For Guelph native and second-year Guelph Gryphon linebacker Maddux Martin, the 26-15 win by the Gryphons over the Ottawa Gee-Gees on a windy Saturday afternoon at Alumni Stadium felt really special.
“It feels incredibly good,” he said. “We were working for this all week, working for this all season. I never doubted it once. I never doubted it once. It's my team, these are my guys. And we're going to keep winning and we're going to keep going. But it feels phenomenal.”
Martin has earned extra playing time this season and started Saturday when his stats included a sack, a tackle for loss early in the third quarter when Ottawa had the wind at their backs and rushed Ottawa quarterback Josh Janssen to force him to unload the football earlier than planned.
“I'm just blessed to get playing time,” Martin said. “I'm blessed to get this opportunity and I just did what I did. That's all it is.”
This season is his first since surgery on his left wrist last December, his fourth surgery on the wrist.
“I feel a lot stronger and I just trained hard,” he said. “It's been about two and a half, three years now, but it's holding up. It's doing well.”
Martin had been a key player for the Centennial Spartans during his high school days that included a District 10 championship. Obviously, university football is a lot different than high school football.
“It's different, of course,” Martin said. “This level is faster, but at the end of the day, if you just train hard, (you can) get faster. I got faster. And you just got to go harder. You got to pay a bit more attention to details. A mistake you make in this league can be a big play in D10, maybe not. But it's about the same thing. You just got to train. I just got to train to match the tempo of this game.”
With Saturday’s win, the seventh-ranked Gryphons will be in a unique position in the Ontario university football semifinals next weekend at London.
By defeating the Gee-Gees in the quarter-finals, the Gryphons advance to play the third-ranked Western Mustangs in the semifinals next Saturday.
By playing the Gee-Gees and Mustangs in the playoffs, the Gryphs will have played every team in the 11-team league this season as Ottawa and Western were the two teams they didn’t play during the regular season.
“This league is so hard,” Gryphon head coach Mark Surya said. “It's so hard to win and credit to all the coaches. It's just getting so competitive. It used to be where there was a clear top and bottom, now you can't see the top and the bottom. Every week any team can lose to any team and it's the teams that are most disciplined that are going to win.”
In a bit of a regular-season role reversal on a windy Saturday afternoon, penalties hurt the Gee-Gees, the least penalized team in the league, and that helped the Gryphons, the league’s most penalized team.
“We always say when it comes to winning moments it's the team that's the most disciplined that wins,” Surya said. “And so we practised all those things in a game situation. I'm really proud of the guys for executing.”
Ottawa whittled a 15-point deficit late in the second quarter to a three-point deficit at the beginning of the fourth quarter. The Gryphons added a point to the gap when Nick Guardiero kicked a 50-yard rouge on a drive that started with a no-yards call against Ottawa, but stalled.
A holding penalty did negate an apparent touchdown by Kaine Stevenson on a pitch by quarterback Tristan Aboud, but the Gryphons had the ball back to the two-yard line. However, it was third down and Ben Lane lined up to kick a 10-yard field goal. He did, but the Gee-Gees were offside on the play and the hosts got the ball on the one-yard line. On the next play, Sargeant weaved his way into the endzone to secure the victory with one minute to play.
“Just a simple inside zone,” Sargeant said. “The whole line did their job, blocked hard, blocked well, blocked everybody up, and we just crammed in at the end to win the game.”
Despite having a couple of tries to score stopped by the Gee-Gees, the Gryphs didn’t feel any pressure to score.
“No pressure,” Sargeant said. “I believe in the guys. I believe in myself. I know we can do it no matter what the circumstances are. I'm just proud of everybody.”
The touchdown was Sargeant’s second of the game as he had just got into the endzone on a 35-yard run in the opening quarter.
Marshall McCray also scored a touchdown for the Gryphons on a one-yard run in the second quarter.
All the other points for the Gryphons were scored by Lane as he kicked two converts, a rouge on a missed field goal and a good field goal of 37 yards into the wind in the third quarter.
The semifinal will be the ninth meeting between the teams since the Gryphs beat Western at London in the Yates Cup OUA championship game in 2015. Western has won seven of the meetings since then.
“We’ve just got to do what we do every week,” Martin said. “Practise hard, pay attention to details, watch a bit of extra film. But they're not anything crazy. They're not a superhero team. They're just guys and we're guys. We're going to go to war with them.”
