Jaguars claim district title with rout over Los Alamos
Queen’s “We are the Champions” blared on the public address system and, as has become custom around these parts, the winners ran a gasser from one sideline to the other.
Considering the history of Capital football, it was a moment to savor, since the last time something similar happened was 24 long years ago.
With its 47-19 rout Friday night of visiting Los Alamos, Santa Fe’s oft-overlooked south side school clinched the District 2-5A championship and secured an automatic bid into the next week’s opening round of the state playoffs. It’s the first time in two dozen years the Jaguars clinched a title at home, and the second time in three years they’ve tossed their name into the playoff mix.
Pairings for the 12-team Class 5A draw will be revealed Saturday night. Capital head coach Bill Moon said it’s fair to expect his team will be handed the 12- or 11-seed, which begs the question — are the Jaguars underrated?
“We’ll know 7 days and 49 minutes from now,” Moon said, referring to next week’s opening round of the playoffs. “I don’t know. To be honest with you, I wonder if I overlook them. They’re an amazing bunch of people. I know that going in. You know how much I believe that, but sometimes they exceed my amazement. I don’t know what amazement-squared is, but we need to figure it out.”
It didn’t take much to figure out Capital’s defense in the early going Friday. Running its wing-T offense, visiting Los Alamos took a 13-0 lead after one quarter on a pair of Dylan Irish touchdown runs. The first covered 37 yards, while the second was a pinballing 2-yard run that capped a nine-play, 81-yard drive.
Some Capital fans yelled about passing the ball, about opening things up.
“We just started slow, that’s all,” said Jaguars fullback Jacob Jiron. “No reason to adjust anything. We made some changes, some little changes, but we didn’t need to do anything else. We knew it would work.”
Capital finished the night with 426 yards offense; 358 of which came from a bruising ground game led by freshman Luke Padilla. With him getting 29 carries on the night,
the Jaguars ran roughshod over the Hilltoppers in the second and third quarters by outscoring them 41-6 over an 18-minute span in which Padilla scored four touchdowns.
He finished his night with 235 yards rushing while Jiron added 90 — a total that would have been well over the century mark, had he not had a 42-yard touchdown run in the third quarter called back by an illegal block.
“Just run hard, hit hard and play the game the way we can,” Jiron said. “That’s all we came out to do.”
What chance Los Alamos did have of coming back dissipated the moment Irish and running back Jack Stewart left the game due to injury. Neither played in the second half after Capital took a 21-19 lead into halftime.
The Jaguars scored on three of their four possessions to open the third quarter, including an 18-yard touchdown run late in the period by Estevan Segura. He broke free near the 10, but was stripped of the ball inside the 5. The ball hopped right into his arms as he crossed the goal line standing up.
He had 33 yards rushing and helped seal the Hilltoppers’ night by intercepting a pass by backup QB Kayden Rivera in the fourth quarter. Asked if he felt Capital, which hasn’t garnered much respect in various chatrooms and social media posts about the 5A bracket, was being overlooked, he said it’s all part of the process.
“Yeah, probably we are,” Segura said. “But that’s fine. If people want to look past us, so what? We’re better than people think.”
Capital’s win prevented a potentially messy scenario in 2-5A. The Jaguars finished the regular season 6-4 overall and 4-0 in the district, but a loss Friday would have created a three-way tie for first with Los Alamos and Del Norte. The tiebreaker would have been point differential in head-to-head meetings, meaning Del Norte would have gotten the edge.
Moon said he and his offensive coordinator, Joe Jiron, often have the same waking nightmare at about 2 or 3 in the morning. In it, Moon said, is a scenario in which the worst case often becomes reality.
“In every game, the opponent gives you two waves of attack,” Moon said. “If you can repel those waves, you can prevail. It occurred to me last night that that’s what we’d face in this game. I knew they’d come at us with everything they had, so I told these guys that they’d come at us in a wave and we’d be gasping for breath and swallowing water. All we had to do was not drown. We took a few gulps but we survived.”
And with that, Capital’s season is assured of at least one more game, one more week.
And for the first time since before any of the current players were born, the championship feel finally took on a home-cooked flavor.