‘This is something special’: Dexter seniors celebrate turnaround for football program
DEXTER – The game had been over for over 40 minutes and several Dexter players were still out on the field.
No, this was not the team’s final home game of the season, prompting one last hangout — the Dreadnaughts are guaranteed at least one state playoff game at home.
But in a sense, Friday night’s 21-14 victory in front of an overflow crowd was the end of a journey for many of the seniors.
It was in Week 2 of the 2018 season that Dexter finally ended an excruciating 42-game losing streak, which spanned parts of six seasons.
These seniors were in elementary and middle school during the years of the streak, and their long-range goal was to be the group to bring some glory to the downtrodden program.
That is why they were in no hurry to leave the field after winning the school’s first league title since 1963.
Safety Micah Davis had two of the game’s biggest plays and kept gazing at the craziness of fans rushing the field following the win.
“This is something special,” he said. “This group of guys, since the eighth grade, we knew we had potential, we just needed to put in the work. Those 5:30 a.m. lifts, just grinding all summer, being a good team. Our chemistry is on a different level and it’s a lot of seniors, a lot of guys who know how to lead a team.”
Dexter (8-0) is ranked No. 1 in Division 2, but it struggled mightily against Saline (7-1), which lost to Temperance Bedford, 7-0, the previous week.
Saline dominated the time of possession and outgained Dexter by more than 100 more yards, but the Dreadnaughts defense got virtually all of the needed key stops.
“How about our defense tonight?” Dexter coach Phil Jacobs asked. “They kept us in it. If there was ever a ‘bend but don’t break,’ it was tonight.”
Notre Dame commit CJ Carr completed five of six passes as Saline took the opening kickoff and marched 80 yards in 13 plays to take a 6-0 lead on Ryan Niethammer’s 1-yard run.
After a quick three-and-out, Carr went 5for-5 on his second drive before the Hornets fumbled a fourth-and-1 play at the Dexter 13.
“I really thought the fumble hurt us, it would have put us up two scores,” Saline coach Joe Palka said. “Coming away with nothing really hurt.”
That eventually led to Michigan commit Cole Cabana’s 5-yard TD run; Davis then set up Cabana’s second score by intercepting a pass and returning it 18 yards to the Saline 37.
“My coach told me to sit a little bit more and not to drop because they were doing a lot of bubbles and action that’s up tight,” Davis said. “So I jumped on a slant and happened to be in the right place at the right time.”
Saline tied it on Carr’s one-yard run with 7:26 left in the third and Dexter nearly lost its composure.
Cabana was penalized 15 yards for apparently kicking a Saline player while trying to get up after a tackle. Compounding that, Cabana fumbled on the second play after Dexter’s defense had stopped Saline.
“I was angry; I was real angry,” he said. “They were doing some things I wasn’t liking at the bottom of the piles and tried getting them off me. If you retaliate, you always get caught. But my defense had my back, and we still got the win.”
Early in the fourth, Saline was on the move again, but a bell-ringing hit by Davis forced a drop of a fourth-down pass and Dexter’s offense got going.
Tight end Brennan Parachek, a Michigan State commit, made a sensational one-handed catch before quarterback Reeves Taylor found Cabana for a 31-yard gain to set up his 2-yard TD run with 5:49 left in the game.
“We’ve had the play since my sophomore year,” Cabana said. “It’s a pipe route down the middle. It works great with the Cover 2 because both our inside guys ran corner routes so they kind of spread out, and he hit me between the safeties. It was a great throw.”
Again Carr led Saline down the field, but the drive stalled when Brock Komaromi tackled Carr a yard short of the first down at Dexter’s 11 with 20 seconds left.
On the day, Carr was 26-for-34 for 215 yards — many of the passes were dinks and dunks.
“We wanted to get back to some fundamental things — get the ball out of CJ’s hand earlier, get the ball on the perimeter,” Palka said. “We wanted to get the ball to the playmaker we do have, and we tried to do it by giving them runaction so it would keep their linebackers in the box and let our guys make plays on the perimeter.”
