In the professional and collegiate levels of football, teams have become more passing-oriented. Some high schools have even gotten in on this trend. Manhattan High has not.

“We got a good offensive line,” head coach Joe Schartz said. “We got a lot of good running backs, and we like to run the football. We’ll throw when we need to.”

The Indians (5-0) used this running game to capture their fifth straight win this season, beating previously perfect Seaman High (4-1) 42-21 Friday night.

During the game, the Indians rushed for 353 yards, eclipsing the 300-yard mark for the fourth time this season. Senior quarterback Ian Trapp led the way with 247 yards on 23 rushes, with four touchdowns.

“There’s sometimes when you’ll break a tackle or something will come open or you’ll have a cut back,” Trapp said, “but that’s always because the offensive line is taking care of everything. There’s nothing if we don’t have those guys upfront, they just do an amazing job.”

Senior running back Iverson Robb added 91 yards of his own on 14 carries, scoring one touchdown.

Going in, there was the fear that Manhattan would overlook Seaman and focus too much on Junction City this week. This proved to not be an issue.

“It’s a credit to the kids,” Schartz said. “They did a nice job of staying focused. It would have been pretty easy to look ahead to Junction City, but we had a good football team to play this week and the kids did a nice job of staying focused.”

Much like Manhattan’s other four games this season, the first half was slower than the second half. The Indians scored only 14 points in the first half, highlighted by Trapp’s 90-yard run to break open the scoring.

Schartz attributed Seaman’s determination to the slower start.

“The other team is excited and they still have their will to win and it takes a while for us to defeat them.” Schartz said. “As the game goes on, we wear them down, and we start having great success in the second half.”

At the half, with a 14-7 lead, MHS made enough adjustments to explode for 28 points in the third quarter. The offense was helped by great field position gifted to them by the defense. Three of its four touchdown drives started within 25-yards of the endzone.

This great field position was led in part by two Manhattan fumble recoveries. Senior Chance Andrade recovered the first fumble at the 25-yard line, and junior Sam Edwards returned the second fumble down to the 15 yard line.

“It’s just effort and being in the right place at the right time,” Edwards said. “If I hadn’t put in effort to run to the other side of the field, I wouldn’t have been in the right place to grab the ball, and it was my teammates put in the effort to even get the ball loose.”

The defense allowed two more Viking touchdowns in the fourth quarter, pushing the score to 42-21. However, they held fast and prevented Seaman from scoring again. As a result, MHS won by at least 21 points for the fifth time this season. This is the maximum number of points counted when using “points won by” as a tiebreaker in the playoff standings.

Injuries were a problem for the Indians, with three players leaving the field in the second half: Edwards, junior Reece Wewer, and senior Zephry Killham. However, the injuries should not prove to be a problem going forward.

“You got to get healthy,” Schartz said. “That’s called football.”

Wewer added that he wasn’t concerned and trusts the training staff to help him recover.

“It’s hurting,” Wewer said, “but we got good trainers. I’ll be able to get good by next week. I’ll be fine.”

With the Junction City game coming up next week, having a healthy team will be incredibly important. Junction City is the only other 5-0 team in the Centennial League, meaning next week’s game at J.C. will likely determine the league champion.

Schartz said it shouldn’t be hard to get the team fired up for the game.

“It’s a rivalry game,” Schartz said. “The kids are going to be excited, two very good football teams [are playing]. We’re going to have to put in a good game plan, and we’re going to have to execute it.”

Wewer added that Manhattan just needed to play their football to win the game.

“We need to stay consistent throughout the entire game,” Wewer said, “and keep playing Indian football; hard and fast.”