When one glances at the annual football records of South Newton High School in Kentland, Ind., over the 40-year period from 1966 to 2005, one season jumps out.
That year
was 2001, when the Rebels, led by all-state quarterback Justin Wentzel (pictured at right) and three-time all-state receiver Sam Logan (below right) in photos by
South Newton High School faculty member Lori Murphy, won every game until
dropping a crushing 16-12 decision to Midwest Conference nemesis Pioneer for the sectional
championship.The
success of that team was not surprising. It just was expected much sooner.
Most of the 10 seniors on the 2001 team had played together throughout their youth and in middle school years. And the players in that 2002 high school graduation class had enjoyed undefeated middle school seasons in 1996 and 1997.
But
the 1998 Rebels went 3-6, and even though most of the Class of 2002 players
made the varsity squad for their sophomore season in 1999, that team and the
following year’s team both finished with 4-6 records.
Wentzel said the 2000 team might even have been a better one than 2001’s. “We just couldn’t get it together.”
The 2000 team had a very good junior running back in Robert Beardsley, Wentzel noted, but Beardsley would not return to school for the 2001-02 academic year. And the 2000 team, in addition to Logan, had fine receivers in Ryan Hoover and tight end Kurt Farney, both of whom would be back in 2001.
Indeed, 2001 would be the Class of 2002’s last chance to leave a mark at the school.
“This should be our year,” Sam Logan told a reporter for the Lafayette Journal & Courier in August before the 2001 season began.
“We’re pretty confident coming into this year. Our main strength is our quarterback (Wentzel) throwing the ball. Defense, it’s all experience. Everybody knows their job.”
Logan’s
prophecy seemed on target through the first 11 games of the 2001 regular-season and
postseason. The Rebels’ largely pro set offense, occasionally using as many as
four wide receivers and crafted to fit the skills of Wentzel, Logan and the rest
of the receiving corps, was high-flying from the get-go. South Newton
even manhandled usually tough Pioneer, 43-8, in its third game on Aug. 31.
And
in the first game of sectionals that season, the Rebels eased up on the passing
game and let the running game take over in a 48-0 shellacking of conference rival Tri-County. The
Rebels scored six times using the ground game and once on a Ryan Hoover interception
return. Wentzel himself scored four of the rushing TDs, three of them on long scampers of 42,
48 and 55 yards.
Two weeks later, South Newton hosted Midwest Conference foe Pioneer in the sectional final, and the rematch was a different story from the Aug. 31 meeting.
The Rebels had an off game, for sure, but more significantly, in the intervening weeks since the regular-season meeting, the Panthers had retooled their offense and defense. The defense was stout enough to limit the Rebels to two touchdowns in the sectional title game. And as Wentzel attests, the Panther defense even somehow correctly anticipated many of the Rebels plays before they were run.
Late
in the fourth quarter, the Panther offense, trailing 12-8, mounted its best
drive of the game and was rewarded with a fortuitous deflection by, of all
people, South Newton defensive back Justin Wentzel.
On fourth-and-goal from the 3-yard line, Pioneer quarterback Bret Winegardner threw to Joey Franklin near the goal line. Wentzel stretched to knock away the ball from reaching Franklin’s hands, but the tipped ball floated into the end zone, where Franklin’s teammate Richie Galbreath hauled it in. After a successful two-point conversion run, the Pioneers surged into the lead, 16-12, with 1:48 left in the fourth quarter.
After the ensuing kick-off, South Newton quickly drove to the Pioneer 21-yard line. The Rebels then used a running play, an incompletion, and another running play to reach the 13-yard line. On the fourth-and-2 play, a Rebels offensive lineman stepped on one of Wentzel's feet as the quarterback pulled away from the center snap for what would have been another pass play. Wentzel said he staggered, never able to regain his balance before falling to the ground about four yards from the line of scrimmage, ending the Rebels’ hopes to pull out a win.
South Newton finished that year 11-1. Seniors Wentzel and Logan would fetch conference and area all-team accolades and be named to the Class A all-state team, Logan for a third straight year. In the Rebels’ 35-6 win over Caston on Sept. 28, Logan set a state record of 43 career touchdown receptions (a record since broken).The Rebels’ football fortunes dropped off considerably in the next three years. The team’s record fell to 3-7 in 2002 and a mediocre 6-5 in 2003 before bottoming out at 1-9 in 2004.
