The Kemmerer High School football team traveled to Mountain View Saturday afternoon to square off against the top team in 2A, and the Buffs more than lived up to their billing, holding the Rangers to just over 140 yards of total offense in a 49-0 loss.

“You gotta tip the hat to Mountain View — they’re a very good team, so you have to give them the credit, first,” said KHS head coach Bart Jernigan. “But looking at what we can control — and what we’re capable of — that was far from the best ball we’re capable of playing. We’ve got to do better. Up front, offensively, we have to really challenge ourselves — with a good, physical Lyman team coming up this week – to step our level up.”

Jernigan pointed to his team’s inability to sustain drives — coupled with turnovers and  penalties at inopportune times — as the biggest culprits against the Buffs.

“We’d move the ball in spurts, then bog down with a penalty, or turn the ball over,” he explained. “We even had a couple of defensive stops that put us in decent position, and we didn’t really execute in those positions as well as I would have liked. And any time you turn the ball over five times, you’re not winning that game, and that was the case for us on Saturday. We have to do a better job of taking care of the ball offensively. We have to do a better job of not only sustaining the drives, but if we are unable to cash in, we have to go ahead and flip the field and kick it away. I think we have the punter to do that; we just have to avoid the turnover that puts you in a position where you’re unable to.”

The Rangers (2-2, 1-2 in 2A West) received the opening kickoff, and seemed to be moving the ball well, before the drive stalled at their own 35-yard line. On their first drive of the game, Mountain View’s Justus Platts hit Rhett Hunt with a pass in the flat that Hunt was able to turn upfield for a 65-yard touchdown; the extra point was good, and the Buffs led 7-0.

Kemmerer’s defense buckled down after that, forcing punts in back-to-back Buffalos drives, though the Rangers were unable to get anything going consistently on offense; every play that resulted in a positive gain seemed to be negated by a penalty or a nice defensive play by the home team.

With time winding down in the first quarter, the Buffs’ big play offense struck again, this time a 40-yard strike from Platts to Isac Linford. The extra point made it 14-0.

Momentum firmly on the side of the home team, Mountain View scored twice more to take a 28-0 lead into the break. Things didn’t improve for the Rangers in the second half, as the Buffs added three more touchdowns to their total, bringing the final score to 49-0.

Logan Emery was the workhorse on the ground for the Rangers, rushing for 56 yards on 10 carries; Noah Parks followed with 17 yards on seven carries. Kyle Fox finished with 10 on seven carries, while Austin Ruvalcaba finished with seven yards on three carries.

Under center, Fox was 4-for-19 for 40 yards and two picks; four different receivers caught a pass for Kemmerer. Emery caught one pass for 15 yards, Bryson McGill for 13 yards, Bridger Anderson for 11 yards and Parks for one yard.

Defensively, Ruvalcaba (8 tackles, 7 solo) and Graison Kelley (10 tackles, 5 solo) tallied 15 points apiece, while Colter Krell (4 tackles, 2 solo) and Bridger Anderson (4 tackles, 2 solo) finished with six points each. Derek Hagler had five points (3 tackles, 2 solo) for the game.

“I was proud of our defensive backfield — they were in coverage for a long time on some of those plays,” Jernigan explained. “There was one play where they were in coverage for 10 literal seconds. We have to do a better job of getting home on the quarterback. [MV quarterback] Justus Platts is the real deal — he’s a good QB. But I think we didn’t do ourselves any favors with how we tackled him. We need to do a better job there. There were times where we got guys to him, and just didn’t finish the play.”

Tackling will be a point of emphasis this week in practice, though Jernigan said he doubts whether the Rangers will see another quarterback like Platts again this season. That said, there are plenty of good quarterbacks remaining on Kemmerer’s schedule.

“Maybe not someone with Platts’ level of slipperiness — and arm talent to go with it,” he said. “But we need to go ahead and take a step forward with our ability to tackle, and keep guys like that inside and in front and apply pressure effectively.”

The Rangers return to the Bridger Valley Friday to do battle with Lyman (1-4, 0-3 in 2A West), another team with a proud tradition that’s off to a slow start in 2024. But don’t let their record fool you, according to Jernigan — the Eagles are tougher than their record would indicate.

“Lyman is just tough, hard-nosed football — if you’ve ever watched one of [head coach] Dale Anderson’s teams play, there’s a certain brutal beauty to it, in the way they play football,” Jernigan said. “It’s tough, it’s physical and their boys are going to be coming forward. They haven’t had the start to the season they’d have liked, but they’ve had the toughest schedule out of the gate, as well. You can’t judge them by record. We need to step to the plate and match their physicality. We have to move the ball on the ground offensively, and be able to take advantage of play-action shots, be efficient with our passing game.”

When the dust settles Friday at Lyman, Jernigan expects a different result than the one seen against Mountain View, regardless of what the scoreboard says.

“We are a far better team than we showed out on Saturday,” he reiterated. “It’s unfortunate that it happened on that big stage against one of the best teams in 2A, but that said, everything we still want is still out in front of us. We can still go to the playoffs, we can still meet our team goals — we just have to work together to get that done.”