Westlake is for real

The kids at Thousand Oaks High School were pretty worked up for the game against arch rival Westlake High School (also located in Thousand Oaks, about three miles from our home). I'd recorded and watched the Westlake vs Hart game last week and wasn't overly optimistic. Sadly, I was right.

Westlake has a huge offensive line (I was told that they're all 300+ pounds; could be, they were certainly a lot bigger). Their receivers were taller (and stronger) and used that to their advantage on several jump balls (a number of them in and around the end zone). Mowry (their small, quick halfback) was also a lot stronger than I'd anticipated and uses that huge line to his advantage (literally hiding behind linemen on a couple of running plays and then popping out once downfield). I don't know exactly what happened, but they had people wide open on several pass plays; connecting on more than half.

Rudy Carpenter, of whom much noise was made when he transferred from Newbury Park High School (also in Thousand Oaks) last spring was good. He's got a live arm and a lot of athleticism, but he's also got great support everywhere (line, receivers and running back). He also does things that make coaches scream. Like one play in the middle of the game where he had a picture perfect pocket up in front of him, no pressure at all (after 4+ seconds the front of the pocket still held, it looked like he could have stood there for a long time) so he tossed the ball to one of the Lancer defenders. That may just be part of the learning experience (seeing opportunities as they develop is a hard thing to learn in all walks of life, football has its own patterns which are quite different at the field level from what we fans see).

The final score was 49 to 7 in favor of Westlake.

Sarah and I had an interesting conversation with Adam on Wednesday about this weeks game. It wandered around for a bit and we eventually got to talking about their halfback Tahj Mowry (Adam knew the Disney Tahj, but didn't know they were the same person). We hit a bump in the road when we started talking about linemen and got Sarah pretty twisted up talking about linemen and linebackers. The whole problem was that we talked about linemen (offensive and defensive) together for a while and then jumped into linebackers (who are defensive only). I was sorry but I was also laughing. Hopefully, we helped her figure it all out.

Football is a confusing sport, but the fun is in the details.