CENTRAL NEW YORK – Whether on the old grass or on the new artificial turf at Buckley-Volo Field, the usual pattern was that the Cazenovia football team rarely let anyone come in and leave with a victory.
Yet General Brown broke all of the standards in Saturday’s season opener, spoiling the Lakers’ first game on its new surface by pounding away and ultimately pulling away to prevail by a score of 47-26.
Warm temperatures greeted the Cazenovia fans, who got to see just why General Brown has, year and year out, put together one of the strongest small-school programs in Central New York.
The Lions, unlike the Lakers, had played on the first weekend of September, romping past Malone 70-6, and it did quite a number in the opening minutes against a new-look Cazenovia defense.
Before it could even settle down, the Lakers trailed 27-0, with GB’s run attack producing long touchdown runs of 52, 73 and 45 yards and then scoring again early in the second period.
Despite this, a comeback almost happened. Cazenovia got on the board with Bobby Livingston’s 28-yard scoring pass to Danny Bliss. Then, in the last minute of the half the Lakers scored twice.
Livingston finished off a drive with an eight-yard TD strike to Paul Mitchell. Then a sack and fumble deep in GB territory led to the Lakers having the ball on the one-yard line and Livingston again finding Mitchell in the end zone.
What was once a rout was now 27-20 at the break and the Lakers had all the momentum, only to quickly discover that the Lions had some resilience of its own.
Two scoring drives early in the third quarter stretched GB’s margin to 40-20, and though the Lakers would answer with Livingston’s fourth TD pass (24 yards to Mitchell), it was blanked in the final period and the Lions tacked on an insurance score.
For the day, Livingston went 17-for-28 for 289 yards, intercepted twice. Mitchell had seven catches for 167 yards, the longest of them covering 55 yards. Defensively, Bryce Enders had six tackles and fumbles were recovered by Carter Bowden and Zander Jackson-Sizmer. But GB managed to run for 369 yards.
All this followed last Friday night’s rematch of the wild 2023 Section III Class B quarterfinal between Chittenango and Carthage, only here the Comets were able to beat the Bears by a more comfortable 59-33 margin.
Chittenango had nearly prevailed in that playoff game, a 51-46 epic that threatened to repeat itself when the Bears scored twice in the early going on one-yard TD plunges by Kyle Wehrlin and Seamus Gardner.
Carthage got away, though, with 24 points in the second period, three TD’s by Geremiah Ademola-Sadipe that included a 62-yard dash, each one of them followed by a successful two-point conversion.
As if that wasn’t enough, Ademoa-Sadipe added scoring runs of 61, 30 and 17 yards in the third quarter as part of an historic performance where he would accumulate 458 yards, one of the best single-game totals in Section III history.
All told, the Comets ran for 517 yards, but the Bears still managed good moments as Gardner completed 10 of 18 passes for 100 yards and a TD, Chittenango returning home this Friday to face Oneida as Cazenovia goes north to play Lowville.
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