Let the second guessing begin

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How does a team that looks unstoppable one half blow a 24-7 lead at halftime?

‘They came back on offense and shoved it down our throat,’ Pacifica Coach Guy Gardner said. ‘That was the start.’

Most of the ‘shoving’ was done by Cypress’ Ryan Saumur, who had three rushing touchdowns, all in the second half. He also added a fourth touchdown on a fumble return with 3:18 left in the game to give Cypress a 36-30 win in Friday’s Southern Section Southern Division championship game at Cerritos College.

‘If I had to do it all over again, the play where we fumble, and the guy goes 300 yards for a touchdown, maybe we run the ball instead of running play action. But that’s our game,’ he added. ‘And the odds of fumbling and having someone return it 85 yards for a touchdown are not very high. It’s just got away.

Following Saumur’s go-ahead touchdown, Pacifica got into position to tie the score and potentially win it with an extra point. But the Mariners should have never been in that position to begin with, Gardner said.

‘We can look at it and say, ‘yeah, we kind of bungled those last three or four plays,’ but to put ourselves in a position to have to do that wasn’t ideal,’ he said.

‘There’s going to be a bunch of second-guessing. I’m going to do that to myself all the time. I just hope ... the guys keep their heads up. We went through some pretty good adversity and for us to get here was pretty special unto itself.’

- Jaime Cardenas