But the Wentzel and Logan aerial show at South Newton would serve as a delicious appetizer for what the South Newton community would be able to enjoy in a few years, and the individual responsible for much of that upcoming success would be the first-year quarterback of that abysmal 2004 team, sophomore Eric Watt.
The majority of Kentland, named for its 1860 founder, Alexander J. Kent, a wholesale grocer, importer and real estate investor, spreads west of U.S. 41. Kentland and Newton County observed their centennial anniversaries together in 1960.
Because South Newton High School’s student enrollment hovers at about 250, its sports teams fall into the smallest classification, single A, of competition as recognized by the Indiana High School Athletic Association, the regulatory authority of high school sports in Indiana.
The town’s population was about 1,700 people in 2007, the year multi-sport athlete Eric Watt graduated from South Newton High School, and just six months after Watt helped the Rebels football team recapture the imagination of the southern Newton County community.
Eric
and his siblings all participated in sports-related activities in high school.
At 6-feet-8, oldest brother Justin gravitated toward basketball. Next oldest, Keith,
about 2½ years behind Justin, was not nearly as tall, but he played
basketball and football. Eric, eight years younger than Keith, starred in
football and basketball. The boys’ only sister, Michelle, who was 15 months
behind Eric, competed on the school’s girls swim team and was a Rebels
cheerleader.
Justin and Keith took an interest in sports in their youth, and that influenced little brother Eric to seek out sports as a recreational outlet, too, at age 3 in the early 1990s, according to his mother, Luanne Render Watt.
“One older brother watched a lot of sports on TV and often dribbled a basketball” while doing so, she said. “Eric saw that, and he’d want to dribble the ball, too.” And Eric wouldn’t settle for just a toy basketball. He wanted to practice with the real thing.
When brother Keith would see Eric bounce a basketball, he’d coach the youngster by saying, “ ‘Don’t look at the ball when you’re dribbling’,” Luanne said.
She remembers Eric always seeming to have a ball in his hands as a child. The kind of ball he held – baseball, basketball or football – depended on what season or time of year it was.
“Mom went into labor with me at one of my older brother’s games,” Michelle said. “We were always at games while growing up, and I’m sure Eric wanted to grow up to play the same games that his brothers did.”
But while his siblings’ high school athletic careers were normal by most standards, Eric’s football career at South Newton stood out then – and still stands out today. It propelled him to an even more stellar football career at a small university in northeastern Indiana.
Eric confirmed what Michelle had speculated – that as a child, he aspired to play sports like his big brothers. He also said that, like his brothers, he’d watch games on television whenever he had a chance. What he watched on TV undoubtedly influenced how he eventually became a fan of the Indiana Hoosiers college teams after first following and cheering for Purdue University basketball great Glenn “Big Dog” Robinson.
Purdue is a modest jaunt south of Kentland, and Robinson spent his high school playing days at Theodore Roosevelt High School in Gary, Ind., just 70 miles north of Kentland via U.S. 41. Robinson had a successful career in the NBA, spending the first eight of his 11 years in the league with the Milwaukee Bucks. And Big Dog wore jersey number 13.
Eric’s
brothers and friends started calling Eric “Big Dog,” and if there were any
doubt that Eric admired Robinson, he erased that when he put on his first
high school football and basketball jerseys … bearing Big Dog’s No. 13.
Luanne Watt said Eric also played Little League baseball at Kentland for as long as he was eligible under the league’s age restrictions. The family’s home was close to the ball diamonds in the town's community park, so Eric and family members could walk to all the baseball games. That’s Eric in one of his Little League team uniforms in the photo at right, courtesy of the Watt family.
Michelle said Eric hung out with older kids as a child, and his older brothers’ friends took a liking to him to the point that they would occasionally welcome him to play in their games. Luanne Watt chuckled when that subject game up. She said Eric was very active – and fearless.
Older kids liked Eric, she continued, because he was willing to try something daring before they’d consider doing it. She cited the time she was in the family home and happened to look outside and see Eric cruising down the street on his roller blades while holding onto a rope being pulled by a friend driving a moped. When he let go of the rope, Eric glided up a ramp that he and the friends had built. “I put a stop to that,” Luanne chuckled.
Except that it really didn’t stop.
“For a while, I was really feeling like a bad parent because he was always getting stitches. But I couldn’t stop (him).”
She
said the emergency room visits got to be so frequent that she started alternating
emergency-room trips between hospitals in the two closest communities – one was
northeast in Rensselaer, Ind., and the other due west in Watseka, Ill. – because
she feared that if she continued taking him to just one of the hospitals all
the time, the volume of visits might prompt hospital staff to suspect her of child
abuse.
