Cardinal Gibbons stuns Gulliver Prep with 19-point, second-half comeback in region finals
For two and a half quarters Friday, Gulliver Prep looked exactly like the team that was a preseason favorite to win the Class 4A title. Gulliver dominated the first half of its showdown with defending-champion Cardinal Gibbons, but forgot one thing.
“We didn’t close the gate,” Raiders coach Earl Sims said.
A 19-point third-quarter lead slipped away. The Chiefs rallied all the way back for a 36-33 win in the Region 4-4A championship at Tropical Park in Miami. Gulliver was a quarter and a half of decent football away from returning to the state semifinals for the first time in 13 years and couldn’t finish.
Cardinal Gibbons quarterback Dylan Rizk threw two fourth-quarter interceptions, then became the hero anyway when he scrambled for an 8-yard, game-winning touchdown with 1:16 left to send the Chiefs (9-2) to the 4A semifinals, where they’ll host St. Petersburg Lakewood next Friday with a chance to clinch a return trip to the state championship.
“There’s no quit in these kids and that was pretty obvious out there tonight,” Cardinal Gibbons coach Matt DuBuc said. “Gulliver’s a great team. They were built to win this year. They were built to win the state championship, but they played the defending 4A champs and when you play the defending 4A state champs, you’ve got to play four quarters. We’ve still got a lot of corrections to make because we certainly didn’t play well for the first two and a half quarters, but to be moving on next week is really something after the hole we had dug ourselves.”
Despite three interceptions, Rizk still enjoyed quite a night through the air, completing 24 of 33 passes for 255 yards and one touchdown, but his feet that came through in two clutch moments.
First, he turned a routine scramble into a 67-yard sprint to the end zone down the sideline for Gibbons’ first touchdown of the second half. At the end of the game, he ran in the decisive 8-yard score, shooting up the middle after dropping back to throw.
“It was a designed pass to our tight end, but there was an overhang with [Raiders strong safety D.C. Cannon] and I saw him overcommit to one side, which created a lane up the middle,” Rizk said. “When I saw the lane open up, I just took off for the end zone. What a feeling when I got there.”
The Chiefs started their winning drive at their own 46-yard line with 4:40 left and didn’t throw a single pass to get into the end zone. Karmari Moulton and Willie Reed traded carries all the way downfield on the eight-play drive before Rizk took it the last 8 yards.
“Four out of five of those O-lineman are seniors,” DuBuc said. “They asked me for the ball, they wanted me to put it in their court and that’s exactly what I did.”
One of those seniors is left guard Gabriel Espiniera.
“I was talking to my boys in the huddle at the start of the drive and said, ‘Let’s do this. Let’s go right down the field and finish this,” he said. “We could feel like maybe their defense was getting a little tired and felt like we could move them back on that last drive, and that’s exactly what we did.”
But perhaps the unsung heroes for Gibbons in the second half were the defensive players.
Gulliver quarterback Carson Haggard, who’s orally committed to the Tulane Green Wave, lit up the Chiefs in the first half, completing 14 of 20 passes for 163 yards and four touchdowns, three of those to C.J. Donaldson from 26, 10 and 11 yards as the Raiders (8-2) took a commanding 27-7 lead to the locker room at halftime.
But the Chiefs’ defenders — led by defensive end Mason Thomas, who had two sacks — were relentless, especially the defensive line.
Against constant pressure, Haggard wound up completing only 5 of 14 passes for 32 yards as the Raiders offense managed just two first downs.
After Rizk’s long touchdown run made it 27-14, the Raiders answered with their only big offensive play of the second half, a 25-yard touchdown run up the middle by Sedrick Irvin Jr., just one play after Gulliver linebacker Jayvon Only recovered a Chiefs fumble.
Down 33-14 with 8:02 left in the third, the Chiefs didn’t buckle, They immediately charged right back as Rizk led them on a quick six-play, 80-yard drive, finding Davon Kiser wide open down the sideline for a 38-yard touchdown to make it 33-21. After the Gibbons defense forced a quick Gulliver three-and-out, Moulton took the ball on the first play after the punt and bolted 57 yards for a score. The Chiefs even tried a little trickery as they came out in the swinging gate formation for a two-point conversion and got it.
Just like that, it was 33-29 and Gulliver was a different team.
While the offense struggled, Gulliver’s defense did come through with two late interceptions, the first by Antonio Smith in the end zone with 7:39 left to keep the Raiders ahead, then another with 5:45 left to kill another Cardinal Gibbons possession.
But this time, the Raiders, who shot themselves in the foot all night 16 penalties for 119 yards, actually went backward to their own 20 before punting again setting up Gibbons’ game-winning drive.
After the Chiefs took the lead, Gulliver still had two timeouts and more than a minute left, but Haggard’s pass on fourth-and-4from his own 41 to Donaldson, a quick slant, was too high and incomplete, prompting the wild celebration on the Gibbons sideline.
Amid the euphoria of the Gibbons celebration on the north side of the field following the game with fans was the flipside. Gulliver players were inconsolable as they laid on the ground, stunned over what had happened, assistant coaches trying to pick them up. All season, they had pointed to this matchup, a game they had lost to Gibbons, 29-7, a year ago, as their chance at righting a wrong. But as it turned out, it was another wrong.
“We feel like we got the wind knocked out of us right now,” Sims said. “We were so ready to come out and perform, and we did for two and a half quarters, but you don’t win the game without finishing the game and we didn’t finish. When you’re about to close the gate, you’ve got to slam it shut and lock it and we didn’t do that. Credit Gibbons, as well. They’re a great team, a defending state champion for a reason and they showed a whole lot in the way they hung in there and came back on us.”
Sims looked like a coach that had just seen a huge opportunity slip away.
“We all felt like this was our year, like this was our opportunity, but not everybody gets a storybook ending and unfortunately ours will end in heartbreak,” he said. “I’m heartbroken for those kids over there because they gave it everything they had.”
