Wolverines run by Griswold in 52-0 win

East Mills got three touchdown passes from Michael Schafer and the defense pitched its first shutout of the season in a 52-0 victory over Griswold Friday in Eight-man football Friday in Griswold.

The Wolverines (3-1) scored the game’s first 45 points, attempted just one pass after intermission and played the second half almost exclusively with their junior varsity.

“Defensively I thought Claude (Lang) had a really good game plan for what Griswold does and the obviously the kids executed it,” said East Mills co-head coach Kevin Schafer. “We did a really good job of stopping their run game, which is their bread and butter, and forcing them to pass. They like to pass when they want to and we forced to pass when they didn’t want to. It was a group effort. I thought our kids rallied to the ball better than we have all season.”

Quarterback Michael Schafer had a hand in four touchdowns for East Mills, throwing for 190 yards on 14-of-19 passing with touchdown tosses to Nic Duysen, Davis McGrew and Nolan Smiley, and running for a fourth.

“Defensively they kind of surprised us. They had been running a defense similar to us so we practice all week for that and they came in and did something different. Luckily our kids were able to transition and we dinked and dunked. A lot of teams are trying to take (Daniel) Duysen away and so we had to have other kids step up. Davis McGrew caught a few passes but all of them did a good job. We were patient when we didn’t get the big plays and used our short passing game.”

East Mills rushed for 87 yards on 26 carries. For Coach Schafer, who admits his team has struggled to run this ball this year, it was just enough to keep the Tigers honest defensively.

“If teams drop six guys in to coverage, and we’ve seen that, we’re going to run the ball more,” Schafer said. “We see a lot of teams running six guys in zone so we have to run the ball some so they brings those guys up to the line of scrimmage. We ran some power running game in the second and that was good for us.”

Duysen and Jackson Wray each wrapped up six tackles to lead the defense.