Eric mentioned one such instance when he required stitches. He said he was inside the family home and one of brother Justin’s friends, Joe, was teaching him the proper way to tackle a ball carrier. During the demonstration, Eric was inadvertently thrust into the protruding point where two walls met at a 90-degree angle, “and I split my head open.”
After those tackling “lessons,” Luanne said, as soon as Eric saw Joe come into the Watt family house, Eric would lunge for Joe’s legs to show that he knew the proper way to tackle.
Michelle
said the Watts had a large living room containing furnishings that included a
pool table, so when the youngsters played sports inside, they had to work
around the pool table. Eric’s accident proved that the pool table wasn’t the
room’s only unmovable object.
Eric has always been known to be fearless by everyone in the family. Luanne said the only things he feared were roller coasters, scary movies and spiders. He also was known to be a young man of few words, and so family members often joked, in a play on a popular idiom, that Eric was “always deadly, but silent.”
Eric said the group of friends close to his own age that he hung around with most of the time didn’t get interested in playing traditional sports as early as he did. They were much more into roller-blading and biking, not baseball, football and basketball.
The course appeared in several places in the neighborhood over time – Eric remembers them being in the Watts’ driveway and in a vacant lot across the street. His father, Ron, remembers one being set up on the side of the street.
The driveway version lacked length, so skaters had to generate all the momentum themselves. When the thrills with that waned, they set up a course in an open lot across the street where a funeral home once had operated.
“The problem with the (vacant) lot was you didn’t have a straight runway to gain speed,” Eric said. “Hence, why we moved it to the road. Plus the lot had cracks in the pavement.”
Once they graduated from self-propulsion, they explored the goal of going faster by being pulled on a rope driven by engine-powered vehicles, such as the moped episode that Luanne had witnessed.
“We would use cars, scooters, four-wheelers, snowmobiles or anything that went faster than 20 mph to pull us on skates, sleds, snowboards or anything with wheels,” Eric said. “They were all very stupid and unsafe ideas in hindsight.”
Derek, Stefan and Shaun were two years ahead of Eric in school. Stefan would eventually get interested in football and play the sport at South Newton High School. In his high school years, McGrath played on the school’s golf team.
Ron Watt said he and Stefan’s father, Tom, a Newton County automobile dealer, are friends to this day. “He comes out and we visit every day.”
In fact, a few days before doing his interview for this story, Ron said he and Tom were conversing, and the subject of Eric and Stefan’s roller-blading came up. Ron said Tom mentioned that he possesses video recordings of the boys enjoying the quarter-pipe course and ramp when they were children.
Eric said he got into playing football at age 6 when he signed up to play in the nearest Pop Warner League program. At the time, that league was in Morocco in northern Newton County, so his mother drove him about 20 miles each direction for practices and games. The Spartans, the team Eric played on in Morocco, is shown above in a photo courtesy of the Watt family. Eric is seated on the far right of the second row from the bottom (jersey #13).
Luanne Watt said that when Eric was in seventh grade, he wanted to try out for running back on the South Newton Middle School team, “but the coach told him he had to be the quarterback. So he came home and called me at work saying he needed a tire to practice throwing the ball through.”
That prompted Ron Watt to tie a rope around a tire that had been removed from a pickup truck and string it onto a tree branch in the family’s yard. It wasn’t long before Eric felt that the hole in a pickup tire was too small, and he called his mom at work and asked for a bigger, semitrailer tire, something she declined, Luanne said.
But the pickup tire idea also presented other issues for Eric. “This ended up with footballs rolling 25 to 30 yards away” after his practice throws, he said, “and I would get annoyed chasing after them.” Even when he talked sister Michelle into helping him, she had difficulty throwing the ball 25 to 30 yards back to him, he said.
“I
finally convinced my parents I needed a throwing net, and this is what I used
the remainder of the summer(s).”
Michelle said the net had “pockets,” and if the ball(s) landed in the pockets, no one had to run around to chase down errant balls. However, the ball(s) would still have to be retrieved from the pockets.
Eric noted that he also had tried taping a square on the side of the family’s brick house to use as a target for his practice passes. “I don’t think my mother was too fond of this idea, because (the square) was right next to a window,” he said. “Plus, the brick was destroying my footballs.”
