The Hillsdale football team stays above .500 after splitting a pair of lopsided games over the past two weeks. The Chargers followed a 41-0 homecoming loss to the Tiffin Dragons with a 41-7 away game victory, trouncing the Northwood Timberwolves and leaving them 4-3 overall, and third in the G-MAC.
During the Chargers’ victory, senior running back Michael Herzog posted the best statistical game of his career, earning his first G-MAC Offensive Player of the Week award with 159 yards and three touchdowns on 23 carries. He now leads the conference in rushing yards with 680 on the season.
“I feel pretty honored, ” Herzog said. “I’ve been not playing for two seasons and being able to come back this year and win an award like that, it’s pretty cool to me. I’m proud of myself. That’s not happening without the help of everybody else, especially those guys on the line of scrimmage.”
Sophomore wide receiver Isaac TeSlaa continues to stay near the top of the nation’s leaderboards in receiving statistics. He sits at fifth in receiving yards with 808, and is tied for second in receiving touchdowns with nine.
At the Chargers’ Homecoming game, they were unable to get anything going offensively, finishing with just 164 yards of offense to Tiffin’s 419.
“We didn’t play very well against Tiffin in a lot of phases, and we got dominated in the line of scrimmage,” head coach Keith Otterbein said. “We didn’t execute very well, we didn’t block them very well, and didn’t block the right guys very well. We couldn’t get off man-to-man coverage, so there wasn’t anywhere to throw the ball, and defensively we had really poor tackling.”
The game marked Hillsdale’s first shutout loss since 2004 and its first home shutout loss since 1998. Tiffin scored 20 points in the first 12 minutes of the second half, effectively putting the game out of reach.
“When you go through a game where you get your tail whipped a little bit, negativity and doubts and pointing fingers can start to creep in, and that’s what I’m really proud of our kids and our coaches for, that we blocked out all of the, as Nick Saban says, rat poison,” Otterbein said.
The team’s next game was wildly different, nearly flipping the score of its Homecoming game. The Chargers finished just shy of 500 yards of offense while holding Tiffin to 202.
“I thought it was great that we bounced back and had a great team win this week against a good team in Northwood,” sophomore defensive end Riley Tolsma said. “It’s the first time this season we’ve really put together two great halves of football. All season we’ve had good halves, like the first half versus Truman, or the second half against other teams, but this is the first game where we played a complete 60 minutes of good football.”
Tolsma came up with three of the team’s seven tackles for loss, a sack, four total tackles, and the game’s only interception on a batted ball.
Herzog finished off each of the team’s first three scoring drives in the end zone, more than doubling his season total of touchdowns.
“It’s not like we had a set of bad plays against Tiffin and a set of good plays that we decided to call this week,” Otterbein said. “They worked better, we blocked them better, but a lot of the success we had in the run game was on run-pass options, so we’re reading the secondary and depending on how they filled or didn’t fill, we either hand it off or throw the ball.”
The Chargers continued their dominant play into the second half, scoring touchdowns on each of their first four drives in the second half. Herzog’s third touchdown, two passes from senior quarterback Luke Keller, and a one-yard run from backup quarterback Garrit Aissen made up the team’s 28 second-half points.
“I thought we executed very well, blocked them well, threw it well, protected, tackled, broke on the ball,” Otterbein said. “The difference one week to the next was 75 points on the scoreboard, a pretty significant rebound for us.”
Hillsdale will now begin a three-game homestand with a 2 p.m. kickoff against the Findlay Oilers. The Chargers’ rivals are 3-4 overall with a 2-2 record in conference play.
“We’ve got to play well, we’ve got to play physical, we’ve got to play fast,” Otterbein said. “They’re athletically gifted, certainly we have our hands full.”
