Mike Gottman almost couldn’t have asked for a better pair of birthday presents.
On the eve of his 50th birthday, his Durant Cougars team locked up a playoff spot with a dominant, 28-7 win over East Bay. Soon afterward, Wayne Ward’s Plant City Raiders scored a 20-14 win over Brandon that handed the Cougars the district championship.
Down at Cougar Place, quarterback Erick Davis put the home team on the board early with a 53-yard keeper in the first quarter. East Bay nearly tied it up at 9:17 in the second, but a big red-zone stop by the Durant defense led to a turnover on downs, and the Cougars took a 14-0 lead six minutes later with a Kamerron Joyce goal-line punch.
Crispian Atkins scored his first touchdown of the night on one of Durant’s only pass plays of the game, a 35-yard screen. He did it again in the fourth quarter, scoring on a two-yard run to make it a 28-0 game.
Atkins finished the game just nine yards shy of becoming the first Durant running back to run for 1,000 yards since Jamarlon Hamilton did it in 2012. After Indians quarterback Ian Kuykendall scored on a goal-line QB sneak with 1:10 to play, Atkins wasn’t inserted in the lineup as Durant killed the clock.
