Rebels jump out early, hold off Oxford
Two snaps in, it looked like it was all over.
Vestavia Hills scored 14 points in 27 seconds. But as we all know, high school football is a 48-minute game, and it was a battle for the next 47:33, but the Rebels prevailed 17-10 over a feisty bunch of Oxford Yellow Jackets on Buddy Anderson Field at Thompson Reynolds Stadium Friday night.
It wasn’t over until Ray Murphy recovered a fumble on the Rebels’ 29-yard line to end a last-minute drive by Oxford with 12 seconds left.
On the game’s first offensive snap, Rebels running back Walker Minor burst up the middle and went 75 yards for a touchdown. Curry Howard’s extra-point made it 7-0, Rebels, with 18 seconds gone.
“Nobody touched me,” Minor said. “So it was all my offensive line. It was pretty exciting, it’s really my first long run like that.”
After a touchback, Oxford quarterback Brody Syer’s pass was picked off by Reid Adams who sped 20 yards for Vestavia Hills’ second score. Howard’s PAT was good, and the Rebels had a 14-0 advantage with 11:33 left in the first quarter.
While most of the Rebels’ faithful, and probably some of the Rebels themselves, thought it was going to be a Rebel rout, it didn’t turn out that way.
“I knew it was going to be a long ballgame," Vestavia Hills coach Buddy Anderson said. “They didn’t play well last week, but they’ve got some players and they came ready to play.”
Minor, who rushed for 115 yards on 12 carries, felt like the team relaxed and figured it would be a cakewalk. “We had that mentality but we shouldn’t have,” Minor said, “because it ended up coming back and almost getting us.”
Quarterback Brett Jones agreed. “We started out really focused but we lost our focus.”
It was a play midway in the second quarter that seemed to spark the Yellow Jackets. The Rebels were on the move deep in Jackets’ territory but fumbled the football and Oxford’s Desmond Cooley scooped it up and ran 82 yards for a touchdown. Keaton Borrelli added the extra point, and it was 14-7 Vestavia with 4:01 left in the first quarter.
After an exchange of punts, Vestavia found itself backed up on its own 9 and Anderson chose to quick-kick on third down. Minor’s punt died on the Rebel 46, and the Jackets drove eight plays to a 22-yard Borrelli field goal to cut it to 14-10 with 8:45 left in the first half.
The Rebels couldn’t sustain anything offensively the rest of the half, the Jackets couldn’t either, and the half ended that way.
In the second half, even though all the Rebels could manage was a 21-yard Howard field goal at the end of 63-yard, 15-play drive early in the fourth quarter, they did make some big plays in the passing game, especially a 30-yard connection between Jones and Charlie Sharbel that flipped the field.
“We shot ourselves in the foot in the first half but we made some plays when we needed to in the second half.” Anderson said.
Besides the plays on offense, Nolan Turner picked off a pass in the end zone with 5:57 left in the game.
“Our defense made big plays the whole night,” Minor said.
Jones ended up 5-of-11 passing for 69 yards and no interceptions. Turner led the defense with 11 tackles, Adams had nine, plus a sack and two tackles for losses. Nate Lewis added nine tackles.
The non-region win leaves Vestavia Hills at 4-1 overall. They’ll take their 2-1 Class 7A, Region 3 record next week to Thompson.
Oxford falls to 2-4.