Cardinal Gibbons’ defense holds the line against Cocoa to secure third state title

All season long, the strength of an already strong Cardinal Gibbons defense was its line.

On Thursday night, when coach Matt DuBuc needed them most, the Chiefs defensive linemen showed up in a big way.

From the opening play to the final play, Broc Weaver, Ahmad Moten, Christopher Williams, Mason Thomas, Jose Olivier and Greg Otten, turned up the heat on Cocoa quarterback Davin Wydner all night long to the tune of seven sacks and countless quarterback pressures.

Thus on a night where the Gibbons offense struggled to put points on the scoreboard, it played a key role in the Chiefs notching a third state championship when they hung on to knock off Cocoa 21-19 in the Class 4A state championship game at DRV PNK Stadium in Fort Lauderdale.

“It’s been like that all year with this group,” DuBuc said. “All year they’ve been doing this so tonight was nothing new.”

And while it was clearly another group effort, one player stood out among the rest. That came in the form of junior defensive end Broc Weaver.

Having not recorded a single sack all season long, Weaver went crazy, recording four of the seven sacks.

All four came in the first half including a key sack on the final play of the first half when the Tigers had made it down to the Gibbons 12 with seven seconds left.

“I didn’t even imagine this could happen and I’m kind of speechless right now,” Weaver said. “I wasn’t even sure if I was going to start tonight and in fact was not in there when the game started. The plan was to switch out and find who was really popping up. Once I got in there and started picking up sacks, I just kept going.”

Also picking up sacks were Thomas and Olivier, who split one with Williams. Linebacker Tray Brown came through with the most crucial one when he forced Wydner to get rid of the ball on third down on the final drive which led to an intentional grounding call.

That left the Tigers in a fourth-and-long and an incomplete pass ended the game.

“It all starts with him right here,” said Thomas, an Iowa State commit, pointing to Moten. “Because with him blowing up everything in the middle, that’s what starts creating other lanes and other opportunities for the rest of us. We had a goal to play as a unit tonight, not let him (Wydner) get outside of the pocket, try and contain him and keep him inside. We wanted to control the line of scrimmage and make him not leave the pocket. The goal was to do whatever we had to do to keep him in the pocket and make it feel uncomfortable.”

Uncomfortable indeed.

Even when they weren’t getting to Wydner to sack him, they were all over him with quarterback pressures, 10 of them to be exact.

“Going into the game it was just a matter of making sure we bull rushed all game to try and get pressure on the quarterback,” said Moten, a 6-4, 290-pound senior who has multiple FBS offers but will wait until February to make his decision. “We knew back in the spring that we had something special with this group and how bout Broc out there tonight, we’ve been looking for something like this out of him all season and he picked a great time to do it tonight. We knew coming in I was going to get double teamed a lot so he would be single blocked and thought he might be able to step up and have a big game which he did.”

Olivier said: “Everything is about leadership and hard work. All of the workouts on the beach in the offseason and stuff like that, all of it paid off tonight. We felt their offensive lineman were a little slow so we used our speed and quickness to beat them off the line, pin our ears back and go get’em.”