The Etiwanda High School football team dropped below .500 Friday night, but that may be the only bad thing that’s happened in its first three games. The Eagles came up short against another Inland Division titan, a 42-36 loss to Norco at Colony High School, but nobody had anything negative to say about either team.
“They’re a semifinal team in our division,” Norco coach Todd Gerhart said of Etiwanda. “I just hope they’re not on our side of the bracket. They gave Vista Murrieta two touchdowns last week, a blocked punt and a fumble, and still barely lost.”
Etiwanda (1-2) opened the season by blowing out a Summit team ranked No. 1 in the Eastern Division, followed with a 31-28 loss to Vista Murrieta on a last-second field goal and led Norco 30-28 at the half before coming up short in a dramatic game against a team that has won multiple CIF-SS Inland Division titles the last five years.
“That’s why we play these teams,” Etiwanda coach Steve Bryce said. “We could have loaded up our preseason schedule with a bunch of cupcakes and gotten chubby thinking we’re great. But we’re going to get better and we already know we can play with these guys.”
The Etiwanda defense is missing its starting middle linebacker and starting safety, perhaps the two biggest hitters on the team. Norco (2-0) exploited the middle of the Eagles defense with a devastating combination running the zone read.
Junior running back Joseph Ajeigbe collected 229 yards and three touchdowns on 35 carries while 6-foot-1, 211-pound quarterback Coltin Gerhart, the coach’s youngest son, rushed for 228 yards and three scores on 23 carries.
Behind a mammoth Norco offensive line, the Cougars successfully kept the ball away from Etiwanda’s high-octane offense in the second half. Eagles quarterback Larry Cutbirth was 21-of-32 passing for 296 yards and a pair of touchdowns with one interception. Receivers Raphael Barr and Jordan Villamin each went over 100 yards, but the Etiwanda offense twice turned the ball over on downs deep in Norco territory in the final 16 minutes of the game.
Norco sandwiched Etiwanda’s first failed fourth-down conversion with clock-milking touchdown drives to take a 42-35 lead with 11:53 to play, the first two-score lead of the game. Cutbirth, who also rushed for 102 yards, including a 50-yard touchdown, was then stopped on a quarterback sneak on fourth-and-1 with 9:29 remaining in the game.
“Our defense just didn’t play like we wanted them to,” Bryce said. “Gerhart is a stud and they just killed us with their offensive line. We assumed that they’d try to keep the ball away from us and they did.”
