Bucs' advance with 49-14 victory over Sparkman
HOOVER -- A sprained right knee ligament put a damper on the second half of Bucs’ running back Dylan Pauley’s regular season, but he let it loose in a big run during the Hoover High School football team’s 49-14 win over Sparkman in the first round of the Class 7A playoffs.
Pauley’s 73-yard touchdown run gave the Bucs a 35-7 lead midway through the third quarter. He got the start and finished with 106 yards on six carries.
Pauley, a Vanderbilt commit, injured his knee in the sixth game against Prattville. He missed the Bucs’ 29-28 win over Hewitt-Trussville and played sparingly over the next three games.
With a week off, Hoover head coach Josh Niblett said Pauley had a great week of practice. He was ready when his time came on Friday.
“He gets behind his pads and he runs hard and when he gets in the break out, he’s got speed to take it the distance,” Niblett said. “When you’re a big back who weighs 220-plus, there’s not a lot of guys who can do that. I’m proud of him and proud of his leadership.”
Pauley broke his 73-yard run down the left sideline one play after Marcus Williams stripped and recovered a fumble.
“Once I saw the hole, I was like, yes,” Pauley said. “I saw the dude come to me and I thought, ‘Please don’t tackle me,’ and then I just ran around him and scored.”
Williams was involved in another big play in the third quarter. Four minutes earlier, he forced Sparkman receiver Cameron Foley to fumble after a catch. Teammate Jason Riles picked it up and went 40 yards for a score.
“One of my teammates, Marcus Williams, No. 5, stripped it,” Riles said. “I saw it in front of me, picked it up off his body and took it to the house.”
Hoover scored first in under two minutes when receiver Joseph Buffett recovered a teammate’s fumble in the end zone. The Bucs went up 14-0 on Jabari Gaines’ 6-yard touchdown reception from Josh Lundy. They answered a 93-yard kickoff return touchdown from Sparkman’s Caleb Ransaw with an 80-yard drive, culminating on Jaylen Taylor’s 9-yard rushing score with 2:11 left in the first half.
RJ Hamilton returned a kickoff 95 yards for a score after Sparkman’s only offensive touchdown late in the third quarter, a 41-yard run from Chance McClendon. In the fourth quarter, backup quarterback Evan Reeder threw a 19-yard touchdown pass to K.J. Law.
Lundy completed 10-of-16 passes for 130 yards with one touchdown and an interception. The Bucs had 179 yards on the ground, but gave up 216 on the ground and 109 through the air to the Senators.
Sparkman lost two fumbles, had a clock management problem to end the first half inside the Hoover 10-yard line with no points, and Hoover’s Jay Avery picked off a pass in the end zone on another possession.
“We didn’t tackle very well tonight,” Niblett said. “We did come up with some turnovers. We were able to strip the ball out. Our defense prides themselves on getting takeaways, but we’ve got to do a better job at the point of attack. When you’re playing in November, you’ve got to play really good defense and play really good in the run totals because we know what we’re about to see next week.”
The Bucs’ improved to 10-1. The Senators finished 6-5 on the season.
Next week will be a home game against region foe Oak Mountain. The region’s fourth-seeded Eagles won 41-28 at Austin, the No. 1 seed in Region 4.
Hoover beat Oak Mountain 42-7 in the teams’ fifth game.
“When you’re playing that kind of offense and you have four days to get ready for it, that’s the thing that makes it tough,” Niblett said. “It’s assignment football. You’ve got to stop the dive and make the quarterback pitch it. If you don’t, their quarterback will hurt you all night.”
Click here to view and purchase photos from the game.