2A football: No. 2 Eaton defeats No. 1 Delta to complete three-peat

PUEBLO — If there were any plays as important as the huge play the Eaton defense made with just less than 10 minutes to play Saturday, they were the 15 little plays the Reds offense made immediately afterwards.

That shouldn’t diminish the one big play Eaton made with less than 10 minutes left.

Quite the contrary.

The second-seeded Reds came up with a huge fourth-down stop with 9 minutes, 52 seconds left in the game, then proceeded to run a critical 8 1/2 minutes off the clock, en route to defeating top-seeded Delta 21-10 in the Class 2A state football finals Saturday at the Neta and Eddie DeRose ThunderBowl on the CSU-Pueblo campus.

The gritty, hard-nosed victory represented Eaton’s third consecutive state title, its fourth overall, as the Reds capped a 12-1 season in as impressive of a way possible.

“This is the sweetest (title) for sure,” Eaton senior quarterback Walker Martin said. “Coming in as the underdogs was a little different. The last two title games, we came in as a No. 1 seed. … Coming in as a freshman, I told (coach Zac) Lemon we’re going to win four state championships. We may not have got to four, but to win three is pretty awesome.”

The loss was the only slip-up this season by Delta (12-1), which was in pursuit of its first football title since 1960.

Martin — an unquestioned leader for Eaton — was awarded the Most Outstanding Player Award moments after the game.

He immediately offered the award to his teammate and classmate, Morgan Tribbett, a middle linebacker and running back, who came through with big play after big play — on both sides of the ball.

Delta appeared in position to put an end to their six-plus decades of championship futility when Panthers junior Landan Clay blocked an Eaton punt and returned it 31 yards to the Eaton 30 with 11:44 left and Delta trailing just 14-10.

The Panthers advanced nine yards on their next two plays before running into a brick-wall Reds defense, spearheaded by Tribbett.

Delta’s tenacious junior running back Esai Carrillo was stopped at the line of scrimmage on third-and-1 from the Eaton 21. Then he was dropped a yard behind the line of scrimmage on fourth-and-1.

“I messed up earlier by fumbling, so I knew I had to make a stop (on defense) and had to put 10 toes down,” Tribbett said. “It was 10 toes down for all of us. … I’m honestly overwhelmed. (This title) feels amazing. It feels better than I could have ever imagined.”

In addition to leading the Reds’ swarming defense, Tribbett ran for 171 yards on 29 carries with 18 of those carries and 116 yards coming in the second half.
Stubbornly holding on to a four-point lead, Eaton got the ball on its own 22-yard line with 9:52 left. The Reds didn’t allow the Panthers to possess the ball again until there was just 1:25 left, and the game was suddenly out of reach.

After the game-changing fourth-down stop, Eaton progressed forward, chunks at a time, running 8:27 off the clock before Tribbett rumbled into the end zone from 6 yards out to put the Reds up 21-10.

“People question, can we run the ball, are we just a quick-strike passing team,” said Eaton coach Zac Lemon, a Delta High School alum. “(Delta) took away our passing game, and we took advantage of it. We’ve said it all along, ‘How are you going to stop us? What’s going to be your game plan.’ We had answers for everything.”