Wild NIC-10 football Saturday: North's great escape, Boylan's unusual win, 5 TD Huskie

Saturday was an unique day in NIC-10 football. And not just because 2 1/2 league games were played on a Saturday.

Unsung Freeport almost threw a wrench into the entire season. Boylan stopped one of the longest drives you will ever see. And Harlem quickly broke open its suspended game with Auburn with a couple of big plays. Here is a look at the action:

Belvidere North 35, Freeport 27 (2 OT)

Freeport narrowly missed its second huge NIC-10 football upset in as many weeks, but left Belvidere with heads held high after a 35-27 double-overtime loss Saturday to preseason favorite Belvidere North.

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The Pretzels (0-2) lost 14-13 to Boylan last week, with a missed extra point the difference. Saturday, the Pretzels missed a go-ahead extra point with under three minutes left. Then, after tying the score in the first overtime, they hooked the potential game-winning extra point slightly left.

“That was very nerve-wracking,” North coach Jeff Beck said.

Freeport had stopped North’s first extra-point by swarming the holder after a bad snap.

Freeport has missed the playoffs 15 years in a row, but have often been not that far away. Anthony Dedmond, in his seventh year as head coach, said the Pretzels have been slowly building toward this.

“This was a great game,” Dedmond said. “We showed we are a much better team than we were in the past. This started from my first day on the job. A culture shift can’t happen over night. This is a product of all my previous teams before this moment. They are proud of Freeport. They are proud of who they play for. The family on the back of our jerseys means something. It’s not there just for looks.”

North senior fullback Trent Dinsmore scored the winning touchdown.

North’s Beck singled out Freeport’s Cam Verner for praise. He led the Pretzels both rushing and tackling.

“Freeport has some tough, resilient kids,” Beck said. “We had a 21-7 first-half lead but their kids just relied on what they were doing. They ran the same plays they ran in the first half. They have some tough kids. Really tough. That Verner kid is a heck of a football player. He broke several tackles where we had him dead to right, including a fourth down where we hit him in the backfield and he shrugged off a couple of tacklers and got the first down.”

Harlem 40, Auburn 6

Jahmani Muhammad, who had 107 of Harlem's 108 rushing yards when the game was suspended after a fight behind the stands led to chaos Friday, scored on a 63-yard run on Harlem's first play after stopping Auburn on fourth down. Jackson Cook then added a 68-yard interception return for a touchdown. Harlem then made it 40-6 by blocking a punt and Muhammad scoring on a 20-yard run on the next play. Muhammad finished with five TD runs.

Boylan 25, East 6

Forget the score. This was not your normal East vs. Boylan football game. Boylan’s 25-6 victory Saturday, in many ways, was one of the stranger NIC-10 games in recent history.

Yet it was also indicative of who these teams are. Consider:

The drive

East had the ball for almost an entire quarter on one drive. “We have had 17 of those in the 11 years I’ve been at East,” coach Gary Griffin said of drives that ran at least 10 minutes off the clock.

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But even against that backdrop, this one stood out. It wasn’t 10 minutes. It was 11:29, only 31 seconds shy of a full quarter. The E-Rabs ran 20 official plays on the drive. There were also five penalties, only one pre-snap. So the ball was snapped 24 times. Three times, the E-Rabs converted on fourth down.

And still Boylan held Freeport scoreless on the drive.

“We knew what we were doing and we knew what we were up against,” Boylan safety/running back Alex Hernandez said.

The drive ended when quarterback Twaine Phillips was stopped at the 2 on a fourth-down quarterback sneak.

“That felt amazing,” Boylan outside linebacker/running back Donzelle Ingram-Love said. “The whole summer was about conditioning. We are built for it. We were ready.”

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Partial penalties

The drive was also notable for its penalties and how little they often mattered. There were no flags on the first 16 plays. The drive then ended with five penalties and only four more plays — including three 15-yard Boylan penalties that netted East 14 yards instead of the normal 45 and only one first down because all were half-the-distance to the goal. Two of those were fourth-down pass interference penalties. The second only gave East 3 yards and the E-Rabs were stopped on fourth down on the next play — unlike the pros, pass interference is not an automatic first down in high school football.

“I don’t worry about that,” Griffin said. “We’ve got to play better. We’ve got to block and tackle.”

Interchangeable parts

While East handed off to either Zy’Air Lee or Tyeshaun Whittie 14 times on that long drive alone, Boylan had three runners with between six and eight carries — all for between 55 and 87 yards rushing — and rotated three quarterbacks virtually every play with Dominic Cacciatore (90 yards passing), Owen Scandroli (37 yards passing) and Jaden Williams (no passes but 70 yards rushing).

“We switch receiver, running back, QB, O-line, we switch every position around a lot,” Hernandez said. “We’ve got limited players. We try to keep everyone fresh.”

What’s next?

Chris Tolliver had two interceptions for East (1-1), including one he returned 80 yards to the 5, to keep the E-Rabs close. Boylan (2-0) looked more like typical Boylan on Saturday after a one-point opening win over Freeport. … Especially after Freeport took NIC-10 preseason favorite Belvidere North into double-overtime before losing 35-27 on the road Saturday.

“The whole week it was in our head,” said Ingram-Love, who ran for 55 yards on eight carries and also led Boylan’s defense with a fumble recovery and a tackle in the end zone for a safety. “It was frustrating because we didn’t do as good as we could against Freeport. Everybody was doubting us. So we came out and did what we have to do.

“And we’re not even our best yet.”

Matt Trowbridge is a Rockford Register Star sports reporter. Email him at mtrowbridge@rrstar.com. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, at @MattTrowbridge.

This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Wild NIC-10 football Saturday: North's great escape, Boylan's unusual win, 5 TD Huskie