FILE PHOTO.
Peabody’s Matt D’Amato threw three touchdown passes in Friday’s win.
By Anne Marie Tobin
PEABODY – The Peabody Tanners football team made have had only six possessions against Lynn English on Senior Night last night, but it made the most of them.
In a impressive offensive display, Peabody scored on all six possessions in a 41-8 rout at Coley Lee Field.
Senior captain and running back Jake Doherty had a career day for the Tanners with four touchdowns, while quarterback Matt D’Amato, also a senior captain, threw three touchdown passes.
The Tanners won the turnover battle early, picking off sophomore quarterback Matt Severance on the Bulldogs three times on interceptions by Moisse Irizarry, Eric DeMayo and Cedric Gutierrez, giving the Tanners with short fields.
“We’ve been struggling to move the ball, but we have a good young quarterback and some skilled receivers on this team,” English coach Chris Carroll said. “They created some pressure and their defensive linemen did a good job of getting their hands up, but you can’t turn the ball over three times and expect to win.”
Irizarry got things started when he picked off Severance at the English 35 and returned it 15 yards to the 20. Facing fourth-and-3 at the 13, D’Amato hit DeMayo for the first score of the game. D’Amato nailed the first of five PATs to put Peabody on top 8-2 just three minutes in.
After forcing a three-and-out, Peabody drove 51 yards in 10 plays with D’Amato finding Doherty from seven yards out to make it 14-0. On English’s first play of its next drive drive, DeMayo tipped a Severance pass to himself at the line, giving the ball back to Peabody at the English 46. Two minutes later the Tanners found the end zone on a terrific scramble by D’Amato, who evaded several tacklers, cut back and threw against his body to a wide-open Doherty, who took it 35 yards untouched to the house.
“You have to give credit to Matt,” Peabody coach Mark Bettencourt said. “They forced us to throw, he saw Jake coming back and he made the play.”
After Peabody’s defense forced another three-and-out, Doherty made it 28-0 on a 3-yard run with under seven minutes left in the half. A minute later, a Gutierrez pick gave Peabody the ball at the English 49. Three plays later, Doherty ran it in from the 18-yard line. DeMayo, set up the play with a 25-yard run on the first play of the drive.
If there was any doubt about the outcome of the game, Peabody put them to rest in the third quarter with a 60-yard drive in 16 plays, capped by a 1-yard plunge into the end zone by Nick Palma. The drive consumed the entire quarter and put the game out of reach at 41-0 with just 11 minutes to play.
English showed its competitiveness and pulled off a long drive that consumed all but a few seconds of the final quarter, driving 60 yards to the Tanner 10-yard where the Bulldogs faced a fourth-and-10. Severance broke up the shoutout with a 10-yard scamper into the end zone to close out the game’s scoring.
The win improved Peabody to .500 at 3-3 and keeps Peabody in the middle of the pack in the Division 1A power rankings, while English fell to 1-5.