Joe Hofmann Notes Column: High School Football’s Most Unforgettable Seasons (Part 2)

Three Morris teams conquered Giants Stadium in 2009 – including a team with someone who was barely recruited by a D-1 school but worked his way onto a scholarship at Rutgers and a long NFL career. 

On Friday night, future NFLer Michael Burton of West Morris had himself quite a night in leading the Wolfpack to a 28-19 victory over Passaic Valley. Burton rushed for 158 yards and threw a halfback option touchdown pass to Tom Cabarle. 

As I recall it, Burton also rushed for a touchdown of at least 40-50 yards that was called back by a holding penalty well behind him on his run. 

What a way to end a stellar career at West Morris.

Some interesting items regarding Burton: 1. He was my Player of the Year for the Daily Record in 2009. The next year? It was Cabarle. 2. Interestingly, coming into this game, Burton was only being recruited by Monmouth and Lehigh. He would later walk-on at Rutgers and now plays for the Browns. He has been in the NFL for 12 years. 3. Late in the Passaic Valley game, coaches told Burton to take a knee and he wanted one more carry, so he scored a touchdown, in effect ending his brilliant career.

The next morning at Giants Stadium, Roxbury beat East Orange, 14-6, as Ryan Roumes made the strip-sack-fumble recovery heard ‘round the world. The current Gaels coach nailed East Orange QB Justin Laroda, forced a fumble and recovered it at the Roxbury 1 with just 16 seconds remaining. It’s not every day that you can say you made the biggest play in school history, but Roumes can make that claim. 

The win gave Gaels coach Cosmo Lorusso his first title at Roxbury (his second would come in 2012, see below). He also won in 1999 and 2000 at Pequannock (the 2000 one was supposed to be a rebuilding one). It takes good coaching to win one or two at one school but great coaching to win sectional titles at two different schools. If you’re talking about Morris County’s all-time elite coaches, you’d better include Lorusso. 

Later that night, in a snowstorm, Mountain Lakes put on a Wing-T clinic and overwhelmed Run and Shoot Butler, 48-7. How bad did it get? Coach Doug Wilkins’ team had a 35-point third-quarter lead that meant that there was a running clock for most of the second half. Amazingly, the Herd was only able to beat Jim Matsakis’ Butler team five weeks earlier, 14-7. Mountain Lakes rushed 50 times for 376 yards and led 21-0 after one quarter. RB Austin DeMarco rushed for 129 yards and three first-half TDs for the Herd’s 25th straight win.

Trivia time: This would be the final high school game ever played in Giants Stadium.

2012

Three Morris schools won state championships – all at Kean.

The most unlikely was Kevin White’s Kinnelon club, which won the first three state playoff games in school history, all of them on the road. What made the 26-14 win over New Milford unique was that the Run and Shoot Colts built a 26-0 midway through the second quarter, causing White to joke after the game that the clock seemed to creep along for the rest of the morning. QB Sean Robbins was simply masterful, rushing 27 times for 118 yards and a TD and going 13 for 21 passing for 232 yards and a TD. Kinnelon’s D had five INTs, including two by Sean Walsh. 

Interesting tidbit about White, a very engaging coach: He was a Wing-T guy all the way back to his days as an assistant at St. Joe-Montvale. He was an easy choice for me for Daily Record Coach of the Year. I asked him if he’d found the secret to winning football after seven rough years leading the Colts. So Kevin, was Kinnelon a contender for 2013? He quickly swatted the question away. “It’s the Johnny’s and the Joe’s, not the Xs and the Os,” he said. In other words, the talent pool was running dry (and it was!). Kinnelon was 4-6 the following year.

Chris Kubik, another all-time great Morris County coach, saw his Madison team extend its dynasty to three sectional championships and 37 straight wins by putting up a No Trespassing sign in the end zone on the way to a 13-0 win over Mountain Lakes at Kean. LB Matt McDonald had 12 tackles and DE Nick Haboj had eight tackles and two sacks in stopping a Herd offense that averaged over 35 points per game. Madison’s Rutgers-bound RB Justin Goodwin was 16 for 138 rushing and lofted a 20-yard touchdown pass on a halfback option to Joey Geyer.

Roxbury’s defense and running game (and powerful OLine) led the Gaels to a 14-6 victory over highly regarded (and a tad overrated) Pascack Valley, which came into the game ranked 15th or so by the Star-Ledger. Roxbury RB Joe Garafolo rushed for TD runs of 95 and 15 yards. The defense came up big midway in the fourth quarter when PV fumbled at the Roxbury 2 with 7:43 left in the game and Donald Panciello pounced on it. It would turn out to be the final time PV had the ball all year as Roxbury strung together five straight first downs to end the game. The Gaels got a first down when Pascack’s defensive line, incredibly, jumped offsides on a fourth-and-4 with three minutes left to give Roxbury a first down at the enemy 31. The Gaels line was dominant all year, with Kyle Adams, John Magi, Shaun Spitzer, Chris Rubinetti, and Brian Kuhn bullying defenders all season.

