Duke City set to play for league crown
Gladiators host Sioux City tonight in Champions Indoor Football championship game
Two teams that were the class of the 2018 Champions Indoor Football season are to meet tonight at Tingley Coliseum in a confrontation that will determine the league kingpin.
The Sioux City Bandits (11-3), winners of the North Conference, are scheduled to face the Duke City Gladiators (12-2), owners of the best record in the 11-team league and champions of the South Conference.
Kickoff for the Champions Bowl is set for 6:05 p.m.
Both teams have come a long way to get to this point. One more than the other; coach Erv Strohbeen’s Bandits had to endure a bus ride of almost 1,000 miles from northwest Iowa that lasted 16-plus hours. They arrived in Albuquerque late Friday morning.
The fourth-year Gladiators, meanwhile, had never won a playoff game until this season, sweeping past Wichita and Texas in down-to-the-wire fashion. Sioux City is in its fourth straight CIF postseason, including its run to the title three years ago.
“Every spare minute that you have, you’re watching film,” Duke City coach Dominic Bramante said after Thursday morning’s practice at Tingley. “Last night, I went to the mall, went upstairs, found a corner chair, put on my headset and watched film for three hours. No kids were around, no wife, no nothing.
“They come in with the No. 1 rushing attack, and we come in with the top run defense. It’s going to be a good battle. I know Erv is one of the best coaches in
the business. His record (66-20, two league titles) speaks for itself.”
Sioux City has a league-high 54 ground TDs, along with 102.4 rushing yards a game. Duke City has allowed only 16.4 rush yards a game. In the playoffs, both of its foes had negative yards running.
“They have a great front four, including Matt Moss, who we’ve played before,” said Strohbeen, who also played nine years as a center for Sioux CIty before getting into coaching. “They really stop everybody. But I think we have one of the best offensive lines. It’s going to be the clash of the titans.”
Gladiators defensive lineman Fatu Ulale, a UNM alum, is confident the Bandits won’t get far.
“If we do our job, ain’t nobody running on us,” he said. “Amarillo, Texas and Wichita like to run the ball, too, and we stopped them. If we just do our job, it should be a breeze.”
Although Sioux City and Duke City didn’t cross conference lines to face each other this season, the did have one common foe — the Wichita Force. The Gladiators went 4-0 against the Force, including a 50-39 playoff victory. The Bandits went 0-1, a 56-43 loss at Wichita on April 14 that triggered a threegame midseason losing streak Strohbeen referred to as “a slump in which we played as bad as I’ve ever seen.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Bramante said of the comparative scores. “We don’t take anything out of that. All those games we had with Wichita were tough.”
There should be plenty of passing tonight, too. Gladiators QB Caleb Holbrook, who helped knock Sioux City out of the playoffs two years ago while with the Bloomington Edge, has thrown for 46 TDs with seven interceptions. The Bandits’ Liam Nadler, who’s 6-foot-5, 240 pounds, has a 42/8 ratio.
“This week I’ve watched probably 20 to 30 total hours of film on them,” Holbrook said. “We have three of their games this year. And I’ve got old film from when I played them. There’s been a lot of prep going on this week.”
NEW KICKER: Duke City’s Kimo Naehu, who suffered a knee injury Monday in the victory over Texas, is out. He will be replaced by Conner Hollabaugh, who played for Amarillo most of the year until being released late in the season after the Venom signed its former kicker. Hollabaugh signed Wednesday night.