GNC TITLE IS THERE TO BE WON

WEEK 8 FOOTBALL

Raiders, Indians both rolling going into clash

Not only will the Cheese Grater traveling trophy be up for grabs Friday, so will the Great Northern Conference football championship trophy when the Medford Raiders meet the Mosinee Indians in a 7 p.m. kickoff in Mosinee.

It didn’t take long for most outsiders to peg this one as the GNC’s game of the year as the 2022 season has unfolded.

But for the teams, it’s been a weekto- week mission to keep it that way.

“It is an exciting week, but it’s important to remember that in football every game is important, every week,” Medford head coach Ted Wilson said Monday. “Whether or not you’re going to win a championship is riding on the week. You have to expect in this day and age that you’re going to have to go undefeated to win a conference championship. Yes it’s a big week. Yes Mosinee is a great team, extremely explosive. They have great skill-set players in (Keagan) Jirschele and (Davin) Stoffel and the quarterback (Trevor Obremski) is a good athlete also.

“We have to concentrate on the things we can control, which at the moment isn’t the score and the hype or any of that stuff,” Wilson added. “We have to concentrate on trying to get better, taking our best step forward and trying to become a better team Friday than we are today.”

Both teams are 5-0 in the GNC. Medford is 6-1 overall and has won six straight since a 32-8 season-opening loss at New Richmond. Mosinee tied Stratford 20-20 in a weather-shortened game in week one and lost 48-38 to still-undefeated Racine St. Catherine’s in week two in a game played at Lomira.

Friday’s winner is assured of at least a share of the GNC title with one game left. Medford hosts Antigo (1-4, 2-5) next week, while Mosinee is at Merrill (3-2, 4-3).

Through five weeks, no one in the GNC has been able to stop either team’s offense.

While there may be a perception that this game will pit Medford’s running attack versus Mosinee’s passing game, that’s probably not entirely true. Both teams are relatively balanced as Medford’s passing game behind senior quarterback Logan Baumgartner has started to click the past three weeks, while Mosinee has added some rushing wrinkles this year under new head coach Kyle Stoffel.

“Offensively when they do run the ball, they’re trying to run some midline/ veer stuff. They have a little triple option look,” Wilson said. “They are running the quarterback more than they were in the past. It does appear to be that their big plays are coming out of the passing game. They are going to throw it quite a bit against us. They get athletes in space. That’s a wise choice for them.”

In Mosinee’s 41-14 win over Medford in week eight last year, the Indians gained 327 yards through the air with the speedy Jirschele catching 11 passes for 118 yards and the bigger Stoffel grabbing eight passes for 89 yards. They’ll be key targets again Friday. Statistics posted by WisSports.net show Stoffel with 28 catches for 588 yards and 11 touchdowns this year, and Jirschele with 28 catches for 586 yards and five scores. A handful of others have at least five catches as well.

The triggerman, however, is different. Last year, Trevor Garski completed 27 of 35 passes in the win over Medford. This year, it will be Obremski, a 6-2, 205-pound junior, doing the throwing. He’s thrown for 1,540 yards and 22 touchdowns while completing 84 of his 133 passes (63%).

“Garski was pretty much a pure pocket passer with very good accuracy, a good arm,” Wilson said. “Obremski has a very strong arm. I would say he’s not quite as accurate, but he’s a lot more athletic. If he gets out into the open field he can hurt you. They’ve been running him and he looks good running it.”

Obremski and Jirschele are the team’s leading rushers with 330 and 326 yards respectively. Jirschele doesn’t run it a lot, but he averages 14.8 yards per carry when he does.

No doubt, it’s going to be a team effort for Medford to keep Mosinee in check.

“It’s a team-wide thing,” Wilson said. “Based on what they’re trying to do it comes down to coverage, but it also comes down to putting pressure on the quarterback and playing good sound defense all the way around and tackling in the open field. They’re going to get some completions. That’s just the way it is. If they throw it 40 times, and I’m not saying they’re going to, they’re going to get some completions.”

Medford comes in averaging about 270 rushing yards per game behind Tukker Schreiner (802 yards) and Peyton Gilles (664 yards) and a physical group of offensive linemen and blocking backs that have been rolling since the New Richmond loss. Medford has at least 345 rushing yards in four of its last six games and field position and running clock were key reasons why the Raiders didn’t get that high in wins over Merrill and Ashland.

