More physical Scott City football team rolls by Herculaneum

When Scott City football coach Jim May looked out at the field following his team's season opener Friday night, he was happy with what he saw. And it wasn't just because his team had more points and on the scoreboard.

"We were very physical," May said of the Rams' 34-6 victory at Herculaneun. "We were the more physical team, and that's the first time that I can say that in quite a while from a game that we played because we weren't the most physical last year. It was really nice to come out and at the end of the game see their kids sore and beaten and ours excited about what just happened. That's a promise of good things to happen."

The Rams dropped their season opener to Herculaneum a year ago on their way to a 4-6 season.

"It's great with a win just because the spirits keep up and they're going to really buy into what we've been selling because we changed a lot of things going into this year," May said. "It kind of pays off for the defensive intensity that we're focusing on. They were pretty excited about what happened, and I think they were pretty proud of the result they got. We're not a real big team, but we have a lot of athletes so we've got to fly around. They did a really good job of that."

The Rams allowed a 70-yard return on the opening kickoff and fell behind 6-0 later in the first quarter before dominating the rest of the game.

"We played fairly good defensively," May said, "but we still made a lot of Week 1 mental mistakes that we've got to get cleaned up -- a lot of missed blocks and missed tackles and we gave up that one kick-off return that was a long one that could've caused us problems right out of the gate, which was frustrating because we work very hard on kick-off coverage. That's something that's very important to us. But for the rest of the night we did exceptionally well."

The Rams scored three times in the second quarter to take a 20-6 lead into halftime.

Junior Ty Wilthong completed a 5-yard touchdown pass to senior Nick Bickings with 9 minutes, 36 seconds left in the second. Braden Cox added a touchdown on a 2-yard run with 3:40 on the clock and Jaden Kaiser capped the first half scoring with a 40-yard interception return for a touchdown with 2:07 left.

Scott City scored again on the opening possession of the second half on a 1-yard run by Cox and Bicking set the final score with a 5-yard touchdown scamper with two minutes left in the third.

Wilthong and Cox split time at quarterback as planned in an effort to utilize all of the Rams offensive options in varying ways.

"It was flawless," May said of the execution on quarterback switches. "Ty can play the slot, Ty can play the outside receiver and Braden can play any of the positions, and so they are kind of interchangeable."

Wilthong finished 4-of-10 passing for 42 yards and a touchdown and had 26 yards rushing on four attempts while Cox threw just one pass, an incompletion, and had 69 yards rushing and two touchdowns on 13 attempts.

"We've moved him to quarterback to throw it probably more than we did," May said of Cox. "But we had success running the football, which is a good sign for us up front because I didn't know if we'd be able to do that that well. Then we kind of started pounding them with Braden a little bit. He had two really long runs that were called back on holding penalties. One of them was about a 70-yarder or Braden's night would have been a lot bigger."

Bicking led Scott City with 86 yards rushing on just seven touches while Caden Hillemann added 65 yards on 10 touches. Three other Rams added rushing yards to the team's 268 total yards on the ground on 37 attempts.

Drew Short caught two passes for 23 yards and Trent Pobst had a catch for 24 yards.

"Their goal you could tell coming out was Braden Cox wasn't going to beat them, and that's all right because with Nick Bickings and Caden Hilleman and Trent Pobst and Drew Short and Jordan Kluesner we've got a lot of weapons as you can see," May said. "We had 300 yards rushing and we had multiple people going for 60, 70, 80 yards. You're not going to be able to just stop Braden Cox and stop our offense, and that's a good thing."

Scott City will host St. Vincent next week in its home opener and Green Up game. Both teams will wear green to honor former Scott City student-athlete Dominic Hooper and raise awareness of organ donation. May said there will be carnival games and other attractions as well to raise money for the Midwest Transplant Service.