Rattlers drop to 4-4 after loss to Panthers
It was back to reality Saturday night for the Rattlers against a good team.
Playing back-and-forth for much of the first half, the Rattlers failed on an onside kick, and the Bay Area Panthers continued their onslaught. It was a twopossession lead at the half before plowing through for a 68-52 victory before 8,214 fans at Desert Diamond Arena.
After winning three straight games against the three worst teams in the Indoor Football League, the Rattlers (4-4) are back at .500 with self-evaluations moving forward.
At midseason, the Rattlers are tied for fifth place in the Western Conference with San Antonio. The top four teams from each conference qualify for the playoffs. The Rattlers have never not made the playoffs since Kevin Guy took over leading the team in 2008.
Bay Area (7-1) has beaten the Rattlers twice and showed no signs of slipping after capturing the IFL title last year.
That 2023 championship team had Dalton Sneed at quarterback.
This year, the Rattlers have Sneed, but he’s only been able to play in 2 1/2 games so far. The lack of continuity on both sides of the ball has plagued a Rattlers team that at the midpoint in the season Guy said he would grade out with a C-.
He would only give the team that high a grade because of how some newcomers have stepped filling in for injured players.
“It’s midway point, it’s no reason to hit panic buttons,” Guy said. “But we certainly put ourselves in a bad position trying to get a home playoff game. They’re the defending champs. They’ve developed something pretty good the last couple of years. And we’re trying to catch them.”
Sneed was the MVP of Bay Area’s championship game win over Sioux Falls last season,
It’s been hard to keep him on the field in Arizona. But it’s not so much the offense as the defense that plundered on Saturday.
The Rattlers didn’t get a single stop as quarterback Daquan Neal ran for 78 yards and three TDs, running back Shane Simpson added 74 yards and three scores on 15 carries and Neal only need to throw eight passes, completing six, all of those to JT Stokes, who caught three TD passes.
The Rattlers made six and five stops in their last two games, but those came against bottom-tier teams in Jacksonville and Tucson.
This was a completely different opponent, one that was far more physical than the Rattlers and ready to pounce any any missed opportunity.
After the Rattlers couldn’t get the ball to travel 10 yards on an on-side kick try late in the first half, the Panthers scored on Neal’s 7-yard run. The Rattlers got stopped, and Simpson scored on a 3yard run to make it 40-24 with 16 seconds left in the half.
A missed field goal by the Rattlers to end the half, and a Bay Area touchdown coming out of the half, followed by the Rattlers getting stopped again, and it quickly turned bleak, as the Panthers built a 47-31 lead.
Sneed was 19 of 26 for 198 yards and three scores and ran for three more TDs, running for 60 yards on 12 carries.
But the Panthers were just too good every time they had the ball and made it look easy most of the time, barely getting touched as Simpson and Neal took turns finding huge holes.
“We haven’t done a good job stopping the quarterback run,” Guy said. “We haven’t done a good job stopping the run, period. It’s either scheme or personnel and the truth usually lies somewhere in the middle. I look at it a lack of execution. We’ve always had a great defense here. We’ve always played this style of defense. So nothing has really
changed from a scheme standpoint. But we’ll look in the mirror and see if it’s got something do if we’re putting them in a bad position? But the truth is we were outphysicaled.”
This was veteran safety Dillion Winfrey’s first game back after being out the last five weeks. At times, Neal was picking on Winfrey, going over the top to find Stokes on TDs of 12 and 35 yards.
“They were more physical,” Winfrey said. “Any time you just line up and run the ball at will, obviously you’re going to win the game.”
Sneed said this was the same Bay Area team he played for last year. The Panthers pride themselves running the ball.
But he felt the game turned late in the first half and the beginning of the second half when the Rattlers struggled to score and the Panthers capitalized to build a four-possession lead.