But all of those ideas didn’t come close to the benefit of having a live body to work out with him. His father, Ron, says that over time, everyone in the family at some point would throw the football in the yard with Eric. But by the time Eric entered high school, his older brothers, the ideal backyard catch mates, were away from home most of the time, so Eric often turned to Michelle to “play catch.”
Well, it might have started
out as “catch.”
Michelle liked the fact that she could spend quality time with her brother, so she said she rarely refused Eric when he asked her to pass the ball around in the backyard. But it wasn’t long before Eric felt he needed to do more than just play catch.
He next
asked his sister to run pass patterns for him, and he explained to her how to
run them. He knew he needed to be able to hit a moving target with a thrown
ball consistently and accurately.
At some point, Michelle said, those backyard sessions with Eric became like a team practice, and it was getting more intense. So intense, their mother said, that Eric was throwing the ball very hard to his sister. “He did not let up. She would come into the house with very red hands.”
Michelle agreed that by the time Eric got to be a senior in high school, she couldn’t be the helper he needed in the yard at home anymore.
“His ‘practices’ got to be more than I could accommodate,” she said, although she did credit herself for getting better at running pass routes and catching the ball as a result of those many repetitions.
She recalled that some years later, the Watts were at a large family gathering one day when someone suggested they have a football-throwing contest. She said she commented how she probably could do pretty well in such a competition, considering how often she had thrown the ball with Eric in the backyard years earlier. The family did have the contest, Michelle said, but the result was as you might expect: Eric won, and it wasn’t close.
Luanne also recalled how a high-school aged Eric, apparently trying to broaden his skills beyond just passing, stood in the front yard and tried to kick a football as hard and as high as he could in hopes that the ball would sail over the house and into the backyard, where a friend was waiting to catch it. Eric pulled it off successfully a couple times before one kick, instead of clearing the house, found and broke a second-floor window
"It worked a few times -- until it didn't!" Luanne said.
The accident notwithstanding, the boy's daring kicking exercises in the family's yard might prove beneficial years later in Eric's college playing years.
Being
an individual of few words and spartan elaboration is just how Eric is. Several people who were interviewed for this project issued polite warnings
that one should not expect to get much information out of him. Especially if
one wants to discuss Eric Watt.
And as it turns out, despite the fact that Eric’s father, Ron Watt, was “about 5-feet-8," he did play football, and a year each of basketball and wrestling in high school, according to school yearbooks.
The posed photo of Ron Watt below, for example, is from 1970's The Regiment, the South Newton High School yearbook. The text under the photo indicates Ron played offensive guard for the team. Ron said he played mostly on the offensive line in high school, although he did not play junior year because of a hernia.
“I was small, but I was quick enough that I could see where the ball was going” on the line of scrimmage.
The list of extracurricular activities under Ron’s senior yearbook portrait indicates he also participated a little on the school basketball and wrestling teams. The list shows him playing basketball one year. He said he wasn’t good enough to make the cut for the varsity team his senior year, he said. “I was never the athlete Eric was.”
As for wrestling, Ron made it onto the South Newton squad one season – his senior year – and he appears in the team photo in the 1970 Regiment. Unfortunately, that year’s team was not very successful, finishing with a 1-12 record.
There is one notable exception to Eric’s circle of friends who didn’t care for traditional sports in their younger years: his longtime buddy Andy Rodriguez. Andy said that one of the first things he and Eric did together was play youth basketball.
“I
was big for our class, and he was very athletic,” Andy said. “So we were the
best. We stood out.”
The two youths spent considerable time hanging out together while growing up. Andy and Michelle remember Andy staying overnight at Eric’s house many times. Luanne said she eventually would turn to Andy when she needed to learn where and when Eric needed to be places for his activities.
She recalled getting a call from a coach one day asking where Eric was because he was late for a football scrimmage. Luanne told him Eric was in bed and asked when he needed to be there. The coach said, “Now!”
“Eric had trouble paying attention to details like when he needed to be places,” Luanne said, “so after that, I started using Andy as my contact for that information.”
After his schooling, Ron went to work for the family trucking business. He said that although he spent a lot of time away from home on long-haul trips, he made a point to attend as many of his children’s athletic competitions as he could through the years.
Ron also said that although he and Ed Donahue did not hang out with each other while in school together, they would become friends during Eric and Andy’s years playing sports together in school. The parents would sit together at the Rebels basketball games, and at home football games, Ron set up a tailgating tent behind the gridiron’s south end zone and grill food for players to enjoy afterward.
