Pirates perfection
Whitworth’s Michael Allan had just wrapped up a Saturday afternoon postgame chat with family and friends near midfield in the Pine Bowl and was jogging back to the bench to pick up his helmet and head for the locker room.
“Hey, Allan,” a fan shouted from the nearly empty stands, “nice game.”
Which just might have been the most vastly insufficient compliment in the history of college football, considering the 6-foot-7, 264-pound senior tight end had just caught six passes for a single-game, school-record 251 yards and two touchdowns in the Pirates’ historic 44-27 Northwest Conference win over the University of Puget Sound.
Allan, a preseason NCAA Division III All-American and invitee to the upcoming Hula Bowl in Honolulu, hauled in a 74-yard touchdown pass from Joel Clark on the first play of the game and later caught another 66-yard scoring toss from the senior quarterback as the Bucs crafted an appropriate final act to an undefeated and record-breaking regular season in front an appreciative crowd of 2,250.
“It’s the perfect scenario,” Allan said of the lopsided win, which gave the ninth-ranked Pirates, who are celebrating their 100th season of college football, their first outright NWC title and 10-win season in school history. “It’s a storybook ending. What more can you ask for?
“This is the biggest year we’ve ever had, going 10-0. I never even did that in high school, so I’ll take it.”
So will Whitworth coach John Tully, who choked up while expressing his feelings following a well-deserved triumph that undoubtedly earned the Pirates (10-0 overall, 6-0 in the NWC) a postseason playoff berth and, in all likelihood, a first-round home game Saturday.
“I’m so proud of our guys,” he said. “I mean, what are the chances – when a school is celebrating its 100th year of football – to be able to go through a season undefeated at 10-0? It’s just unbelievable.
“Our team, for whatever reason, is at its best when their backs are to the wall.”
That’s exactly where the Bucs found their backs near the end of the first period, when UPS (7-3, 3-3) overcame the shock of Clark’s opening-play bomb to Allan to forge a 21-14 lead.
But as Tully and Whitworth fans alike have come to expect, the Pirates responded in a big way, taking a 27-21 lead on a pair of early second-quarter scores and then turning things over to a defensive unit that seemed determined to prove that UPS’ first-period scoring surge was nothing more than an aberration.
Clark, who completed 16 of 22 passes for 379 yards and three touchdowns, despite playing the majority of the game with a sprained and heavily taped right ankle, pulled the Bucs to within 21-20 on a 19-yard scoring pass to Steve Silva just 21/2 minutes into the second period.
Jay Tully, the son of the Pirates’ head coach and a versatile strong safety, return specialist and part-time wide receiver, put Whitworth in the lead for good when he blocked a UPS punt less than 2 minutes later and recovered it in the end zone for another TD.
Tully, who later added a touchdown on an 11-yard fourth-quarter pass from Clark, was just one of many heroes who emerged on a late-autumn afternoon that featured weather conditions that included sunshine, wind, light rain and even some hail.
“When you have a season like this, you have so many people who contribute,” John Tully said. “Coaches, players, trainers, fans – I mean, what an unbelievable crowd we had on a day like today.
“That’s the beauty of it.”
Both Tully and Allan were impressed with the play – and courage – of Clark, who turned his ankle early in the game but never missed a snap.
“He’s a stud, simply put,” Allan said of the former standout at Mt. Spokane High School. “He was a little less mobile, but he still made plays – like he does every game.”
“Joel hurt his ankle early on, and we weren’t able to run him,” Tully added. “But he stood in there and made some nice passes.
“It was beautiful.”
Puget Sound, in capping off its best season in two decades, got 101 rushing yards and two touchdowns from senior running back Rory Lee, who became the Loggers’ all-time leading rusher. But the Loggers couldn’t deal with Allan, Clark and the rest of Whitworth’s superior offensive cast.
Of Allan, UPS coach Phil Willenbrock jokingly said, “I haven’t seen a tight end like that since I played college football. … He’s just a special talent, and so is Joel (Clark) and Jay Tully. They’ve got some great offensive weapons there, and we certainly weren’t able to shut them down.”
Whitworth’s coaches and players will gather this morning in the Scotford Fitness Center to learn their postseason fate when the NCAA Division playoff participants and brackets are announced at approximately 11 o’clock.
Pacific Lutheran 38, Willamette 7: Brett Gordon threw three touchdown passes and ran 56 yards for another score as the Lutes (4-5, 4-2) rolled to a season-ending NWC win over the Bears (2-7, 2-4) in Puyallup, Wash.