Dexter’s defenders — especially Parachek — made plenty of plays, too. He was able to sack Carr a couple times, though Carr’s play frustrated the defense at times.
“It’s what he does,” said Parachek with a shrug. “He’s a great quarterback. He played a great game, but we ended up coming out with a win and found a way to stop it and it showed on the scoreboard.”
This was a genuine team effort for Dexter, which needs to be the case for the Dreadnaughts to make a run at a state title. They need contributions from unlikely suspects, like the ones they got Friday.
“Our nose tackle (Sean White) played a heckuva game,” Parachek said. “He showed up. We had an injury two weeks ago and he had to step up and he showed up tonight.”
Palka was disappointed in the loss, but he was pleased his Saline team showed some grit.
This is a young Hornets team, while Dexter is loaded with vets, and Palka was satisfied with the determination from his team, as opposed to the week before.
“It was a championship atmosphere — you make two more plays, you win the game,” Palka said. “But I was very happy with our improvement from the previous week. I really thought we were much more composed, much more physical of a team this week.”
Cabana finished with 130 yards — all but three of Dexter’s rushing total — on 28 carries. He spent some 30 minutes signing autographs after the monumental win.
“It means everything, really,” Cabana said. “For us to turn the team around and get this done, it’s pretty crazy. We’ve got bigger things in mind, so it’s not over, for sure.”
Rouge winning in defeat
River Rouge lost its second game of the season, but in doing so, it may have gained more credibility than it did in its first six games.
“They’re good, they’re really good,” said Warren De La Salle coach Dan Rohn after his team’s 19-18 comeback win. “Their defense was way better than I anticipated. We didn’t play great at times, but we didn’t play really bad. We just kept shooting ourselves in the foot.”
After a scoreless first half, the defending Division 2 state champ trailed, 18-7, with about five minutes left in the fourth quarter.
Brady Drogosh threw a 25-yard fade to freshman Damion King to make it 18-13 with four minutes remaining.
After a Rouge three-and-out, the Pilots had one more opportunity, and Drogosh eventually found King on a 5-yard slant on fourth down forc the victory.
King was forced into service because of an injury to Triston Nichols, De La Salle’s top receiver.
“He’s going to be really good,” Rohn said. “He had a hamstring injury so we didn’t rush him. We didn’t really need him. We felt all along he’s going to be a pretty dynamic football player and we didn’t want to press him as a freshman.”
The biggest take from this game is that Rouge and Detroit King could be in for quite a game when the teams likely meet in a district game.
“That’s the best defense we played all year; I was super-impressed with Rouge’s defense,” Rohn said. “They didn’t do anything fancy, but they’re good enough to play Cover 0 and put seven in the box and you better be able to manipulate them or beat them on the edges. I wasn’t so sure we could.”
PSU’s Franklin swoops into Southfield
If nothing else, Penn State coach James Franklin knows how to make an entrance. He arrived for Friday’s West Bloomfield at Southfield A&T game via helicopter, which landed on the field behind the football field.
“It landed about 100 yards away,” Southfield junior quarterback Isaiah Marshall said. “I knew who it was. It was cool actually, it was cool to see. I’d never seen that before.”
Marshall said the Southfield coaches told the team ahead of time that Franklin would be at the game.
“I hope he came to see me,” Marshall said, laughing. “We were playing West Bloomfield, so there were a whole bunch of great players on the field for him to come see.”
Marshall, who was offered a scholarship to Michigan before his eighth-grade year, said he has had only a little contact with the Penn State staff.
“They have recruited me a little,” he said, “but they haven’t made an offer.”
That game was the first of two scheduled stops for Franklin. He was also headed to the Rochester Adams-Harper Woods game.
“I had seen him on the sidelines,” Marshall said. “He was there about 30 minutes. One of our players dislocated his ankle and it took him like 40 minutes to get off the field, and I think he left during that because he had to go to another game.”