When their sons went off to college, Luanne and Ron Watt and Ed and Angela Donahue drove in separate cars, met at the stadium and enjoyed pregame tailgating together.
Ron remembers the October 2009 day that he was outside his home painting fenders – by this time, late in the first decade of the new millennium, the family trucking business WTI had transitioned to manufacturing fiberglass truck fenders – when Ed Donahue drove up to the Watt residence. Ed had come over to inform Ron he was dying of cancer. Ed, a couple weeks shy of his 59th birthday, died two weeks later, Ron said. “That was a sad moment.” After that, Angela rode along with the Watts to the college games the rest of 2009 and all of 2010.
Because Eric and Andy were such good friends, Andy said, “It’s safe to say we know our darkest secrets about each other.”
Unlike Eric, Andy Rodriguez did not play Pop Warner football, but not because he didn’t want to. Andy didn’t play because his weight exceeded Pop Warner limits for his age.
Today, for example, the weights of youths ages 5, 6 and 7 – like those of Eric’s age when he started playing – must fall within 35 to 80 pounds at the time of certification to play in the lowest category, the Tiny-Mite Division. Also, they can weigh no more than 89 pounds by the end of a season in that division. Youths competing in the next age group, Mitey-Mite, for ages 7, 8 and 9, must weigh within 45 to 105 pounds upon certification and no more than 114 at the end of the season. And so on.
Because his weight exceeded the league’s maximum threshold at every age division as he grew up, Andy did not get a chance to enjoy the Pop Warner experience, which included travel to competitions in such places as Merrillville or East Chicago, Ind., like his buddy Eric did.
Brice Willey, a high school football and basketball teammate of Eric and Andy, recalls that Andy’s difficulty qualifying for Pop Warner ball was not unusual. He said there were a lot of youths in the community who were sized out of Pop Warner, depleting significant talent from the Southern Generals team for which Willey also played.
Watt
and Ben Welsh, another South Newton High School football and basketball teammate,
played quarterback on their respective Pop Warner teams and, later on, in
middle school. Both would eventually play the position in high school as well; Welsh,
like Willey, was one year behind Eric in school.
“I
remember watching Eric” in Pop Warner ball, Welsh said. “He could do things I
knew I could not.”
Rodriguez didn’t start playing football until seventh grade, when he suited up for the middle school team. The first time he went to the locker room that year to dress for practice proved to be an awakening for him. “I had to watch Eric and the others … because I didn’t know how to put on (shoulder and thigh) pads.”
One would expect that an athlete's first year of football would be joyous, but it didn’t turn out that way for Andy. He broke a leg while playing, and the injury was complicated enough to keep him from playing not only the rest of that season, but also all of eighth-grade football.
A new era for Eric and Andy began in 2003, their freshman year at South Newton High School. The boys went out for the football team, and both played defensive back with the junior varsity. Andy also logged time with the varsity’s special teams, which are crews sent onto the field for punts, kick-offs and extra-points. Alas, a dislocated shoulder cut short Andy’s play – again – freshman year.
The 6-5 2003 varsity team was top-heavy with seniors – Andy estimated there were 18 – so the following year as sophomores, both boys easily made it onto the varsity squad.
Asked what he remembers about his initial assessment of Watt in 2003, head coach Chris Bell said that the freshman was particularly good at taking direction.
“He put in a lot of effort. He was always like a sponge – he took in as much knowledge as he could.” But, Bell added, “there was nothing exceptional about him.” Yet.
Assistant coach Blaine Durham agreed that Watt was extremely coachable.
“He always listened. He always wanted to be good,” Durham said, and he worked hard and eventually, when his body caught up to his skills by his junior season, his confidence was such that Eric knew he was good. But in 2003, that was still two seasons away.
Watt and Rodriguez observed that upperclassmen in 2003 and ’04 didn’t fully “buy into the program,” and teammates Welsh and Willey agreed with that assessment about the 2004 team, which was Welsh and Willey’s first year of high school football.
“They just wanted to get by, even if they had some talent,” Andy recalls. “They didn’t want to do the work.” The 2004 team’s 1-9 record, especially, reflected the difficulty the Rebels encountered adapting to a new offense that their coaches were introducing.
The offense was new not only to South Newton but to high school teams most everywhere. It was a pass-oriented offense, something coaches referred to as “the spread.”
The spread was a concept that Durham had studied from watching it used on teams directed by noted college (and later, pro) coach Urban Meyer in his stints at Bowling Green, Utah and Florida. Meyer would use it again when he moved to Ohio State in 2012.
