McCaffery is 8-man Player of the Year

Reprinted with permission from the Santa Barbara News-Press
Determining where an 8-man football player lands in the All-County team can be tricky. Comparing the game to the more traditional 11-man game is kind of like comparing a game of Madden to the NFL.

While 11-man football tends to reward team depth more than individual talent, star athletes can have an immense impact in the 8-man game that has more open space on the field and therefore more room for talented athletes to juke and run their way to touchdown after touchdown.

Often, that means that players like Laguna Blanca's Stephen McCaffery - this year's 8-Man Player of the Year - Cate's Dean Smith and Orcutt Academy's Jordan Sutton get relegated to the second team of the All County list. Often, the argument for that tactic is that these players likely wouldn't produce at the same level if they were playing against 11-man defenses.

That might not be the case for McCaffery, who threw for 1838 yards and 25 touchdowns and ran for another 1308 yards and 22 touchdowns.

In his senior season, his fourth as a quarterback for the Owls, McCaffery led Laguna Blanca to a 6-4 record and its second-straight trip to the playoffs. And, after the Owls graduated stars Quentin "Q" Tedesco and Andrew "V" Vignolo in McCaffery's junior year, he was the driving factor the whole time.

"Coming in, I knew that I'd have to carry more of the load without those two offensive threats," McCaffery said. "But we got a transfer from Pasadena Poly who played center for us (Alex Lindskog). He was invaluable for us and came in and was exactly what we needed at the time.

"Our juniors stepped up on offense and it was a more balanced attack coming from a receiver standpoint because it wasn't here's your checkdown and go to Q all the time. I had to spread it out to everybody and it was more of a running back by committee."

McCaffery's career at Laguna Blanca was filled with adversity. An injury essentially kept him out of all of his sophomore season, and his junior year was a battle for the Owls to field a full roster. Yet McCaffery overcame each of those hurdles to have the best overall year of his career his senior year.

"I think my junior year led well into my senior year," he said. "Being able to prep for my senior year by having Q and V to help me out led into a smooth transition to have them go and take on more responsibility."

And as for playing against 11 defenders, McCaffery will get his chance next season, as he's agreed to attend and play for Washington and Lee University -- a Division II school in Virginia.

email: slewis@newspress.com
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