JOHN GLENN - Aug. 27, 2009 - Nearly lost amongst the torrent of penalty flags was the fact that John Glenn's football team looks very much up to an encore of its 2008 run to the Division 3 regional championship game.

Despite losing plenty of offensive talent to graduation, the Bobcats barely missed a beat, amassing 398 yards rushing on a whopping 61 carries to key a 35-14 season-opening victory over Cadillac.

"If you'd have told me before the game that we'd put up 35 points, I probably wouldn't have believed it," said Glenn coach Mark Miller. "We're pretty young on offense. But we really stepped up and ran well.

"We broke a couple of plays to the outside, but for the most part we did it between the tackles."

Running back Brandon Wrzesinski is about the only experienced skill player returning to the Bobcats' backfield, and he responded with 77 yards on 17 carries, including a one-yard touchdown dive on his team's first possession. Ryan LaFlure led the team with 124 yards on 21 carries with two scores, and new quarterback Jordan Schumann added 93 yards on five carries, including a 51-yard run in the fourth quarter. Schumann also connected with Jacob Carter on a 48-yard pass play on Glenn's first series that set up the first score.

In all Glenn ran 66 plays from scrimmage to the Vikings' 45, despite Cadillac holding a 24-8 edge in in the fourth quarter.

It would have been a thoroughly impressive display were it not for the 200 combined yards in penalties, including five 15-yarders assessed against each squad. Nine of those were personal fouls, including three thrown on a fight that erupted between two Bobcats and one Viking during the kickoff return following Glenn's opening touchdown.

Those three were ejected, and the officials clamped down on anything even resembling a potential skirmish for the rest of the game.

"I told the kids at halftime, we'd faced more adversity in that first half than we have in most seasons," Miller said. "I've never seen something like that happen on a kickoff.

"The officials did the right thing. They said they would call everything close, and they did. I'm really disappointed in our personal fouls, because that's not what we're about."

A garden-variety illegal block penalty on that same kick return cost Cadillac a 90-yard touchdown. The Vikings eventually punted and Glenn responded with a 15-play, 71-yard drive for a 13-0 lead that consumed nearly seven minutes.

Cadillac needed just one play to score as Tyler Ellsworth broke loose for a 55-yard jaunt, cutting the Bobcats' lead to 13-7. Glenn threatened one more time before the half, but

The Vikings fumbled away their first possession of  the second half, setting up a five-yard LaFlure run. Schumann's conversion pass to Tanner Kain made it 21-7.

Cadillac got a 40-yard kick return from Ellsworth that set up a 34-yard touchdown pass from Gary Silvers to Mike Weeks.

Ellsworth and running mate Jacob Hurrell finished with more than 100 yards of kick returns, and that doesn't include the 90-yarder that was erased. Ellsworth led the Vikings with 109 yards on 11 carries.

"Those guys were fast," Miller said. "I thought our defense did a great job on them. You could see how dangerous they were on those returns when they had some space to run."

But Cadillac couldn't score without the ball, and after the Vikings' score made it 21-14, Glenn did what it does best: churning away the final six minutes of the third quarter with a 13-play, 79-yard drive that ended with a three-yard Wrzesinski run. That re-opened up the Bobcats' two-touchdown lead, and the Vikings never again posed a serious threat.

Michael Dombrowksi's 1-yard run with 3:55 left capped the scoring.

The Bobcats (1-0) travel to Pontiac on Thursday, Sept. 3, while Cadillac (0-1) plays Wyoming Godwin Heights on Friday.