Unlike upperclassmen on the team, Eric and Andy were willing and interested in learning and implementing the spread offense.
That last sentence – about how nobody knew how to stop the spread – would be repeated by other South Newton players when recounting their years on Rebels football teams.
Durham’s first assignment when he joined the South Newton coaching staff in 2000, the penultimate year of the Wentzel-Logan era, was to manage the offensive line. After three years of that, he moved to coaching wide receivers for a couple years, and from 2005 until today, he has coached wide receivers and quarterbacks, effectively making him the team’s offensive coordinator, an important role for the Rebels, given their implementation of the spread offense.
Indeed, the 2004 team lumbered through the schedule with the new offense, but head coach Bell, shown below in a 2014 photo by Lori Murphy, gave his players credit for trying it.
In 2004, with so many seniors gone (including the starting quarterback), Bell and the Rebels turned to Watt, then a scrawny 5-foot-8, 135-pound sophomore, to call signals behind center. The decision to anoint a new starting quarterback came down to Watt or freshman Welsh, the only other player with quarterback experience.
At the time, Ben Welsh stood about 5-6 and weighed 115 pounds. Welsh said he was so slight physically in 2004 that he felt that he didn’t belong on a football field. And while Welsh says he could run just fine carrying the ball, he had trouble passing it because, at his size, the shoulder pads put a serious crimp on his throwing motion. That wasn’t something that would help coaches wanting to implement a pass-oriented offense.
Welsh volunteered that in middle school – when he and Eric had played quarterback with different squads – Eric already was showing signs of greatness. Whereas, Welsh said he played the position on his middle-school team “out of necessity” because there was no one else.
So Welsh had no quarrel with the coaches’ decision in 2004 to go with Watt as starting quarterback. “There was no quarterback controversy,” he added with a chuckle.
They soon realized, though, that wasn’t going to happen.
In time, Welsh grew physically into his football gear. By his junior year at South Newton, he became one of senior Eric Watt’s top receivers and, in Ben’s own senior year in 2007, after Watt had moved on to college, Welsh enjoyed a terrific season as South Newton’s starting quarterback, leading the Rebels to a 10-2 record and the postseason sectional final game against Triton. He would also lead the whole state – at all levels – in average passing yardage per game (with 266.2 yards) and rank second statewide in completions (225), total passing yardage (3,194) and touchdown passes (40).
Being so physically ready, he stepped onto the varsity as a slot receiver his first year and stayed there throughout high school. He also played in the defensive backfield for the Rebels.
Assistant coach Durham was already talking to Willey about playing for the Rebels the summer before Willey entered high school. “Coach Durham did a good job connecting with people,” Willey said. “He told me they were going to run a four-wide (receivers) offense.”
That 2004 season, Willey ended up as the team’s second-leading receiver. Having had that extra year (freshman season) of starting on varsity no doubt contributed to him being able to finish his high school career, in 2007, as the school’s all-time leading receiver.
Still, success came slowly for senior-depleted South Newton in 2004. Coaches continued to acclimate players to the pass-oriented offense, but there was a significant learning curve. The team had so many new starters on the field, and starting quarterback Eric Watt was among those needing repetitions to learn and get comfortable executing the spread.
Coaches who use the spread have as many as four (sometimes even five) wide receivers line up “spread out” along the line of scrimmage before a center snap. The spread, when executed by good quarterbacks, forces a defense to pull one or more defenders – usually linebackers – away from the offensive center and quarterback in order to cover an extra receiver or two. That means the defense loses some pressure on the quarterback or loses help to stop a running back trying to spring through gaps, also known as “seams,” between offensive linemen.
Watt said that on some occasions, the Rebels eventually would use five wide receivers, in which case Ryan Care, who normally played just on defense and special teams, would enter the game on offense as fifth receiver.
Ostensibly, this advantage of the spread allows a quarterback to exploit open spaces he sees where receivers run their routes. Sometimes, if the spaces are gaping, the quarterback can elect to run with the ball himself, especially to escape defensive pressure.
Because of the Rebels’ losing record in 2004, opponents grew increasingly less concerned about the Rebels’ new pass-oriented offensive schemes.
“Even with Eric running it in 2004, it wasn’t a thing of beauty yet,” Bell said. “It took a while to click. We were asking our running backs to block and pull (out). It was a big change for everybody.”
