Esperanza delivers in crunch time to beat Edison

COSTA MESA - A lot can happen in the course of an evening, just ask the Esperanza football team.

The Aztecs entered Friday's game with Edison just hoping for a shot at making the playoffs.
They ended the night with the No. 1 seed out of the Sunset League.

A loss to Edison would have eliminated Esperanza from playoff contention and given the Chargers the outright league title.

That was the simple scenario, but life isn’t always easy in the Sunset League.

Esperanza defeated Edison, 16-3, at Orange Coast College to force a five-way tie for the league championship and sent all of the coaches scrambling to Edison High to settle things with a drawing for the three automatic spots in the CIF-SS playoffs. (Full game stats.)

Esperanza (7-3, 3-2), Edison (7-3, 3-2), Los Alamitos, Newport Harbor and Fountain Valley all finished tied for first place at 3-2.

The night ended even better for the Aztecs, who wound up with the league's No. 1 seed. 
Fountain Valley got the No. 2 seed and Los Alamitos the No. 3 seed.

Edison got the fourth spot and can only reach the playoffs if selected as an at-large team to the Pac-5 playoffs. Newport Harbor got the No. 5 spot and will not go to the playoffs.

The playoff pairings will be announced Sunday.

(The top three seeds were selected this way: All five team names were placed in a bowl and three were selected for the automatic spots during a drawing late Friday night. Those three teams then flipped coins to determine the 1-3 order.)

“The Sunset League is unbelievably tough,” Esperanza coach Bill Pendleton said. “It is almost fitting that it was a five-way tie.”

“The guys have a lot of heart. We got beat by Newport (35-6) and came back and played their butts off and got beat (by Los Alamitos, 22-21) and they didn’t let that faze them.”

The Aztecs also didn’t let a sluggish first half slow them either.

Esperanza produced very little in the first half, punting six times and losing two fumbles. To its credit, the Aztecs defense kept them in the game also as Edison had its own problems in the first half.

The Aztecs got life to start at the third quarter. Esperanza recovered a fumbled kickoff at the Edison 19 to open the half. Four plays later, Jared Moore went into the end zone for a 6-3 lead.

Moore put the game out of reach in the fourth quarter when he scored on a 2-yard run to give the Aztecs a 13-3 lead. Moore finished with 187 yards rushing.

“We had to win, just to have a chance to go to the playoffs,” Moore said. “We came out and gave it our all.”

Esperanza’s defense had Edison quarterback Matt Viles under pressure all night. The Aztecs were credited with five sacks, led by two apiece from Mike Brewer and Lukas Lopez.

“We knew that we had to have all out pressure on him (Viles),” Lopez said. “We knew that was going to key if we were going to win.”

• Click here for full game stats and links to season totals and team rosters.

Contact the writer: dcalhoun@ocregister.com