On a night when both teams were playing grind-it-out football and points were at a premium, Yorkville made the most of a rare downfield shot.
Jack Beetham found Anthony DeVito in stride for a 57-yard touchdown and the visiting Foxes went on to beat No. 20 Oswego 16-6 Friday night in a battle of Southwest Prairie West unbeatens.
Beetham also scored on a one-yard sneak in a game that was scoreless until the final two minutes of the third quarter.
Yorkville (5-0, 2-0) shut out Oswego (4-1, 1-1) until the final five minutes and had three takeaways against a team that came in with a plus-10 turnover margin. Luke Hendershott and Dillon Viscogliosi had interceptions for the Foxes, who also recovered a fumble on a hook-and-ladder play.
Beetham didn’t expect anything different from the defense.
“I’m just amazed,” he said. “They do it every game for us. … Even when we’re not scoring for them, they still stay up. They say, ‘We got you, we’re gonna get you guys the ball back.’
“And it just gives us the motivation to score and help them win the game.”
The feeling is mutual, according to Hendershott.
“I think our offense just makes great adjustments later in the game,” Hendershott said. “Our defense is able to hold it down and credit to our offense for always pulling out the wins.”
Hendershott’s interception and 12-yard return to the Oswego 28 set up the game’s first score, a 30-yard field goal by Kyle Nadler with 1:22 left in the third quarter.
Yorkville’s defense then forced a three-and-out and Beetham responded with the long TD to DeVito to make it 10-0.
“We set it up early by throwing a little screen pass,” Beetham said. “So they knew that’s what we kind of do — we throw screen passes and make them work. … We’re like, we want to take a shot and put points on the board.”
“Their corners are just so physical and so aggressive … in the quick [passing] game,” Yorkville coach Dan McGuire said. “We knew we had to — in order to beat a good team like that — we had to do something vertical. And we just got lucky and things happened at the right time.”
Beetham finished 8 of 13 for 106 yards and a touchdown with no interceptions. Tavaris Harland Jr. ran 27 times for 122 yards, including a 33-yarder that set up Beetham’s one-yard TD run that made it 16-0 with 5:46 remaining.
Now Yorkville is playoff-eligible after going 4-5 and missing the postseason last year.
“The goal from the get-go was 9-0,” Hendershott said. “This is a big step in that direction.”
Oswego scored on a 30-yard pass from Drew Kleinhans to Mariano Velasco with 4:52 left. But a missed two-point conversion left the Panthers still facing a two-score deficit and Yorkville closed it out.
Kleinhans was 8 for 18 for 82 yards with a touchdown and two interceptions.
“The template for both schools is kind of the same,” Oswego coach Brian Cooney said. “Neither school’s overly flashy, just hard-nosed, get downfield, do what you’ve got to do. And it just wasn’t our night. But no disrespect to them, they played well.”