Phoenix rises out of ashes

Young quarterback leads comeback win over Paint Branch

Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo laurie dewitt⁄the gazette Paint Branch’s Brandon Saunders (left) stops Springbrook’s Carlo Galeano (40), but the Panthers couldn’t stop Blue Devils quarterback Phoenix Butler-Poole from leading an improbable, 17-point, fourth-quarter comeback in Springbrook’s 34-31 win Friday in Burtonsville.

‘‘Wildest game I’ve ever been a part of,” Williams said.

The winning coach, Springbrook’s Rob Wendel, was even more succinct.

‘‘We got lucky,” Wendel said.

The performance of Blue Devils quarterback Phoenix Butler-Poole was anything but luck. The sophomore, starting just his fourth varsity game, led a furious comeback from a 17-point deficit. Butler-Poole had played a flawless fourth quarter, engineering two touchdown drives to cut the Panthers lead to three. He would finish 24 of 31 for 287 yards with three touchdowns, all career highs.

But the winning play — well, that was luck.

With the ball at the Paint Branch 26-yard line and just over a minute to play, Butler-Poole appeared to make a fatal mistake. Looking for senior wideout Dom Omatade, whom he’d just hit with an improbable 12-yard, two-handed chest pass several plays earlier, he underthrew the ball by several yards. It headed into the arms of a Panther defender.

‘‘My coach had just told me to throw it to the outside,” Butler-Poole said of his receiver’s go-route. ‘‘But I mean, I don’t know what I was thinking, I threw it to the inside.”

As fate would have it, the placement didn’t matter. The ball bounded off of Paint Branch defender Devin Hayes and propelled higher into the air, seemingly in slow motion. Omatade, who had worked back to the ball simply to try and prevent a game-ending interception, had the ball rebound right into his chest at the two-yard line. From there, he went in unmolested for what would prove to be the winning score.

A former Paint Branch student who played two years of junior varsity ball for the Panthers, Omatade credited a common drill he’d learned as a cornerback for the quick recovery. But did he expect to make the play all along?

‘‘No. I’m going to be honest with you,” he said. ‘‘But when we go to defensive practices, coach [Dwayne] Eddy makes us do tip drills. So if the ball is up in the air, you’ve got to go get it. ... With my good hand-eye coordination, I caught the ball.”

Had Butler-Poole thrown his usual precise deep ball (he completed five passes of 20 yards are more), Omatade was open on his pattern down the right sideline. Hayes did not have safety help, as the Blue Devils had four wide receivers in the formation and Omatade had single-coverage. After running short patterns all night, he’d decided that this was the time to go deep.

‘‘In the first half, second half, third quarter, I’d been going with the wide slant,” Omatade said. ‘‘I’d been doing slants, slants, slants. So I told my coach, let’s go slant and go. So I did.”

After the touchdown and missed extra point, Paint Branch managed to drive to the Springbrook 36, but time expired before they could get into field goal range.

The amazing comeback overshadowed another spectacular performance by the Panther ‘‘triplets” — quarterback Scott Barnes, wide receiver Dayon Arrington and running back James Simmons. Barnes threw for a season-low 147 yards, but found his big-play wideout six times for 115 yards.

Simmons was even busier, as he was the most prominent figure in the game’s first three quarters. He topped 100 yards for the fourth straight week, galloping for a season-best 188 and two touchdowns.

‘‘They’ve got all kinds of weapons,” said Wendel, who runs the Blue Devils defense. ‘‘You try to stop the run, they throw it over your head. You loosen up, Simmons runs all over the place. I was afraid we couldn’t trade punches with them.”

But somehow they did, mostly thanks to a plethora of heroes on the offensive side of the ball. Springbrook’s workhorse, running back Adou Kouadio, scored two second-half touchdowns and gained 159 all-purpose yards, mostly in the second half. Nick Oates, doing double-duty covering Arrington on defense and catching passes on offense, snared eight balls for 98 yards and a touchdown. His most important play, however, was the 22-yard catch and run that preceded the game-winning score.

‘‘This game gives us a lot more confidence because when we lost to Sherwood [33-0 in the opener], we fell in confidence,” Oates said. ‘‘I came into the game having to guard Dayon Arrington who, first play of the game, caught a [27]-yard pass. You have to shake it off and keep playing. ... You can’t give up.”

Springbrook 34, Paint Branch 31

The Blue Devils didn’t. And even more importantly, they now know their young quarterback can be a prime-time leader. Until the Paint Branch game, the Blue Devils had employed a more conservative attack, staying mostly on the ground so as to not force too much responsibility on a sophomore.

But after leading a comeback for the ages in just his fourth game on varsity, Springbrook’s young gun has already proven that his age is nothing but a number.

‘‘I was ready for it,” Butler-Poole said of the rally. ‘‘We all knew we could come back and win it. I was ready to step up to whatever they gave me.”

Note: The game was the second in the 2006 Consortium Cup, annually contested among Blake, Paint Branch and Springbrook. The Blue Devils can wrap up this year’s Cup with a win Friday against Blake, which lost to Paint Branch in the season opener.