Waukee Northwest Shuts Out Ottumwa 49-0 After Inadvertent Whistle

The Wolves scored five first-half touchdowns to improve to 4-2, while Ottumwa fell to 2-4 with its third straight loss.

Waukee Northwest ran away from Ottumwa for a 49-0 high school football win Friday night at Ottumwa, improving to 4-2 on the season. The Bulldogs dropped to 2-4. Upsetting the Wolves required every break to go Ottumwa's way, including the ones decided by officials, as the opening minutes showed.

Ottumwa began the night hoping to set a tone with a touchdown on its first possession, and the drive appeared to stay alive early. Facing third-and-12, quarterback Spencer Dalbey spun through two Waukee Northwest defenders and lunged ahead for what looked like a 14-yard gain to midfield, two yards more than the first down required. The Bulldogs were set to keep the drive moving with a new set of downs. Instead, one of the three officials believed Dalbey had been tackled while he was still working free of defenders and blew the play dead. After a lengthy conference, the crew ruled an inadvertent whistle, erasing the entire result of the play and forcing Ottumwa to line up for third down again.

The do-over went nowhere for the Bulldogs. Marquez Briggs was stuffed short of the marker on the repeated third down, and Ottumwa punted. Waukee Northwest answered with a 64-yard touchdown drive that took seven plays — the first of five touchdowns the Wolves scored in the first half on the way to the shutout.

Dalbey said the wiped-out play drained his team at the worst possible time, and the Bulldogs never fully recovered their footing. "It's frustrating. It's a big momentum killer," he said. "The thing we struggled to do was to get back and get back momentum without letting those things bother us."

Friday's result stretched Ottumwa's losing streak to three games. The Bulldogs have fallen to Des Moines Lincoln, Southeast Polk and Waukee Northwest during the skid by a combined 92 points. Those three opponents own a combined 13-5 record.

Dalbey traced the wider problem to how his team started the night. "It was a confidence thing. We came out and just were not on top of it," he said. "We need to get back to that."

Ottumwa travels to Norwalk on Friday looking to end the slide, the first of three games left on its schedule. The remaining opponents — Norwalk, Des Moines Roosevelt and Iowa City High — carry a combined record of 8-10. The final two games will be played at Schafer Stadium.

Dalbey said the response down the stretch has to come through effort. "We just have to put in 100 percent effort every play, every quarter and every half of every game," he said. "Every single time you step on the field is big. I feel like we're a group of guys that, if we put in a 100-percent effort, we can go and compete with a lot of teams."