Raiders, Pirates can clinch title shares in second-to-last week
WEEK 8 FOOTBALL
Medford head football coach Ted Wilson put it correctly this week, saying conference championships are not won in a single week, but they are won over the course of several weeks.
Week-to-week success has put both Taylor County varsity teams on the verge of clinching title shares on Friday in next-to-last games of the regular season that have been highly-anticipated by their respective fan bases.
It’s homecoming week in Medford where the Raiders battle what has become, to many, the program’s biggest arch-rival Mosinee in a matchup of teams that are both carrying six-game winning streaks, are 5-0 in the GNC and 6-1 overall. In Gilman, a three-game homestand for the top-ranked Pirates ends with a heavyweight eight-player matchup with fifth-ranked Thorp, both of whom are 3-0 in the Central Wisconsin Conference-East and looking to solidify their spots in that division’s 16-team WIAA playoff field.
Both games kick off at 7 p.m. Friday. “When you’re trying to win conference championships every week is a big week,” Wilson said Tuesday. “You can’t get to the big week or the big game without winning every other game. There are no off weeks. I get the hoopla surrounding it and it’s homecoming and all of that other stuff. But you have to take care of business every week in order to quoteunquote get to the big game. In my mind every game is important and no game is necessarily more important than any other game.”
Mosinee/Medford
Mosinee is the two-time defending GNC champion and still has several returning players from the 2022 squad that won a 42-28 shootout over the Raiders at Mosinee at this same point in last season.
The Indians’ top skill players to watch are quarterback Gavin Obremski, running back Wyatt Harris and the tremendously quick Keagan Jirschele at receiver, who has been trouble for Mosinee’s opponents defensively and on special teams, where he has three punt return touchdowns and one kickoff return touchdown.
“They have a very dynamic, explosive offense, very similar to New Richmond and Onalaska with their explosiveness and the fact that they’re capable of scoring from anywhere on the field,” Wilson said. “We definitely have our work cut out for us trying to figure out how to stop their multitude of weapons. That starts with Jirschele, but the Harris kid at running back is really good and Obremski is a really good athlete also. They’ve got a lot of kids there and we’ll have our work cut out for us.
“Offensively we have to try to control the ball, control the game, control the clock. That will help.”
Mosinee’s offense operates closest to a 50-50 run-pass balance than any team the Raiders will see in the regular season. Onalaska was certainly the one team that passes more than runs. That balance Wilson said is part of the challenge in defending the Indians, who have gotten 827 passing yards from Obremski, 502 rushing yards from Harris and 471 receiving yards and 167 rushing yards from Jirschele.
“They’re going to run three or four wides,” Wilson said. “They do play a little bit with a tight end, but it’s mostly single back with the spread. They run a little bit of option off it. They’ve done that a little bit more of that this year, run the option and run the quarterback a little bit. Most of their game is short passes and trying to hit the long one. They are much closer to a 50-50 run/pass split. If you look at their stats it’s almost exactly 50% running yards and 50% passing. I would say last year they were more like 60-40 pass. This year they have run the ball better and have been more inclined to run the ball than they did last year.”
Obremski had the biggest play in last year’s game, an 83-yard touchdown run right before the half that broke a 14-14 tie and put the Indians ahead for good.
Up front on offense and defense, Mosinee’s returning all-conference linemen are junior Jackson Lindell and senior Teryn Walls and senior Andrew Nevienski, a member of last fall’s secondteam defense, is back at nose tackle and Harris is a strong linebacker.
“They have a good front seven,” Wilson said. “They have a couple of all-conference returners there. Wyatt Harris is a good player. Their d-backs include Jirschele. A lot of the kids that are dynamic on offense are on defense as well. With the Nevienski kid at nose, their defensive line is pretty tough, pretty stout. We’re going to have to move our feet and block to the whistle. The holes are not going to be as big as they were the last couple of weeks and that’s OK. We need to find a way to get it done and we will. Our kids will work and grind away at them.”
Jirschele has returned punts for scores the last two weeks, a 65-yarder against Rhinelander and a 96-yarder this past week against Antigo.
“Obviously you try not to kick it to him,” Wilson said. “You’re going to try to kick it away from him, but he’s also very fast. He’s a dynamic runner. He covers a lot of ground to be able to go get punts. They also do a very good job of setting up a wall punt return. We have to take that into account and our kids need to recognize where the wall is going and try to understand that’s where they’re trying to run the punt return to. He’s very, very dangerous. When he gets the ball in his hands in the open field, he is a playmaker.”
