Marquette gets its first win, 47-8 at Sault Ste. Marie

SAULT STE. MARIE, Mich. — The first loose ball of the night went Sault Ste. Marie’s way. A punt snap skipped along the ground on the Blue Devils’ opening possession, and Colin Jones picked it up with nobody expecting him to and ran for a first down, an accidental fake that worked.

The second one did not. On the next snap, Mason Garlinghouse tried a delayed pitch to Charlie Freeborn, who had already run past the spot where the ball was going. It hit the ground behind him, Marquette fell on it at the Blue Devil 44, and the shape of the evening was set with 10:02 still left in the first quarter.

Marquette scored seven touchdowns from there and won 47-8 at Van Citter’s Field, its first win of the season after an opening two weeks against Negaunee and Menominee.

This time nobody scored on the Sentinels until the fourth quarter.

A quarter, and then a rout

That opening series had gone backward from the start. A holding call on Sault’s own offense created a first-and-20, Nashua Hoffman covered a throw to Dane Armentrout well enough to force an incompletion, and Jack Keough tripped up Freeborn for no gain on third-and-12. The punt that followed was the snap that got away.

Marquette took the short field and used it. Connor D’Ambrosio, a junior back, got a chunk up the middle. Winston Leonard threw a bubble screen to Landen Faccio, who got to the pylon before he was driven out at the goal line. A false start on first-and-goal pushed the Sentinels back to the 6, and Leonard kept it himself on a draw, got knocked down in the end zone and got in anyway. Eric Epper’s kick made it 7-0 with 7:09 left in the first quarter.

The Blue Devils caught a break on their next series. Another snap got over Garlinghouse’s head and he had to chase it down in his own territory, but a late-hit flag on Marquette after the play handed Sault a first down anyway. The drive went nowhere.

Sault gave it back again before the quarter ended. A snap sailed high, Garlinghouse chased it down, picked it up and lost it, and Marquette recovered at the Sault 37 with 2:53 left. The Sentinels needed a fourth down to finish it: on 4th-and-4 from the 16-yard line with 31 seconds showing, Leonard found Wesley Robinson for the first down. On the next snap, with the clock at zero, Faccio took a pitch off right tackle and scored from the 6-yard line. Epper’s kick made it 14-0, and that was the last play of the quarter.

Twenty-seven in the second

The second quarter is where the game stopped being a game. It produced four Marquette touchdowns and 27 points, and two of them came from a long way out.

The first was a 52-yard throw to Robinson, who was alone on the left side; Leonard had bounced around in the pocket before letting it go. Epper’s kick made it 21-0 with 9:13 left.

The second was longer. Marquette had the ball at its own 16. Leonard threw over the middle to Brody Clements, who broke the first tackle and was not caught again. Eighty-five yards, 28-0 after the kick.

The Sentinel defense then took a turn. Blackburn stepped in front of a Garlinghouse throw and returned the interception into Sault territory with 6:14 left in the half. Faccio scored from 12 yards out with 5:26 left. Epper’s extra point was blocked, leaving it 34-0.

Marquette got the ball back at its own 44 with four minutes left in the half, after a Sault punt the Sentinels got a hand on. Faccio and Dylan Pond moved it from there. With 24 seconds on the clock, Leonard threw 6 yards to tight end Cooper Smith in the end zone, and Epper’s kick made it 41-0.

A second quarterback, and a running clock

Marquette changed quarterbacks in the second half. Robinson, a junior listed at quarterback on the roster but used mostly as Leonard’s favorite target over the first two weeks, took the snaps.

His best moment came on fourth down. On 4th-and-10 from the Sault 20-yard line with 6:50 left in the third quarter, he put a ball into the right corner of the end zone and a Marquette came down with it. The extra point was no good, and it was 47-0.

The clock had already stopped mattering. Michigan’s scoring differential rule had put it in motion to start the second half and kept it there, and the last quarter and a half went quickly.

Marquette kept handing the ball off. Sault kept swarming to it. Carter Erickson, a junior lineman, and Levi Paimon, a sophomore, both made third-quarter tackles against an offense that was no longer trying to do much.

Sault Ste. Marie’s night

The Blue Devils are short on players. They have been dressing junior varsity players under the five-quarter rule, which lets an athlete work a percentage of a game at both levels, and the broadcast counted several of them on the field Friday.

What they had was Dane Armentrout on kickoffs. He brought two out to his own 30 and 35, and a third across midfield to the Marquette 35, a return that nearly went the distance. They had Kanyon Peller, a sophomore receiver who does not drop the ball and does damage after he catches it.

Garlinghouse is a freshman, and it was a hard night to be one. Two of Sault’s three turnovers came on plays that went wrong before he could do anything about them, a pitch his back had already run past and a snap that sailed over his head.

The returns stopped in the second half. Marquette started kicking away from Armentrout in the third quarter, which the broadcast noted as a lesson learned, and the Blue Devils lost the one part of the night that had been working for them.

Peller is why they did not get shut out. Garlinghouse threw to him over the middle in the fourth quarter, and Peller ran through the 30-yard line, cut inside at the 10-yard line and finished it, 40 yards in all.

Garlinghouse came off the field after the score. Peller moved to quarterback for the 2-point try and handed to a Sault back, who broke a tackle and got in up the middle. 47-8 with 7:41 to play, which is where it ended.

It was Hall of Fame weekend at Sault Area, with five distinguished alumni and seven athletes to be honored at a banquet the following night, and the inductees were introduced on the track at halftime. The crowd was large. By late in the third quarter much of it had filed out, though the student section stayed.

What it means, and what is next

Marquette is 1-2, and the record has not been a fair measure of the team. The Sentinels opened against Negaunee, which beat them 30-28 on three long touchdown passes to one receiver, and then against Menominee, the defending Division 7 state champion, which ran for 240 yards out of a single wing and won 49-19. Sault’s own broadcast made the point in the first quarter, before the game got away: do not let the 0-2 record fool you, because that was not against cupcakes.

Friday was the night the pieces came together. Marquette forced three turnovers and scored a touchdown after every one of them. It scored on the ground and through the air and from both quarterbacks. Leonard accounted for four touchdowns. Faccio ran for two. And a defense that had been the story of the first two weeks did not allow a point until the game had been settled for more than a quarter.

The opponent is worth saying plainly. Sault Ste. Marie is short on players, starts a freshman at quarterback and turned the ball over three times, and a 41-0 halftime lead took most of the second half out of the evaluation. But two of Marquette’s seven touchdowns covered more than 50 yards, a second quarterback ran the offense for a half and threw one more, and the Sentinels did on Friday what a good team is supposed to do to an overmatched one.

Marquette is home next week against Cadillac, which will ask harder questions than the Blue Devils could. Sault Ste. Marie goes to Charlevoix on Friday.

Compiled from the WSOO 1230 AM broadcast of the game, which did not provide individual statistics. A running clock was in effect from the third quarter under Michigan’s scoring differential rule.