Bam: Devonte Lyons' 4-TD night powers St. Augustine football past Escambia in playoffs

ST. AUGUSTINE — Devonte Lyons earned the nickname “Bam” from his father when he was just tiny. That moniker was displayed on Friday night in a Region 1-3S semifinal, with Lyons powering for four short touchdown runs and the Yellow Jackets defense pitching a second-half shutout en route to a 31-14 victory over Pensacola Escambia.

“Devonte is our best football player,” St. Augustine coach Brian Braddock said. “It’s not always flashy maybe — and that’s OK — and that’s on a team with a whole lot of good football players.”

Lyons, a 5-foot-10, 190-pound battering ram, carried the ball 25 times for 102 yards against a stout Escambia defensive front, and had scoring yards of 4, 4, 5 and 5 yards. He indicated that his father gave him the nickname when “I was about 2, I think, I don’t even remember.”

“I guess I lived up that tonight, most definitely,” Lyons said.

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St. Augustine, 11-0, moves on to host Fort Walton Beach Choctawhatchee in the Region 1-3S final next Friday. Choctawhatchee beat Tallahassee Lincoln 38-7 on Friday and returns to the scene of a win at St. Augustine in the first round of the 2022 playoffs, overcoming a 28-6 deficit to win 42-35. St. Augustine has won 11 consecutive games since. Escambia finishes its season at 8-4.

If St. Augustine’s defense plays like it did in the second half, then another win may be coming.

Up 17-14 at the half and into late in the third quarter, St. Augustine went ahead 24-14 on Lyons’ third touchdown run with 3:38 left in the quarter. Two plays later, Escambia senior quarterback Anthony Hall (291 yards passing, one touchdown) tried to sneak a pass over the middle. But St. Augustine junior linebacker Matteo Bernardi read the quarterback’s eyes and intercepted the ball and returned it the Gators 25. Two plays later, Lyons had his fourth score. In 26 seconds the game went from a tight affair to a comfortable 31-14 St. Augustine lead. The Jackets sacked Hall five times in the second half.

“We talked about how there’s going to come a night in the playoffs where we were gonna need to lean on the defense some,” Braddock said. “It seemed like that night came tonight.”

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Bennett’s long history vs. St. Augustine

Veteran Pensacola Escambia coach Mike Bennett is used to the long commute from Pensacola to St. Augustine for postseason football.

The 29-year coaching veteran has led Pensacola High School and Escambia in the playoffs, with all six St. Augustine encounters over an 18-year span occurring on the Northeast coast of Florida. That’s a 400-mile, six-hour road trip from the Central time zone, usually broken up by a Thursday stopover in Tallahassee for a final walk-through at Florida State and overnight stay before continuing east on Friday. This time, they traveled all the way to St. Augustine for a Thursday night stayover since Florida State’s women’s soccer team was using the indoor facility.

At Pensacola High School, his squad went 1-2 in those trips. The 2005 28-21 St. Augustine win led to the Yellow Jackets’ only state title, in Class 3A. Pensacola won the 2009 game 9-0 en route to the 3A title. St. Augustine halted a 26-game Pensacola winning streak in 2010 with a 7-3 victory.

At Escambia, Bennett’s Gators won 33-16 at St. Augustine in 2018 and St. Augustine returned the favor, 48-27, in 2020 prior to Friday’s contest.

Wide Receiver High

St. Augustine has been explosive throwing the ball this year, largely thanks to a foursome of receivers who have totaled 165 catches, 34 touchdown receptions and nearly 3,000 receiving yards. And three of them are underclassmen.

Senior Myles Simmons has 11 TD catches, in tandem with 6-3 junior Carl Jenkins Jr. (12 TDs) and 5-10 junior Trenton Jones (51 catches). Somourian Wingo has come on late in his sophomore season with five TD catches.

Friday’s win over Escambia was the first time this season that the four receivers didn’t catch a touchdown pass. The Jackets were averaging 46 points per game entering Friday’s contest.

Emmitt Smith’s roots

Escambia is most famous for developing one of great running backs in football history, Emmitt Smith. Smith led Escambia to state titles in Class 3A in 1984 as a sophomore and in Class 4A in 1985 as a junior. The Gators had experienced only one winning season in the previous 18 years of football prior to Smith starting on the varsity as a freshman in 1983. He finished his prep career with 8,804 yards rushing and 106 touchdowns — third all-time in Florida behind Derrick Henry and Kelvin Taylor.

Smith is the University of Florida’s second-leading career rusher (behind Errict Rhett), totaling 3,928 yards in just three seasons. In the NFL, Smith finished with 18,355 yards, No. 1 in career rushing. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2010 and Escambia’s home field is Emmitt Smith Field, named for the Gators’ former star in 2003.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Escambia-St. Augustine: FHSAA high school football playoffs 2023