 yards in the air throwing two touchdowns. Gabe Anderson finished the night having completed sixteen passes in twenty seven attempts for 181 yards, two interceptions and two touchdowns. Anderson also led the Bobcats in yards on the ground with sixty seven yards on fourteen carries. Bobcat running back Jens Jorgensen had nine carries for twenty two yards. Jaren Balls topped the Bobcat defensive effort with four solo tackles and teamed up on eight more.

When asked about his impression of the game senior quarter back Gabe Anderson said, “I thought we did some things well, but there were also things we need to fix. We need to be able to run the ball better, we need to be able to stop the run better, and we need to limit our turnovers as well which is something I had a little bit to do with. I think we did some good things and some things we definitely need to work on.”

When asked about the running game Anderson continued, “We just need to sustain blocks. We had some receivers whose DB’s got off their blocks a little bit early, and on a couple of runs we didn’t have any push from our O-linemen so we just need to stay on blocks which is something we can easily fix.”

Echoing Anderson’s comments head coach Craig Anhder said,“At the end of the day there are a lot of little things we need to work on, we’ve got to improve the details. At times our offense just looked good; really potent, and were really moving the ball well. Our defense made some great stands after some turnovers. They were given some poor field possessions multiple times, and there were two or three possessions that they made some great stands and kept them out of the end zone.”

Anhder speaking of the areas they need to work on said, “Turnovers if I had to pick one thing, that had the biggest impact on us. We didn’t run the ball well enough, and we gave up 200 yards rushing. So we gave up too much run game. That is what we need to improve on. There is a lot of good we can take from this game, the worst thing we could do is get down on ourselves at this point, and not keep working and going forward.”

The Bobcats will be ready when they face their next opponent Cottonwood High School from Murray, Utah. Kickoff is scheduled for next Friday, August 27th at 7:00 p.m.