Jackson-Milton shuts down Windham 47- 0

Photo by Ashleigh Mccune

If you look at a 47-0 score, all you can conclude is that it was a disaster, that everything that could go wrong did go wrong. You might be right – but then you probably weren’t at Jackson-Milton High School last night.

Yes, the Bombers got crushed for the third game in a row. Yes, they have been outscored by over 100 points, surely a record for a football program that is now almost 110 years old. Yes, the second half flew by, because the 30-point mercy rule kicked in.

But if you are despairing, you are not a real Bomber fan.

Coach Jake Eye is like the Guardians’ Stephen Vogt. Last year everybody thought they were geniuses. This year, if you look at the production, you can wonder what the hullabaloo was all about.

But watch these gutsy kids in Black and Gold closely. They lose, but they are as far from losers as they could be.

24 players dressed this week. That is exactly the same number that started the season. No one is walking away.

They still sprinted in and out of the game. The coaches kept throwing wrinkles into the offense, to see if something worked against a third straight undefeated opponent. DeJuan Ramsey got knocked down and needed trainer Lisa Murton’s attention three or four times in the game. But the kid was right back out there a couple plays later.

I have seen teams quit. I once saw a Windham team quit during a playoff game. It was the worst thing I have ever seen in 70 years of going to Bomber football games.

It’s not happening this year. There is a game within the game, and that’s what a true Bomber fan is watching in 2025.

Last week, the progress was on offense. This week, it was the defense that showed that these youngsters are growing weekly.

The Blue Jays took Cam Peet’s kickoff and fumbled it forward to the 39-yard line. The opening end run gained 26 yards, and a quarterback keeper added five. It looked for all the world like the opening drive of the last two games.

Until it wasn’t.

Two plunges up the gut from inside Windham’s 10 netted nothing, as the heart of the defensive line stiffened. On 4th and 8, an incomplete pass left the Bombers in possession of the ball right on their goal line.

Please don’t just slide through that last sentence. The Bombers stopped a 2-0 team inches from a score, the most pleasant surprise of this young season.

The ensuing Bomber drive had the four elements that have become so familiar to the fans. DeJuan Ramsey, all 155 pounds (allegedly) of him, plunged up the middle and ended up injured. Bryan Smithberger threw an incompletion. Bryan Smithberger completed a pass to Cam Witherspoon. And Loudon Collins punted.

On the second J-M series, Matt Kolaczek supplied a crunching tackle on an end sweep. Smithberger knocked down a pass over the middle, and Gavin Kiser smacked a fourth down pass out of the receiver’s mitts for a second Bomber stoppage.

After another Bomber turnover, the Blue Jays connected on a 35-yard pass over Windham’s undersized defensive backs for the first touchdown of the game at 2:34 of the period.

This, folks, is a step forward. Two defensive stops, and the Bomber went nearly an entire period without the foe reaching paydirt.

To finish the quarter, DeJuan Ramsey broke off a 40-yard gallop on the best run of the year, but as the second stanza opened, the problems began to accumulate.

Bryan Smithberger, so effective on short passes to the flats and over the middle, tossed the first of several long-distance interceptions, giving the Blue Jays a 60-yard pick six on the first play of the quarter.

Gavin Kiser took his turn at quarterback, disappearing under the center so completely that it looked like a wildcat alignment until his head popped up, but a first down pass to Kolaczek was the most he could muster.

The most hankie-happy officiating crew this fan has ever witnessed then began littering the burned-out grass with yellow fabric, and for every yard forward, the zebras made sure 10 went backward (to be fair, they were equally liberal in stymieing both squads, as if they were intent on calling every penalty in the rule book).

Jackson-Milton was forced to punt twice in this quarter, once again a positive sign of growth in the Windham defense. But a Smithberger fumble after several completions gave J-M an open field touchdown.

The next drive was almost a carbon copy. The third Jackson-Milton interception led to a touchdown with only three seconds left in the quarter. 28-0 at halftime is a score that very few teams can overcome.

But Jake Eye teams may lose, but they do not give up. After the intermission, just as they had in the first quarter, the Bomber defense, highlighted by a Xavier Bruton knockdown of a long Blue Jay pass, held on 4th down.

Later in the period, an interception and spectacular runback by Ethan Thornton ended with a fumble, snuffing out the best chance the Bombers had to get on the scoreboard.

But with their backs against the wall, with a single score threatening to bring on the mercy rule, these kids turned in a scoreless third quarter. It’s just a number in a box score, and nobody might notice it if they weren’t paying attention, but these kids shut out a high-powered offense for 12 minutes.

If they did it once, they can do it again.

2025 has one of the ugliest schedules any Bomber team has ever faced. They may not win a single game this year. It may turn out to be a year of lessons learned.

But Bombers are smart. If they apply what they are learning week by week, there could be some surprises for the fans that are showing up in high numbers every game.

If the boys aren’t giving up, we can’t either.

(Matt Kolaczek wasn’t wearing his orange shoes last night. With those atrocious gold letters on Windham’s white uniforms – making them impossible to read from more than 10 feet away – it was hard to keep track of him, let alone the other Bombers. My suggestion: pass out magic markers to every player, each one getting a different color, and they can color their shoes so fans can tell who is doing what, and not have to rely on a PA system like Jackson-Milton’s, which reached only the dozen or so Blue Jay fans in the stands, and was completely obliterated on the Windham side by a bandster noodling on his guitar the entire game).