<\/p>\n
The 2016 Montezuma-Cortez football season came to a close on Friday night at Panther Stadium.<\/p>\n
Hosting the Pagosa Springs Pirates, both teams entered their final game of the season with 1-8 records, hoping to end with a victory.<\/p>\n
The Pirates got on the board on their opening possession with a 31-yard touchdown pass from Isaiah Griego to Keaton Laverty, but both offenses were stagnant for the next handful of possessions, trading 3-and-outs.<\/p>\n
A muffed punt by M-CHS gave Pagosa possession late in the first quarter, and the Pirates put together a 59-yard scoring drive that stretched into the second to go up 14-0.<\/p>\n
The Panthers\u2019 highlight play came later in the second quarter when quarterback Coby Baer connected with Tanner Desrosiers on the right side of the field.<\/p>\n
After catching the pass for a short gain, Desrosiers spun out of two tackles and streaked down the right sideline to the Pagosa Springs 2-yard line for a 52-yard pickup. Baer then capped off the drive with a TD run and tacked on the extra point to trim the Pirates\u2019 lead to 14-7.<\/p>\n
M-CHS drove down inside the red zone late in the second after Pagosa Springs had added two more scores, but the Pirates stopped them inside the 10-yard line to go to the half up 28-7.<\/p>\n
Juan Arballo made a nifty toe-tap catch on the sideline for a 20-yard gain to start the third quarter. But the drive stalled and M-CHS turned the ball over on downs.<\/p>\n
The Pirates controlled things the rest of the half, scoring 25 unanswered points to go on to win, 53-7.<\/p>\n
The contest resembled many of the Panthers\u2019 league games this season, as the undermanned team seemed to run out of gas in the second half, finishing with a 1-8 record and 0-5 in Intermountain League play.<\/p>\n
Still, the Panthers showed consistent effort, even when trailing by large margins.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey never quit. That\u2019s just heart,\u201d said assistant coach Tim Robinson.\u201cWe were shorthanded all year, we didn\u2019t have a lot of kids come out or stay, and a lot of kids got hurt, but they never gave up.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re proud of the seniors,\u201d he added. \u201cWe had a good senior class and they played their tails off.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Springs defeats M-CHS 53-7<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":68340,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[21],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-68339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-cortez"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68339\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68339"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=68339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}