He said there were not enough South Newton players who went out for football that season to field full scout teams to play opposite the team’s starters during the week at practices.
“Scout teams” consist of players – usually
reserves, freshman and/or and junior varsity members or, in pro ball, members
of a practice squad – who at practices go opposite starters and use schemes and
formations that the next opponent is known or likely to use.
Because of the thin turnout in 2004, some South Newton one-way defensive players were drafted to play positions on offense on the scout teams, and one-way offensive players were drafted to play defense on the scout teams. This “drafting” of players onto scout teams on opposite sides of the ball from what they usually played added experience and depth to the squad, which would in turn help the team during the season in situations when starters were injured or so exhausted they needed a break.
The one game the Rebels won in 2004 – a 12-7 squeaker over Midwest Conference foe Caston – came more than halfway through the season. A notable aspect about that contest was that it was the one game Eric Watt did not start at quarterback in his three years on varsity. Coach Bell said that fact would become a source of playful razzing of Watt for the rest of Watt’s time at the school … and it probably still comes up to this day when those players come together or cross paths in everyday life, he said.
When questioned about the 2004 Caston game, Eric said he didn’t play at all because he was trying to recover from a concussion he’d gotten in the previous game, a 29-0 loss to arch-rival Tri-County, a game that was played in the RCA Dome, which then was still the home of the Indianapolis Colts.
Above is a Lori Murphy photo of Rebels players in the RCA Dome locker room, for the 2004 game against Tri-County. Individuals shown include Andy Rodriguez (center, facing left) and head coach Chris Bell (far right).
Coach Bell did not recall such an injury to Watt, and he and Welsh said Watt didn’t start against Caston but eventually did enter the game and finish it. Bell’s recollection was that he decided to start Welsh so the coach could “think ahead” — i.e., look beyond the 2004 season. He wanted to see what backup QB Welsh could do because, in the coaches’ minds, Watt still did not have a lock on the starting job.
Welsh thought the coaches started him at quarterback to motivate Watt because of the latter’s lackluster play against Tri-County.
“I don’t think Blaine or Coach Bell were happy with Eric’s performance in that game. I came in at the end (vs. Tri-County in the RCA Dome) and mopped up,” Welsh said. So to get Watt back on the right track, he said, they started Welsh against Caston. Welsh said he didn’t last long at the position and that, as Bell asserted, Eric did enter and finish the game behind center.
Welsh said that when the coaches came up to him to inform him that he’d be starting against Caston, he said he thought they were joking. “But I soon found out they were not.” Welsh repeated the fact that at that point in his high school athletic career, he still couldn’t throw the ball comfortably because of how shoulder pads impaired his passing motion. Hence, the reason why, he said, Eric was back in the game soon enough.
To illustrate just how slight of physique Welsh was at the time, he singled out a play early in the Caston game when he ran the ball on offense along the sideline. He said a Caston defender came up to him to make the stop, but instead of tackling Welsh, the defender lifted him and tossed him out of bounds. Coach Bell just happened to be in the right place at the right time on the sideline, Welsh said, and “he literally caught me.”
A check of the Lafayette Journal & Courier archives from Oct. 2, 2004, the day after the Caston game, showed that Watt did, indeed, play in the game. According to the game box score, he threw a 42-yard touchdown pass to Adam Rheude in the second quarter and ran it into the end zone from 2 yards out in the fourth quarter to account for both Rebels scores (both of South Newton’s extra-point conversion attempts failed).
Welsh said the coaches’ psychological experiment with Watt must have worked. Eric was back to starting the following week. “The coaches knew what they were doing,” Welsh said.
In summary, midway through the 2004 season, starting at quarterback was not yet a lock for Eric Watt, and coach Bell acknowledged as much. “We were not yet totally sold on Eric being the man yet, but we knew we had the right pieces.”
By the season-ending 34-20 loss to undefeated Whiting in 2004, which came three weeks after the win over Caston and in the first weekend of postseason sectionals, Eric said, he was feeling much more comfortable on the field than he had been early on. But he noted that in the Whiting game, while he threw for three touchdowns, he also had six interceptions.
“We were throwing the ball like crazy,” he said of that last game of 2004. “The coaches realized we had something.”
He
said Whiting, which finished the year 11-1, had a talented quarterback, Matt
Kobli, a junior two-way player who made the Munster Times all-area team
as a defensive back that season. Kobli would go on to play quarterback at
Butler University after high school; in 2008, Kobli set Butler’s season record of 23 touchdown
passes, a mark that still stood as of the end of the 2023 season.