PV had a heralded passing game that year and Roxbury coach Cosmo Lorusso credited passing-oriented NJAC division foes Par Hills and Randolph for preparing the Gaels. Lorusso noticed on film that all season long, even in the playoffs, Pascack’s opponents never laid as much as a finger on their receivers and employed soft zones. So he had the Gaels defensive backs get physical with the receivers in an effort to upset their timing routes. The ploy worked beautifully. 

Meanwhile, West Morris blew out neighboring Warren Hills at Rutgers, 35-7. The talk before the game was how, in the previous meeting between the two schools, Warren Hills scored a shocking 21-14 win at West Morris in 2000. (That West Morris team was most certainly better than some so-so Wolfpack teams that would win state championships, by the way). This time, Warren Hills was a Cinderella story that was aiming to become the first school to have ever entered a sectional championship game with a sub.500 record. But the Streaks’ hopes were dashed in the very first quarter, when the Wolfpack accumulated 212 yards on 12 plays, with the big play a 73-yard TD from QB John Gutowski to TE Tyler Amandos. Kevin Hennelly’s team had 335 yards rushing with Austin Roland (173 yards, 3 TDs) leading the way. The Wolfpack finished the season 8-4 but won seven of their last nine games to capture their seventh title.   

1989

The season featured two undefeated Morris teams playing in a sectional final, which doesn’t happen too often. Host Randolph, in the midst of its historic winning streak, beat Morris Hills in workmanlike fashion, 22-7. It was the Rams fourth straight title and 39th straight win. What was special about this one? Two things: The team lost starting QB Mike Groh (there’s a chance you’ll be reading about him in this five-part series at some point) in midseason and HB Tony Williams switched to QB. I’m genuinely curious: Is there a Morris-Sussex sectional champion that has won a title with the backup at QB? I’ve been doing this for 42 years and I honestly cannot think of any other. Second notable thing about this game: Legendary 66-year-old Randolph coach John Bauer, Sr. revealed after the game that he might well have hung it up if his team had lost. He’d been going through three-day-a-week kidney dialysis treatments during the season after collapsing at a Giants practice the previous summer.

Back in that era, you could always count on Sussex County’s Pope John and Lenape Valley making their presence felt come state championship time and they both did this season.

Lenape Valley beat River Dell, 28-0, behind the running of Mike Yanavok (63-yard touchdown run), who was only the second back in Patriot history to go over 1,000 yards in a season. (1986 Kevin Pearson was the first back in 1986). Lenape coach Don Smolyn, truly a great coach, believed in the balance of the Wing T. So if you key on A, B will beat you. Focus on B, and C will beat you. That’s why, in Lenape’s highly successful run, they rarely had an All-Area type of back, though they had plenty of good ones. It’s hard to justify putting a kid with 800 or so yards on an All-Area team when there are kids with literally twice the yards. That’s just the way it is. Another thing with Smolyn: He truly believed in his program, from the grade-school kids in town all the way up the varsity Patriots. He used to meet with the eighth-grade teams and sell them on winning a state championship for Lenape Valley when they became seniors at the school. Very cool stuff, there, why he is an all-time great.

Another all-time great, Pope John’s Vic Paternostro, saw his team fight off scrappy Bayley-Ellard and win Parochial Group II, 35-18. The Lions were up at half, 15-8, before Vic and his coaches figured things out at halftime and scored three TDs down the stretch.  Brandon Mann had three TDs. 

1997

Morristown’s Stewart Winston was one of the best option quarterbacks I ever witnessed, but West Morris had him bottled up for 48 minutes. In OT, Winston scored a 22-yard keeper, which was the decisive play in a 6-0 Colonials victory that concluded the season with a sectional championship.

It was a defensive classic between two Iron Division teams. West Morris won the season-opening game between the two teams, 21-6, and it didn’t appear as though Morristown coach John Porcelli’s club had what it took to win a section at that point. In a highly-emotional game (you couldn’t park within a mile of West Morris for this Saturday afternoon game), Colonials RB Ahmad Hagler cried tears of joy afterwards. The usually affable Porcelli was too choked up to speak with reporters afterwards and needed a moment to get it together. The Wolfpack had a shot to win it in the fourth quarter but Morristown’s Jeff Dirmann broke through the line and blocked Wolfpack PK Kris Grundy’s 21-yard field goal. It was a heartbreaking ending to West Morris coach Kevin Hennelly’s season, but he’d return to many championship games in the future.

