Rams to open playoffs against Grants

PORTALES — There’s a lot of travel this week in the Class 4A playoffs.

Round-trip, the road teams in this weekend’s quarterfinals will travel 1,856 miles — a little more than the distance from Albuquerque to Toronto — and that includes just 46 miles in Friday’s Bloomfield-Kirtland Central matchup.

Aztec, Grants and Lovington aren’t so lucky, traveling to St. Pius X, Portales and Taos, respectively, for Saturday matchups. The Grants Pirates will likely be two hours into their trip to Portales by the time they get east of Albuquerque and face another 200-plus miles to Greyhound Stadium.

Portales coaches know just how long that trip is, because they made it last week during their bye to check out their eventual opponent. They ended up seeing the host Pirates pull a 14-7 win over Silver.

“I thought there were two evenly-matched teams,” Portales coach Jaime Ramirez said. “They both played well, and had positives. Grants had a goal-line stand, played really good defense in the fourth quarter. The next play (after the goal line stand), they went 99 yards for a touchdown and that was pretty much the game.”

On paper, it appears that Grants (9-2) could have had a bye just like Portales (7-3), but their two losses came at district time. The Rams, however, are on a five-game winning streak where they’ve won three district games, outscored the opposition 244-27 and had a 35-point running clock in each contest.

Grants, meanwhile, has only been in two games that weren’t decided by 20 points. The Pirates enjoyed easy wins over Miyamura, Zuni, Gallup, Tohatchi, Shiprock, Pojoaque and Bernalillo, and they suffered a 42-7 loss to top-seeded St. Pius X.

“Really, they’ve done a good job,” Ramirez said. “They’re 9-2 ... they’re a good football team. They want to throw the ball. They run, I’d say close to a 50-50 team. That game against St. Pius started out pretty well, and (the Sartans) ran away with it in the second.”

The Pirates are in their fifth season under Rio Thompson. While this is Grants’ first playoff berth in that time, Grants has been just on the playoff bubble the last few years and is 24-27 during that time. Attempts to contact Thompson were unsuccessful.

“Their go-to guy is Terrell Hocker, who’s been their quarterback at times, and (running back) Isaiah Johnson,” Ramirez said. “Both of them play running back at times. Their tight end (Chandler Martinez) gets involved plenty as well.”

The first round went pretty much like Ramirez expected. Although ninth-seeded Aztec blew out Ruidoso 40-19, Ramirez said it was a well-fought game and it was 26-19 at one point.

Saturday’s winner gets Lovington or Taos. Portales isn’t looking ahead at the rest of the bracket, but we will.

The higher seed hosts the first round and quarterfinals, while semifinals and championships are hosted according to playoff histories. If the teams have previously played each other in either a semifinal or championship, the previous matchup’s host is this year’s visitor. If there’s no semifinal or title game history, the higher seed hosts.

Should Portales make the semifinals, third-seeded Taos would visit Portales (no playoff history, higher seed hosts), and Portales would travel to No. 6 Lovington (Portales hosted Lovington in the 2008 Class 3A title game).

There are four potential title game matchups for the Rams. Portales would host No. 4 Kirtland Central or No. 9 Aztec (Kirtland Central hosted the 1981 3A semifinals, Aztec hosted the 1961 Class 1A semifinals). The Rams would visit No. 1 St. Pius X or No. 5 Bloomfield (Portales hosted St. Pius X in the 1983 Class 3A semifinals and Bloomfield in the 2008 Class 3A semifinals).