WATERTOWN – The Watertown-Mayer football team will have their hands full this week as they take on the Annandale Cardinals on the road. The Cardinals, who have started the season out red-hot, posting a perfect 4-0 record with all four wins coming by two or more scores.
“Annandale is a really good football team,” Royals coach Nick Urban said. “They’ve done a lot of nice things this year. Their team speed definitely shows up on film. We have already started to talk about how we need to limit their big plays. They do a lot of things that put defenses in tough situations. If we can limit the big plays and make them earn their touchdowns, it makes them earn their drives. We know we got a good challenge coming at us.”
If the Royals hope to stick with the explosive Cardinals, they’ll need to continue to run the ball well. Last week against Dassel-Cokato, the Royals ran for 156, 139 of which came from Kendall Nowlan.
“It’s really important,” Urban said about keeping the run ning game going. “We saw the difference last week. Just looking at our offense, if we’re able to run the football, we can use play action and pass the ball more efficiently. That puts ourselves in a better down and distance.”
With the running game getting going last week, that opened things up for receiver Jacob Hanley. Hanley had six catches for 112 yards last week, and will look to continue to make plays this week.
“Jake did a great job,” Urban said. “He did a great job of going up for a couple footballs Friday night. He’s a kid that we look towards for some big plays on offense. When we get that running game established, he’s able to sort of work his way through the secondary and get some more favorable coverages. Teams have to put more defenders in the box to stop the run, and that puts him in a situation to be successful. Finding that balance is just really important in our offense. I think we had found a pretty good flow on Friday night and we hope we can maintain that going forward for the rest of the season.”