Dunbar's football team has enjoyed great success in past state finals, winning nine times in 10 trips. Douglass from Prince George's County had never won.
Saturday night, it was Douglass’ turn.
The Eagles used their big running game to roll over the No. 14 Poets, 38-0, in the Class 2A state championship game at rainy M&T Bank Stadium, giving Douglass its first state title in 11 tries.
Dunbar, overmatched on the line, could not keep pace with the Eagles’ quick-strike offense. Douglass scored on three of its first five drives, each of which took less than three minutes.
When Dunbar (10-4) lost junior quarterback Zionnez Spencer, who was carted off the field with a badly sprained ankle with 7:55 left in the third quarter, the Poets fell apart. By then, the Eagles (14-0) had a 24-0 lead, but Spencer accounted for 129 of the Poets’ 152 total yards and they managed just 23 yards after he left.
“We’re young and it was a real physical football game,” Dunbar coach Lawrence Smith said, “and when you play in those type games, it caught up with us. We didn’t have the bodies up front to match up. We had to take our offensive line and put them on the defensive line. We slowed them down a little in the second half and then losing Z, we just was really out of it then.”
The Eagles ran for 410 yards, led by Akiva Wedge (16 carries, 159 yards), Mikale Makle (14 carries, 110 yards) and quarterback Devin Butler (12 carries, 95 yards).
Douglass, which has had a running clock on 13 opponents and shut out eight, stopped the Poets on the first possession of the game and then needed just 24 seconds and two plays to go 52 yards for a touchdown. Wedge scored on a 43-yard run with 9:59 left in the first quarter.
Dunbar had a chance to pull even as Spencer eluded tackle after tackle on the Poets’ third possession and led them from their own 20 to the Douglass 4-yard line, but the Eagles stopped Kendall Johnson’s fourth-and-goal run at the 2 and took over. The Poets never got back to the red zone.
The Eagles needed about a minute to get there, driving 98 yards in 1:15. Butler’s 6-yard run capped a drive that included Wedge’s 32-yard run and a 55-yard run by Makle. Butler scored again with 5:55 left in the half after Quinton Jordan’s interception.
The only problem for Douglass was conversions — their first four failed. But that didn’t matter much with Dunbar’s inability to score points.
Wedge made it 24-0 with an 8-yard touchdown run early in the third quarter. Spencer suffered the injury a few minutes later and the Eagles scored twice in the fourth quarter.
“It hurts for us because we made it this far and we had chip on our shoulder and we was trying to make plays but it wasn’t working out,” Dunbar senior receiver Juane Robinson said. “Losing our quarterback really hurt us bad, because he was a key player of ours and he helped us get to where we’re at right now.”
The Poets won their last state title in 2012, their third in a row and their seventh in nine years, but they didn’t make it to the state tournament last season.
With a young team, getting back to the final surprised just about everyone — except Spencer, who wrote in his Twitter bio last summer that Dunbar would win the championship.
Smith said the Poets overachieved after losing 30 players to graduation and having several others transfer after he was suspended last summer over the handling of an alleged hazing incident in 2013.
“They have nothing to hold their heads down about,” Smith said. “When you go through what they went through … to get back to this point, it was tremendous in itself. I’m not blind to the fact. I knew this was going to be a tough football game. You don’t tell your team that, but … [the Eagles] are senior-led. When you have ninth and tenth graders and you come into this type of game it’s a major deal for them.”
Interim coach Michael Carter, the Poets defensive coordinator, held the team together through an 0-2 start. Then they won six in a row before Smith was granted an injunction to return to the sideline while he appealed his suspension. The Poets suffered their third loss to archrival Edmondson, 28-22, in triple overtime.
That game helped prepared them to win two close ones in the playoffs, a 30-28 victory over Eastern Tech for the region title and a 24-21 win at Kent Island in the state semifinals.
The Poets were two seconds from losing to Kent Island before Spencer escaped what looked like a sure sack when one defender grabbed his ankle and then another jumped on his back. Spencer shook off both and with no time left on the clock, fired a pass to the end zone where Ivan Lomax made a diving catch to win the game.
With three playoff wins this year, the Poets have won 48 times in the state tournament — more than any other program, even though Baltimore City has only played for the state title for 22 years. The Poets have been to the tournament 19 times.