With SCH lead back Aaron Rascoe injured, Rob Gentile (with the ball) picked up most of the slack. Gentile led the Blue Devils with 81 yards from scrimmage on 16 carries. (Photo by Jonathan Vander …
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Three weeks into a neck-and-neck battle for the starting quarterback position at Springside Chestnut Hill, coach Rick Knox still doesn’t know who is going to be taking full-time snaps under center come Inter-Ac play.
“I was naïve going into the season,” Knox said. “I wanted to have it decided by the first week. I haven’t had a situation like this: two guys of this caliber, each upperclassmen. I told them early on that I wanted to have it decided by week one.”
In the time since SCH’s week-one loss to Father Judge, Aaron Angelos and Jack Elliott have essentially split time down the middle. They’ll have to wait at least another week to know.
“They both played really well, so it’s been back and forth,” Knox said. “After week one, I told them that I wanted to have it decided going into our last two non-league games. I want to give it one more week if they didn’t straighten it out today.”
In the Blue Devils’ 21-7 win over Roman Catholic, they still hadn’t.
Angelos finished with 41 yards and a score on 4-of-7 passing, and Elliott finished with 61 and a touchdown after completing 5-of-6 throws. Compounding Knox’s problem is the pair’s contrasting skill set.
Where Elliot has the advantage in feeling comfortable and calmer in the pocket, Angelos has more of an ability to improvise. What Angelos has over Elliott in foot speed, Elliott makes up in arm strength. It’s like comparing apples to oranges.
“I feel like I can do this because I don’t think that it’s impacting our offense,” Knox said. “If our offense was getting really stagnant or if one was really out of sync, I would have decided earlier. They’re both running the offense well and utilizing their strengths though. For us, in the short term, it’s a good thing.”
Unless he revises his plan again, Knox will have the position decided after next week’s game at George Washington. The smart money is on his quarterbacks keeping this from being an easy call.
Against Roman, the signal-calling duo was certainly helped by SCH’s most impressive defensive effort to date. The Cahillites, who stand at a hard-luck 0-4 after the loss, mustered just 167 yards against the Blue Devils, and took until the start of the third quarter to even register a first down.
“I couldn’t have been more proud of the defensive effort,” Knox said. “(Roman) jumped out 21-0 on Downingtown East – one of the top teams in the area – last week. Roman is definitely a running team, and we stopped them.”
On offense, SCH jumped out to a 21-0 first half lead on Elliott’s one-yard run, a seven-yard connection between Angelos and Jack Elliott’s brother Pat, and the third on Jack Elliott’s 20-yard throw to Rob Gentile.
The attack sputtered in the second half, but according to Knox, that was a function of play calling as much as it was execution.
“In the first half, a lot of our success was in the passing game, but when you’re up 21-0, you don’t want to go throwing the ball all over the place,” Knox said, indicating a move to a conservative game-calling. “You want to be smart. Once you get to the end of the third quarter up that much, you’d be nuts to throw too much… We made enough plays on offense to keep the ball rolling.”
Gentile led the team in yards from scrimmage, with 81 on 16 total touches to go along with his touchdown. Elsewhere, Ke’Shawn Williams finished with three receptions for 32 yards before going down with an upper-body injury, and Andrew Gwynn tallied 20 yards on eight carries.
Roman scored on a late four-yard run by Marquise Cooper, but SCH recovered the onside kick and took a knee to end the game.
“We can play with anyone,” Knox said. “We learned that when you just drop a notch in the execution, it can go from really good to really bad. When we execute, we can be a pretty darn good football team.”