By Brian Holtzapple
CATAWISSA -- Southern Columbia got back to its bread and butter Friday night in a Heartland Athletic Conference crossover game against Jersey Shore.
One week after Southern threw for 202 yards in a narrow loss to Montoursville, the Tigers did what they do best: run the football.
Behind a 194-yard day by Jake Morton, Southern racked up 408 yards on the ground to take a 43-6 victory at Tiger Stadium.
The game was much closer than the lopsided final score would indicate. After a sluggish first two quarters the Tigers only led 16-6 at the half.
"I like to see a team come out after a loss and play with some energy and get after it," said Southern coach Jim Roth, who is now one win shy of 300 for his career.
"It seemed like a hangover effect, if you want to call it that. We just seemed like we didn't recover and we didn't play as aggressively as we did in the Montoursville game."
Southern (2-1) though looked good early as it took a 6-0 lead in the opening minutes of the game.
The Tigers scored on their first play from scrimmage when Morton took the handoff from Jake Townsend and ran for a 61-yard touchdown just 1 minute, 47 seconds into the game.
Morton broke one tackle at the 40-yard line and then another one at the 22 when he stiff-armed Jersey Shore's Jake Rogers.
"It was a belly to the right and Timmy (Benner) had a good block to the inside and I cut it back across the field and there was a lot of green," Morton said. "There were a few guys (in the open field) and I just had to out-run them.
"I like to run the ball, and it feels pretty cool when you get to run a lot," added Morton.
One series later Southern went up 9-0 on B.J. Snyder's 37-yard field goal before Morton ran for a one-yard score 43 seconds into the second quarter to make it 16-0.
Penalties, dropped passes and other missed plays plagued the Tigers the rest of the first half.
And that's when Jersey Shore (0-3) made things interesting by scoring its touchdown on Taylor English's 14-yard pass to Caleb Barnhart with 1:19 left before halftime.
"We had too many mistakes with our offense in the first half. We were all over the place and we had players out of position at times," Roth said. "Jersey Shore has some pretty good skill players and they can make some plays. When they are holding us down score wise, it's definitely scary with that team, especially with the offense they run.
"Jersey Shore is a type of team that you have to come out and score points against and score consistently, and we didn't do that," added Roth. "We couldn't get anything going as far as scoring points and we left (Jersey Shore) hang around."
But all of that changed in the second half.
A one-yard touchdown run by Tyrell Thomas with 3:25 left in the third quarter extended the Tigers' lead to 22-6.
The floodgates opened in the fourth when Benner scored on a 33-yard touchdown run before Taner Levan and Jamie Slotterback both scored on five-yard runs.
"The running game did come back, except there were some plays we weren't happy with," Roth said. "Overall, there were quite a few yards accumulated in this game (524 total), but there's still some things we need to do to get better."
"We'll just keep plugging away and hopefully we'll be ready for Loyalsock next week, which should be a pretty good challenge," Roth added.
