It’s an odd thing when you cover a team for just one season and
the group starts breaking records that were set decades ago.
It’s an odd thing when you cover a team for just one season and the group starts breaking records that were set decades ago.
I never saw a skinny teenager named Jeff Garcia play football for Gilroy High School, but I’ve heard he was phenomenal. I never saw the last two GHS league champions play – mom was in her second trimester in 1981 and I was playing with a Nerf football in 1985 – but I heard those teams had a lot of heart to go with some serious talent. And, obviously, I never saw the 1958 team that had seven offensive players go on to ball in college but I’m willing to consider they might have been the best pure athletes the Mustangs have ever put on the field. (No one did serious weight training in those days.)
But of the things I have seen in my rather brief 25 years, nothing comes close to the game junior quarterback Jamie Jensen had Friday in a 57-27 win over San Benito in the 51st Prune Bowl.
Quite simply, Jensen had the greatest passing performance I have ever seen live.
Before Dennis Green steps from behind a curtain and yells at me to “crown his a–,” I will now provide some context.
Jensen threw for 486 yards, which is a new Central Coast Section record. That number is different from the original count I had after the game (472), however, I subtracted six yards for a sack, and there were two questionable swing passes that both went for 8-yard losses. It turns out that in high school sacks count against rushing yards, not passing yards. My bad. As for the swing passes, having a poor vantage point to judge if the throws were, in fact, laterals, I counted them both as completions due to their intent. If one of those passes was a lateral, and I gave back the yards lost by the sack, my count would become 486.
Coach Rich Hammond, who watched the game film twice and did his own math (which he teaches at GHS), told me he came up with 486 both times. He dropped off a tape for the San Jose Mercury News to review Monday night.
Yards aside though, 486 isn’t the number that made Jensen’s game rank at the top. It’s two other numbers: 8 and 0.
Jensen completed 24 of 35 passes (73.5 percent), with zero interceptions and eight touchdowns. Eight!
The yardage mark is the highest total ever in CCS history. It surpasses the 482 by Jeremy Jordan of Los Altos in 1990. The eight touchdowns ties a record set in 1982 by Jon Paye of Menlo, a year after Gilroy’s second-to-last outright league title (see Friday for most recent example).
Put the three stats together – 486 yards, 8 touchdowns and no interceptions – and you have a 30-point victory over San Benito that gives Gilroy an outright Tri-County Athletic League championship and a home game against Valley Christian Saturday in the opening round of the CCS playoffs.
No one person deserves all the credit for a win in football, even though the quarterback often gets the glory or the blame. Too many people contribute to the finished product.
Each play is choreographed with violence and beauty in mind, from the brutal beginning of linemen crashing into one another when the ball is snapped to the timing and precision that is required for a pass to flutter down the field and land softly into the hands of a receiver. Each move is measured.
So, let these next comments be equally thoughtful. Jensen is a Division I prospect, the offense is the best in the section and I feel lucky to be watching the best team Gilroy has ever put on the field in my first year on the job.
News, Notes and Needless Observations:
– Danny Contreras is one bad dude. He may not stand that tall, but his heart is as big as assistant coach Joffre Longoria. Seven catches for 260 yards and four touchdowns, three of which were for 60 yards or more – wow.
n Coach Hammond counted the sacks his offensive line has given up in 10 games this season and came up with 13. That is how it’s done big fellas.
– Practicing a scramble drill twice a week especially paid off for Gilroy against San Benito. Jensen was able to find receivers in open space when avoiding pressure or simply trotting around the pocket because no one was coming on the rush. The short routes broke downfield and the long routes came back to the ball to decimate the ‘Balers’ zone defense.
– Being in the Open Division of CCS might scare off some coaches since it’s designed to pit the eight best teams in the section against one another, but Hammond believes it’s an opportunity to prove a point. “I told the kids, ‘We’ve done some things that haven’t been done in a long time. We’ve had some individuals who’ve done things never done before. Now it’s time for us to do something as a team that has never been done.’ ” Reading between the lines, the Mustangs aren’t satisfied with just an invitation to the party. They want to dance.
– The junior varsity Mustangs also rolled over San Benito, winning in dominating fashion 33-0. Logan Sweeney and Michael Aldridge both scored twice, Brian Sanchez caught a pass for a touchdown and Jordan Mitchell also got into the end zone. The JV team finished the year 7-3. The freshman team lost 13-0 to San Benito Thursday. The squad finished the season with a 1-6-1 record.