Baumgartner has passed for more than 100 yards in every game but the opener and, with teams playing the run first, big plays have started to come from receivers like Tucker Kraemer and Charlie Kleist, among others.

The Raiders have scored 62 and 66 points in their last two games against struggling teams from Hayward and Rhinelander. The Indians, however, will be a much different beast.

“The Stoffel kid is really good,” Wilson said. “He’s a returning all-conference linebacker. Excellent player. He has a scholarship (at South Dakota State) for a reason. In their defensive backfield they have a bunch of those wide receivers. They’re very strong. They’re a good team. I’m 100% sure they haven’t seen a running game quite like ours, but we’ll find out. That’s what we’ll find out on Friday.”

In other games

There’s another big contest Friday taking place in eight-player football in Thorp, where 5-1 Gilman visits the 6-0 Cardinals in the Pirates’ second game pitting top-10 ranked teams in a threeweek span.

Ninth-ranked Gilman lost the first one 30-14 to now third-ranked Owen-Withee. The Pirates will need to win at fifth-ranked Thorp to hold on to hope of a Central Wisconsin East championship share. Thorp visits Owen-Withee (3-0, 6-0) on Oct. 13 with visions of that game being for all the marbles.

A win would put Gilman in great shape to earn a spot in the WIAA’s 16team eight-player post-season tournament. A loss could make things dicey because Gilman may fall into a large pool of two-loss teams where tiebreakers could come into play. Overall record is the top factor in determining that playoff field.

Thorp, which is in its second year of eight-man play, hasn’t really been challenged so far this fall and seems to be picking up steam with wins of 65-0 over Greenwood and 70-0 over 4-2 Athens in the last two weeks. The Cardinals beat the top two teams in the Central Wisconsin West to start the year, beating Prairie Farm 52-14 and McDonell Central 50-27.

Offensively, the Cardinals have a lot of weapons and are pretty run-pass balanced. Senior Aiden Rosemeyer is an outstanding athlete at quarterback and is a dual threat having run for nearly 300 yards and over 9 yards per carry and having thrown for 843 yards and 13 touchdowns.

The top rusher is Logan Hanson, who is averaging 15.7 yards per carry, according to WisSports.net statistics. He has 975 yards and 16 touchdowns on just 62 carries. He had 259 yards on 18 carries and four touchdowns against McDonell.

“Offensively they have weapons all over the field and they use the whole field,” Gilman head coach Robin Rosemeyer said. “It starts with (Aiden) Rosemeyer at quarterback. He throws such a good ball. He’s very athletic back there. He’s going to be hard to sack and when he gets out of the pocket, he’s very accurate on the run. Hanson gets a lot of yards per carry.”

Coach Rosemeyer said one thing Thorp’s film has shown is a tendency to get outside to create its big plays. Whether it’s run plays, pass plays in the flat or deeper fades, the Cardinals like to use their speed to get outside. Gilman’s task defensively is to try to keep more of the game played inside the numbers and hashmarks.

“Just having leverage this week is going to be a big deal and making Hanson stutter step once instead of getting a full head of steam because he’s a big kid, he’s fast,” Rosemeyer said. “Making tackles this week is going to huge because they are going to spread us out and put us in some one-on-one situations. We have to flow well to the ball laterally this week.”

Defensively, Thorp has shut out four straight opponents, with Athens being the best of that bunch. The challenge there Rosemeyer said is simply the combination of size and speed Thorp can put on the field with its eight players.

“They load the box on people,” he said. “They have size up front and they have a lot of speed in their defensive backfield so they can cover and don’t give up many big plays that way either.”

  It’s homecoming week for the Rib Lake-Prentice Hawks, who will host Kingdom Prep Lutheran of Wauwatosa Friday at 5 p.m. in Rib Lake.

The teams met in last year’s season opener, which was won by the Wolfpack 12-0 for the fledgling program’s first varsity win. They were 3-1 to start this year, but have lost the last three weeks by large margins and have fallen to 3-4. One of Kingdom’s early wins was against Rib Lake-Prentice’s Lakeland Conference rival Webster. The Wolfpack won 20-0 in a game played at Merrill on Sept. 2. They’ve lost in recent weeks to Loyal and Stevens Point Pacelli.

“It looks like a game we can be competitive in, if we avoid some mistakes and keep our mentality up,” Hawks’ cohead coach Jonah Campbell said. “If we can make the game competitive longer, the guys will believe and we can play to the end. We did it against Webster and Hurley.”