5 things we learned in Week 8 of high school football

By: Chris Harlan
Sunday, October 23, 2022 | 7:00 AM

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There were some dark days this fall for the Mohawk football program, but Saturday wasn’t one of them.

The Warriors cemented their spot in the WPIAL playoffs by pulling off a 22-8 upset on the road against Western Beaver, an opponent that had lost once all season. Remembering where Mohawk was eight weeks ago, facing an investigation into hazing allegations, makes the players’ recent accomplishments all the more unexpected.

“I think, emotionally, it has been a little bit of a roller coaster ride for them,” said coach Tim McCutcheon, whose staff had concerns about how the players would cope. “All of them aren’t still there. We lost some good young men and really good football players, too. Obviously, that’s tough on all of them. There’s nothing we could do except try to keep moving forward.

“It’s been emotional, but, at the end of the day, we’ve been able to rally together, stay strong and get focused.”

Mohawk is 4-3 overall, 4-2 in the Midwestern Conference and tied for third in the standings. A win next week over Neshannock would move it all the way to second.

The top five teams in the Class 2A conference qualify for the playoffs.

Western Beaver took an early 6-0 lead Saturday, but Mohawk responded with 22 consecutive points on touchdowns by Jimmy Guerrieri, Justin Boston and Coleton Root.

“It’s a huge win,” McCutcheon said. “They have athletes that we don’t have. No one would have picked us to beat a 7-1 Western Beaver team at home. There’s no question.”

Go back a couple of months, and there were doubts about whether Mohawk would or should play any football this season.

The school canceled the team’s first two games, but, after a district investigation found the misconduct was limited to a “small number of individual players” and not part of a systemic problem, the season was allowed to resume.

This is McCutcheon’s eighth year as head coach, and he points to a tight-knit staff of assistants with local roots as one reason the team has had success.

“They genuinely care about these guys,” he said. “I think that’s a good starting point. We have good relationships with the players, so it makes it a little bit easier to rally them up and move forward despite the terrible situation we were in.”

After skipping two weeks of games and practices, the Warriors lost their first two contests to Laurel, 49-7, and Riverside, 32-28. They’ve won four of five since with conference wins over Ellwood City, 32-13, Freedom, 42-13, and Western Beaver.

Boston, a junior, leads the team with seven touchdowns. Five teammates have scored at least once.

“It took us time to get our game legs and knock some rust off because we were behind everyone else, which is on us,” McCutcheon said. “Obviously, since then we’ve been able to knock that rust off, and we’re firing on all cylinders right now.”

Showing mercy

When Central Valley made the jump to Class 4A, coach Mark Lyons cautioned the scores might not be as lopsided as usual. He wanted his players ready to play four-quarter games, despite being two-time defending state champions.

“It’s OK to not mercy someone,” Lyons said in August. “We’ve been pretty spoiled with that the last couple of years.”

Well, this year brought more of the same.

Friday’s 55-7 win over West Allegheny was the eighth mercy-rule win in nine games for the undefeated Warriors (9-0). The mercy rule makes the clock run continuously if a team holds a 35-point lead in the second half.

The only opponent to avoid the mercy rule was Avonworth, but the Antelopes trailed 30-0 at halftime. Before the 48-point win over West A, Central Valley had winning scores of 49-8, 58-13, 54-0, 42-0, 43-0 and 49-7.

Backing into the playoffs

Every team envisions clinching a playoff spot with a big win, but it doesn’t always happen. Five WPIAL teams clinched spots this week despite losses.

Blackhawk, Deer Lakes, Latrobe, Monessen and Southmoreland all lost in Week 8 but ended the weekend with the assurance they’re each playoff-bound.

Among them, Blackhawk (3-6, 2-4) owns a four-game losing streak, including 27-7 to Montour on Friday. But the Cougars clinched a spot from the Class 4A Parkway when Chartiers Valley (1-8, 1-5) lost to Aliquippa.

Their conference sends five teams to the playoffs.

Three games in one

Apollo-Ridge running back Nick Curci had averaged 17 carries per game this season, but that number went way up after Friday. The 6-foot-1, 225-pound senior carried 51 times in a 43-36 overtime win against Serra Catholic.

That’s the equivalent of three games.

Curci rushed for 338 yards and scored five times in the win, setting career highs for carries, yards and touchdowns. His previous career-best for carries was 31 in a Sept. 2 game against Valley.

No one knows for sure what the WPIAL record is for carries in a game, but Keystone Oaks’ John Fuhrer also had 51 in a triple-overtime game in 2005.

No denying them now

Deer Lakes football hasn’t had much playoff experience in its history, which made last year all the more difficult when the Lancers missed by the slimmest of margins. They finished in a three-way tie with East Allegheny and Burrell, which both advanced via tiebreaker, while Deer Lakes did not.

This year, the Lancers (4-5, 2-2) can put away their calculators.

They’ve clinched a spot as one of four qualifiers from the Allegheny 6. This will be the team’s third appearance in the WPIAL playoffs, along with trips in 2015 and 2010.

Chris Harlan is a TribLive reporter covering sports. He joined the Trib in 2009 after seven years as a reporter at the Beaver County Times. He can be reached at charlan@triblive.com.

Tags: Apollo-Ridge, Blackhawk, Central Valley, Deer Lakes, Latrobe, Mohawk, Monessen, Southmoreland