{"id":56821,"date":"2016-12-05T22:56:23","date_gmt":"2016-12-06T05:56:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/?p=56821"},"modified":"2017-06-10T11:03:20","modified_gmt":"2017-06-10T18:03:20","slug":"the-peterson-principle-1252016-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/?p=56821","title":{"rendered":"The Peterson Principle: 12\/5\/2016"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Tim<\/a>

Tim Peterson<\/p><\/div>\n

By Tim Peterson<\/p>\n

I’ll admit it was hard to be a non biased reporter\u00a0last Saturday night.\u00a0Being an Arroyo alum\u00a0I almost threw my\u00a0clipboard in the air and my arms to the sky when Ernesto “Macho” Camacho hit\u00a0Devin Knight with the game winner in overtime\u00a0for the CIF\u00a0Championship. But I refrained.<\/p>\n

I’ve been thinking\u00a0about it since that moment.\u00a0I’m not ready to say it’s the best high school football game I’ve ever seen,\u00a0(I’ve seen over 300) but the Arroyo win over Rancho Mirage\u00a0has to be in the top three. The big plays (by both teams), the ebb and flows, the momentum shifts, the magnitude of the game, the significance to the city of El Monte, and finally the\u00a0dramatic\u00a0two point conversion\u00a0all contributed to a historical night\u00a0at B.L. Bergstrom Stadium.<\/p>\n

Arroyo took the early lead, the Knights were up 14-3 early in the fourth quarter behind\u00a0Camacho and\u00a0Yezdan Marquez, and 21-13\u00a0at the half.\u00a0Then next thing you know, Rancho Mirage was up 27-24 at the end of three quarters.\u00a0The Rattlers,\u00a0(yeah Rattlers) seemingly had only three players, but they ran roughshod all night making life miserable at times for Arroyo Head Coach\u00a0Jim Singiser and company.\u00a0Some kid named Whitefield kept breaking off big touchdown runs.<\/p>\n

Jesse Ortiz booted a 41-yard field goal in the fourth quarter\u00a0to tie it at 27 and how big was that?\u00a0We talk about Camacho, Knight and Marquez but where would the Knights have been if they forgot to bring their kicker?\u00a0He also clubbed a 41-yarder in the\u00a0third quarter (yes, they both were 41 yards)\u00a0to give Arroyo a four point lead.\u00a0Two 41-yard field\u00a0goals in a\u00a0championship game?\u00a0By a high school kid? They make movies about those kinds of things.<\/p>\n

\"tdchristmas1\"<\/a>Oh, and then this happened. With four minutes left in the\u00a0fourth quarter,\u00a0Daniel Whelan, the Rancho Mirage kicker who stands\u00a06’5″ and was\u00a0booting the ball 50 yards in pre game warmups, missed a 36-yard field goal giving Arroyo a shot in the arm.<\/p>\n

So the game goes into overtime and the Knights\u00a0immediately use that\u00a0momentum\u00a0to shut down\u00a0the Rattlers and score to win the game right?\u00a0Well, not quite.\u00a0It’s been 30 years since Arroyo won a CIF title, you thought\u00a0it was going to be easy?\u00a0There was that dude\u00a0Whitefield again\u00a0(Kyle Whitefield)\u00a0who\u00a0was extremely hard to tackle. His 25-yard TD run had Arroyo in a hole again.<\/p>\n

While Rancho Mirage needed one play to score, the Knights needed\u00a0six but they did score on\u00a0a Camacho\u00a0one-yard run. Then came the decision. But it really was no decision. What did Singiser and the Knights have to lose?\u00a0Well, plenty actually.\u00a0The CIF championship for one.\u00a0Oh yeah, there was\u00a0that.\u00a0And can you imagine the\u00a0wrath that Singiser would have incurred from all the armchair quarterbacks?\u00a0The second guessers would have had a field day from here to eternity. The Knights’\u00a0kicker, Ortiz, was nails. He had been\u00a0lights out all night. Send him out there, knock it through the uprights\u00a0and let’s go to the second overtime.<\/p>\n

Well for the lack of a better term, screw that! That’s why we’re arm chair quarterbacks and\u00a0second guessers and Singiser is wearing the headset. So, really for him it was no decision. There was a lot to lose, no doubt, but oh there was so much to win.<\/p>\n

“We decided if we get down there why screw around,\u00a0and exchange (possessions)? We’re two and a half yards from a CIF Championship. I like our guys from two yards, three yards,” Singiser said.<\/p>\n

“There was no question at the end. We knew we were going to have a hard time stopping them, so Jim (Singiser)\u00a0made the call to go for two and we had a play ready\u00a0and thank God it worked,” said Arroyo offensive coordinator Chris MacMillan.<\/p>\n

Ok but who came up with that specific play? Singiser? MacMillan?\u00a0The Wolf?\u00a0None of the above. “Actually it was Coach\u00a0Knight (Joshua Knight) that suggested that two-point play.\u00a0It was something that we had\u00a0been working on and it worked,”\u00a0MacMillan said.<\/p>\n

So Joshua Knight suggested the two point play\u00a0that his son Devin Knight\u00a0caught to win the game?\u00a0This script\u00a0gets better all the time.<\/p>\n

Camacho took the snap rolled right, threw low and Knight\u00a0dove, sprawled and before you could say\u00a0“It’s 1986!” he rose from the ground in the end zone holding the ball high above his head\u00a0as the roar of the capacity\u00a0crowd on the corner of Santa Anita and Lower Azusa reverberated\u00a0throughout the San Gabriel Valley.<\/p>\n

There were hugs\u00a0and embraces exchanged\u00a0from players, coaches and fans alike,\u00a0tears flowed, and high fives were slapped.\u00a0For a few\u00a0fleeting moments\u00a0B.L. Bergstrom\u00a0Stadium was transformed into one\u00a0giant\u00a0celebration, a reunion of sorts, that will be etched in the minds of the Arroyo faithful forever.<\/p>\n

On second thought maybe it was the greatest high school football game I’ve ever seen.<\/p>\n

That’s my principle.<\/p>\n

Tim can be reached at tim@midvalleysports.com or on Twitter\u00a0@tspeterson40<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Tim Peterson I’ll admit it was hard to be a non biased reporter\u00a0last Saturday night.\u00a0Being an Arroyo alum\u00a0I almost threw my\u00a0clipboard in the air and my arms to the sky when Ernesto “Macho” Camacho hit\u00a0Devin Knight with the game winner in overtime\u00a0for the CIF\u00a0Championship. But I refrained.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,12817],"tags":[7283,7814,1163,6561,12486,12341,11798,12485,3542,365,12487,5761,8661,12480,11755,12490],"class_list":["post-56821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fanview","category-petersonprince","tag-arroyo-football","tag-b-l-bergstrom-stadium","tag-chris-macmillan","tag-cif-championship","tag-devin-knight","tag-ernesto-camacho","tag-high-school-football-novel","tag-jesse-ortiz","tag-joe-t","tag-joe-torosian","tag-kyle-whitefield","tag-mid-valley-sports","tag-mvs","tag-rancho-mirage-football","tag-tangent-dreams","tag-yezdan-marquez"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56821"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56838,"href":"https:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56821\/revisions\/56838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}