In the week preceding Grand Valley State University’s first-round playoff game, head coach Matt Mitchell said the Lakers would need to be successful in many different defensive packages to pull out a victory against Colorado School of Mining.

Mission accomplished.

The No. 6 Lakers (11-1) kept quarterback Clay Garcia and the rest of the potent CSM offense under wraps as GVSU came away with a decisive 35-13 victory at Lubbers Stadium Saturday.

“We ran a lot of coverages,” said Mitchell after his team advanced to face Augustana College (S.D.) next weekend. “We used the full NCAA allotment this week on defense to make sure our guys were ready to go. We were having a lot of meetings, and our call sheet was pretty big. But we felt like that’s what we needed to do in order to slow down their attack.”

Garcia, a candidate for the Harlon Hill Trophy, which is awarded annually to the best player in Division II, looked average thanks to the pressure GVSU laid on him from all angles. The Lakers sacked Garcia 10 times, tying a GVSU single-game record.

Mines finished with -56 yards rushing due to the sacks, a single-game playoff record for the GVSU defense.

“We wanted to be able to go one-on-one outside, and we weren’t able to do that and make the throws,” said Mines head coach Bob Stitt. “We had a couple situations that we didn’t make the catches. We make the catches, we move the chains and maybe it’s a different story.”

Red-shirt freshman linebacker Luther Ware led the defensive charge with 3.5 sacks – the third highest single-game total in GVSU history. Senior linebacker Justin Victor added three sacks, sophomore defensive end Ryan Pettis had two sacks and senior defensive lineman Nick Lawrence notched 1.5 sacks.

“Give credit to the defensive line,” Victor said. “They were creating a lot of opportunities for me and Luther to make plays. We were basically kind of reading off and fitting off what they were doing and getting to the quarterback. I felt like we did a good job of flying around and getting to the quarterback and getting a lot of pressure on him.”

The offense successfully knifed through a stout Mines defense thanks in large part to the play of senior quarterback Kyle McMahon. Playing in his first playoff game as a member of the Lakers, McMahon had a hand in all five GVSU touchdowns and completed 13 of his 22 passes for 216 yards and three touchdowns. The only blemish of McMahon’s day was a second-quarter interception in the end zone when Mines cornerback Bunmi Adetutu wrestled the ball away from senior wide receiver Ryan Bass.

GVSU pounded into Mines’ defense using a combination of McMahon, senior running back Justin Sherrod and sophomore running back Norman Shuford to move the ball on the ground. The trio wore down the defensive front in the second half and opened up opportunities for passing plays down field – opportunities on which the Lakers capitalized.

“We just kept hammering the ball away, which finally opened up the passing game,” McMahon said. “That’s what we expected. We knew that if we could run the ball a little bit on them it would open some things up.”

The Lakers held nothing back, opting for aggressive play calls to help their cause. Ware’s 14-yard run on a fake punt converted a 4th-and-1 situation in the first half and led to a touchdown, and McMahon pooch punted from shotgun to pin the Mines deep its own territory.

“You start getting into some of these games and the gap kind of shrinks,” Mitchell said. “You’ve got to be prepared to do some things a little bit different. I think our kids executed some different stuff today, which was good. And we’re probably going to need some of that stuff moving forward.”

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