Since a penalty-filled GNC opener at winless Merrill Sept. 1 that Medford won 12-0, the Raiders have picked up a lot of momentum in league play, as they expected to do with their talented squad that entered the season with little varsity experience. The Raiders now average 346 rushing yards per game, have shown the ability to hit on some passing plays to give defenses something to think about and they’ve allowed just one touchdown defensively when it mattered in five GNC games.
“We have to really take it week by week and it just happens that this week we’re both undefeated,” Wilson said. “They’re really good and our kids just need to concentrate on the things they can control, which is to get better every day and to work on being a better football player tomorrow than they are today.”
Thorp/Gilman
In Gilman, the Pirates will face the team it supplanted atop the state’s eightplayer rankings early in the season.
While Gilman is unbeaten at 6-0, including a 3-0 mark in conference, the Cardinals come in with an early-season, a tough 30-20 defeat at McDonell Central in Week 2. The Macks are undefeated and ranked second in the state behind Gilman.
Thorp’s offense is geared around the talents of senior quarterback Denzel Sutton and senior running back Logan Hanson. Hanson missed a good chunk of the McDonell game but still has 894 yards and 14 touchdowns while averaging 13.3 yards per carry, per WisSports.net statis-tics. He had 212 yards on 28 carries and two touchdowns in Thorp’s 31-30 win over Gilman at this same point in the 2022 season.
Sutton was a wide receiver on last year’s team and caught the game-winning 25-yard touchdown pass with 16 seconds left.
Sutton has run for 602 yards on 46 carries (13.1 yards per attempt) and completed 45 of 77 passes for 1,083 yards and 12 scores.
Keep in mind with these numbers, Thorp has actually only played five games. One win was a forfeit over Greenwood.
“The quarterback is good,” Gilman head coach Robin Rosemeyer said. “He throws a good ball. He’s fast. He’s a tough runner and then you have Hanson back there who’s a really physical runner with speed. They both bring the same element with speed and toughness.
“They’re capable of throwing the ball,” he added. “They have fast receivers on the outside so they really try to spread you out and put you in some spots. They thrive on the big play, which is kind of the way it is with all good eightman teams. Their speed allows them to get big plays. That’s a concern in really eliminating that.”
This figures to be a good matchup of speed against speed. Thorp had a size advantage with its offensive line, but Gilman’s defensive line might be quicker.
A couple of big plays loomed large in last year’s thriller. Hanson had an early 66-yard touchdown run. The Cardinals hit on a 61-yard completion on their 97yard game-winning drive in the final moments to set up the final pass from Aiden Rosemeyer to Sutton.
“The first guy making the tackle is going to be a big deal Friday night and having good leverage when they want to do their stuff to the outside or run their option,” Robin Rosemeyer said. “They’ll run a little bit of option out of that spread when Hanson wants to get wide. With good leverage we can get good angles to our tackles.”
Rosemeyer expects Thorp will load the box trying to take away Gilman’s run game. That won’t stop the Pirates from wanting to establish the run behind senior Troy Duellman (523 yards and 13 touchdowns on just 44 carries) and junior quarterback Dawson Krizan (402 yards on just 32 carries).
“They loaded it last year, and we still had some success running against it,” Rosemeyer said. “I think it’s going to be the same thing but then we have to be able to spread them out too and use some of our playmakers in a different way.”
Only one of Gilman’s games thus far has been in doubt much beyond the first quarter. That was a 28-6 win over Owen-Withee two weeks ago. The Pirates have had great success with defense and special teams giving them good field position in most of their games, which makes their modest offensive numbers deceiving.
Owen-Withee is hoping for a Thorp win and then will hope to beat Thorp next week to create a three-way tie atop the league standings. Gilman and Thorp, of course, would prefer to win out and win it all for themselves.
“Thorp is in a spot where maybe it can afford one more loss to make the playoffs,” Rosemeyer said. “They still have Owen-Withee next week. They’re in a spot where they can’t lose twice. They’re going to bring it and we have to be able to match that intensity and urgency that they’re going to bring. Anytime you can play for a piece of the conference championship at your place you obviously expect your kids to play well and play hard and hopefully we can do that Friday night. It will definitely be a good challenge.”
Evan Wilkins gets behind a block from Braxton Weissmiller and converts a twopoint conversion for Medford during Friday’s 40-8 win at Rhinelander.BOB MAINHARDT/NORTHWOODS RIVER NEWS