Over in Butler, Bulldogs QB Scott Brown concluded his career with 397 yards passing (3,365 for the season) and four TD passes (a then-state record 39, breaking Butler great Dan Madine’s mark of 38) as coach Bob Jones’ team overwhelmed Mountain Lakes, 30-7. Doug Wilkins’ Herd took a 7-0 lead when Carlton Holbig returned a fumble return for a touchdown, but the Butler passing game was too great and the program won its fourth straight section. Another amazing season ended that day and it was WR Mike O’Brien, who caught an incredible 21 passes that day, giving him 111 receptions for 1,689 yards for the season. I remember bringing up Brown and O’Brien at the All-State meeting a few days later, and people thought I was lying about their incredible numbers. Then, someone chimed in, “Yeah, but it’s Group I!” As if that mattered. Cmon man!

Pope John forfeited three games and finished 4-5 in 1994, so the Lions took out their venom on anyone in their way the following two seasons. This year, they won their 29th straight game and second straight title in Parochial Group II when they blew out DePaul, 44-13. RB Hank Trogani, one of the best backs they ever had, rushed for 313 yards and four TDs, giving him a state-leading 36 TDs and 220 points for the year. DePaul coach Joe Lennon had been watching Pope John for years and said after the game that Trogani was the best back Vic had ever had.   

1976

The season marked the end of a dynasty in Mountain Lakes … the Wood dynasty. Ed Wood was the fifth brother of his family to play for the Herd and he went out in style with two kickoff returns for touchdowns and a touchdown running to lift Doug Wilkins’ team to a 24-14 victory over Clifford Scott. Wood was 17 for 103 yards rushing, plus all of that running on the kickoffs. It was a great way for the family to go out. Is five brothers playing for one school a Morris-Sussex record? 

Sparta won its first-ever sectional crown when it drove all the way to Tenafly and scored a 34-7 win, thanks to the running of Ernie Longston and Doug Moran, both of whom rushed for two TDs each. An interesting item is that Sparta was good that year but only third best in the long-defunct Skyline Conference behind DePaul and Butler.

1995

West Morris put one of the best defenses in Morris County history on the field for legend Pete Piccirillo. The Wolfpack beat Nutley, 21-0, posting its seventh shutout of the year. Despite playing in the terrific IHC-Iron Division (Knolls, Roxbury, Morristown, etc), the team allowed just 39 points all year. The best defender on the field against Nutley was Ryan Taggart – all 5-8, 140 pounds of him. All he did was have two interceptions, deflect a would-be touchdown pass, force a Nutley receiver to drop a pass in the end zone, and force a fumble. West Morris ran Piccirillo’s Wing-T very well, but it was what Pic did on the game’s first drive that inspired the Wolfpack. All week long, he told his team that it could move the ball on the Essex school, so, on fourth-and-1 at West Morris’ own 34, he went for it, the Wolfpack got the first down and soon scored, setting the tone for what was a big day for West Morris.

Over at Giants Stadium, Montclair came in with the big reputation but was completely outplayed by a hungry Morris Knolls club that featured backs Bryan Pojanowski (15 for 117), Dave Benfatti (22 for 107) and QB Doug Maritato (4 for 45) constantly running into the Mounties secondary in a 16-7 win, coach Bill Regan’s second of three in a row. 

Butler finished the 1995 season with a so-so 6-5 record – but coach Bob Jones’ Bulldogs wound up being sectional champions regardless. Jones brought the Run and Shoot to Butler one year earlier. QB Scott Brown wasn’t exactly Record-Setting Scott Brown yet, but the Bulldogs didn’t need big numbers out of him in winning the championship on this day, thanks to a terrific defensive performance. Madison, which beat Butler just one month earlier, 29-18, was limited to just three first downs all game. 

Sidebar to Butler (4-4 at the cutoff) winning: A week or so earlier, I wrote a column saying that it was totally unfair that 6-2 Whippany Park didn’t get in (and I’ll go to my grave still saying that it was not right). My column dealt with the whole power point issue. Back then, Butler played in the NHC-Suburban against some Group II and Group III schools. So if the Bulldogs were decent and beat some of those schools, they’d get a bushel of power points playing bigger schools (and they did). Whippany, meanwhile, was locked in the Group I-laden CHC. Beating Group I schools barely moved the needle as far as power points were concerned. So a Butler had a clear-cut advantage over a Whippany (or any other CHC school) coming into each and every season. 

The Bulldogs did win the section, but the power-point system was faulty because it demanded that a 6-2 school like Whippany was required to go 7-1 (or better) to qualify for the playoffs. I got a letter from a Butler whacko after the Bulldogs won it, demanding my job! 

Pope John went down to Marist and scored a 20-15 victory with not one, but two Pope John runners sharing the workload (unlike most Vic Paternostro-coached teams). Hank Trogani (17 for 123) and Chan Chey (20-97) were double trouble for Marist’s defense. The state title was Vic’s eighth in10 years. One year earlier, Pope John had to forfeit three games for using ineligible players and the team finished 4-5. Marist, with Pope John out of the way, was the Parochial Group II champion that year, so this was Vic’s indirect way of declaring Marist’s title fraudulent.

NEXT WEEK Sparta runs its way to a repeat.