Mosinee’s 15. The Raiders’ offensive ….
Mosinee’s 15. The Raiders’ offensive unit, playing in a second half for the first time this season, then went quiet until the defense bottled up a Kowalski run on a fake punt early in the fourth quarter. One play later, a play action fake sucked up Mosinee’s entire defense to the line of scrimmage and Baumgartner found Carson Kleist as wide open as a receiver could possibly be for a 19-yard score.
“That was a case of them being down 32-8 at that point in time,” Wilson said. “We’d been running and running and running and running, so it was a good time to go play action.”
Doriot picked off an errant Garski pass just over three minutes later and ran untouched 54 yards down the right sideline for the night’s final touchdown with 5:37 to go.
Medford finished with 306 total yards of offense, including 220 on the ground and 86 through the air. Gardner finished with 137 yards on 12 carries, while Grunwald had 59 yards on 13 attempts. Baumgartner was four of 10 in passing for 71 yards, while Retterath was one for three. Five different receivers caught one pass each.
“The first half we played fairly well,” Wilson said of the offense. “In the third quarter, we didn’t play very well at all on offense. We’ve got quite a bit to clean up there, trying to sustain blocks. We did not throw the ball particularly well or catch the ball very well. We had two for sure dropped balls that hit us in the hands that would’ve been big first downs. One overthrow that was a touchdown. There were three balls that we probably should have completed for big yardage and another couple balls that were underthrown. That hurt us.”
Garski posted solid numbers for Mosinee, completing 24 of 35 passes for 213 yards, but the two interceptions were costly. Lehman had 11 catches for 113 yards, while Kowalski had seven catches for 93 yards.
With the win, Medford retained possession of the Cheese Grater traveling trophy.
Medford and Rhinelander are the only 3-0 teams in the Great Northern Conference. The Raiders will host 1-2 Merrill Friday at 7 p.m. The Blue Jays got off to a good start with a 20-14 win over Ashland but have struggled the last two weeks without quarterback and leading rusher Caleb DeJong, losing 34-6 at Lakeland and 42-8 to Rhinelander.
Medford owns a five-game winning streak over the Blue Jays that started in the 2015 WIAA playoffs.