Almost all the scores of the nine Rebels losses in 2004 were by large margins. The only close-loss games were 21-18 to Winamac in Week 4 and 13-6 to intracounty rival North Newton in the regular-season finale. In all other games, South Newton’s deficits were by at least 14 points, like it had been against Whiting. More often than not, the margins were significantly greater. The worst beating – by 53 points – was the 66-13 drubbing administered by Pioneer in Week 3.
“Pioneer was always very good,” Watt said. “They’re always state (championship) contenders. They still are to this day.” After 2004, Eric would get two chances to help his school reverse its fortunes against Pioneer.
The loss to North Newton stung the most for many at South Newton. Coach Bell said the Newton County schools’ rivalry was fierce and evident when he arrived to coach the Rebels in 1996. “That was THE game,” he said.
Eric and Andy agreed that North Newton was a big rival; Watt said he felt North Newton was one of the two most disliked teams on the Rebels’ schedule each year. The other was Tri-County. North Newton because of the school’s proximity to Kentland and because of the annual battle to be king of the county. Another reason he cited North Newton was because it enabled him to play against the guys he’d faced in Morocco in his early years of Pop Warner ball.
“I finally got a chance to get me a shot at them,” he said.
Tri-County, in Wolcott, one of the next closest (geographically) schools to South Newton, is a fellow member of the Midwest Conference; North Newton, a Class 2A school, was in a different conference.
Welsh agreed that Tri-County was a real rival, but he did not feel the same about North Newton, largely because he said that by the time Welsh made it onto the football team, South Newton was beating North Newton handily and regularly.
The camp’s two S’s – Dave and Lance Scheib – are father and son. Dave Scheib was a varsity quarterback at Emmerich Manual High School in Indianapolis in the late 1950s and, in college, at Indiana Central College (now the University of Indianapolis). He has coached football as an assistant at several Indiana high schools, and currently works at Noblesville High School. He is a member of the Indiana Football Hall of Fame.
Lance Scheib might be best remembered as the player who caught so many passes thrown by Warren Central High School star (and future Purdue, Illinois and Indianapolis Colts quarterback) Jeff George. After a college career at Purdue University himself, Lance coached football at Lebanon, Franklin Central and Noblesville high schools in metro Indianapolis before stepping down in 2015. He continues to teach history at Noblesville High School.
Jim O’Hara, the O in SOS, is best-known as a player and coach for Cathedral High School, an independent Catholic institution in Indianapolis. He was a standout quarterback on Cathedral’s 1976 state Class 3A runner-up team and helped Dayton University win the 1980 NCAA Division III championship in a 63-0 whitewashing of Ithaca.
O’Hara later spent many years as an assistant and head high school coach in Indiana. His stops started with an assistant coach position at Cathedral in 1983 followed by a head coach stint from 1988-93 at Hamilton Southeastern, then returning to assist at Cathedral (the Irish won four state titles in his time as an assistant), and then more head coach stints at Cathedral in 2002 (where he won a Class 4A championship in 2006) and Eastern Hancock (from 2013-2017). After 32 years in coaching, he stepped down from the Eastern Hancock post to teach business at Ben Davis High School on the westside of Indianapolis.
Blaine Durham said Watt was South Newton’s first player to attend the SOS camp and that eventually other players from the school – including Welsh and Willey – also would attend.
Watt said SOS camps were on Sundays and that he attended one camp between his sophomore and junior year, and another the following summer. At each camp he attended, he said, there were about a dozen or so quarterbacks there to get instruction. The agenda involved mostly one-on-one drills, but there was little individual attention and no scrimmages, he said.
Durham paused good and long when asked to cite any flaws in Eric Watt’s skills as a quarterback once Watt matured. When he finally spoke, he said he couldn’t produce any. Asked about Watt’s strengths, the first thing out of his mouth was his arm.
“He’s probably got the strongest arm I’ve ever coached.” And, he said, Eric was accurate. “He probably could throw it through a knot hole.”
Welsh agreed on both counts. In fact, he described Watt’s powerful throws invariably as “lasers” and “rockets.” The passes came at receivers hard even when the distances between quarterback and receiver were short, Welsh said. He admitted that he could not handle several passes from Watt because of how hard they had been thrown. But that certainly didn’t make Watt any worse of a quarterback.
Tomorrow in Chapter 2: Mastering the Spread
Previously in "On Hoosier Gridirons":
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