Winning becoming a habit at Plainfield. State-ranked Quakers regain control in Mid-State.

PLAINFIELD — After a jubilant few seconds in the afterglow of a dominant win that put his team back in the driver’s seat of the Mid-State Conference race, Plainfield football coach Tyler Bless quickly turned the page.

“The great thing about it,” Bless told his team. “Is now we have to do it next week.”

It speaks to where Plainfield is as a program that the Class 5A eighth-ranked Quakers did not over-celebrate after a 38-3 win over Franklin. After last year’s sectional title — the program’s first in 22 years — there is a quiet confidence about this team, helped not only by the continuity of the players returning from that team but the transition from Bless as coach-in-waiting on Brian Woodard’s staff to the head coaching position.

It was also an impressive rebound for Plainfield (6-1 overall, 4-1 Mid-State) after the Quakers let a 14-point lead slip away last week in a 26-23 loss to Decatur Central.

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“I think we just accepted the fact that we needed to play better football and we needed to become a more disciplined football team,” Bless said. “It was probably a good wake-up call. We challenged them this week to just tighten things up and execute in all three phases because I still think we hadn’t played our best football.”

Considering the topsy-turvy, every-game-is-a-down-to-the-wire battle of the Mid-State this season, Friday’s outcome was a bit of a surprise. Plainfield’s Caden Vanderbush returned the opening kickoff to the 50 and it took the Quakers just seven plays to score, taking a 7-0 lead on Luke Starnes’ 9-yard touchdown run.

On the following possession, Franklin (4-3, 3-2) picked up a 3rd-and-10 on a 12-yard pass from Clay Pinnick to Alex Leugers at the Plainfield 31 and looked to be in position to get the score tied. But Plainfield’s Seth Martin recovered a fumble on the next play. The next Plainfield offensive play on the scripted sheet called for a pass.

“It was just one of those things where a sudden change occurred and we felt like we could take a shot with a kid we we’ve been trying to run that route with all year long,” Bless said. “I was just happy that it worked. It was a nice sequence of events.”

Plainfield quarterback Hunter Newell went over the top to junior receiver Ja’mir Bouie, who caught the ball in stride and raced 66 yards for a touchdown and a 14-0 Plainfield lead. That play seemed to ignite the Quakers’ who then recovered an onside kick and cruised into halftime with a 30-3 lead.

Newell finished 14-for-18 passing for 184 yards and two touchdowns, adding a 5-yard touchdown pass to Isaiah Miller late in the first half. The 6-5 senior Miller finished with five catches for 36 yards and Bouie had three receptions for 85 yards.

“Coach Bless has a great time being creative with the play calls,” said Newell, who picked up a scholarship offer recently from Morehead State and is visiting Dayton this weekend. “He knows he can trust everybody on the field and that makes it a lot of fun.”

It was a relatively light night for sophomore running back Luke Starnes, who ran for 55 yards and two touchdowns on 14 carries. Westyn Weyrich’s 41-yard touchdown run on the first drive of the third quarter, followed by a 2-point conversion pass from Newell to Vanderbush, enacted the 35-point running clock with 9:45 left and put the second half into fast forward mode.

Franklin struggled to run the ball consistently. Leugers, averaging 158 yards rushing per game coming into Friday, was limited to 58 yards on 14 carries. Plainfield’s pressure up front with Landon Drennan, Martin and Alex Holsclaw hurried Franklin quarterback Clay Pinnick into 4-for-13 passing for 42 yards and two interceptions, including one by Will Freeman that set up a 23-yard field goal by Leo Heyob to make it 17-0 early in the second quarter.

“They were lights out,” Bless said of the defense. “They stopped the run, kept (Leugers) from getting loose. I thought the defensive accepted the challenge of executing the game plan we’ve been practicing all week. We were playing our best football today.”

With Whiteland, last year’s state runner-up, on deck next week, there is little time to enjoy Friday’s win. But when winning becomes habit, that is a sign the program is turning the corner.

“We don’t take losses lightly,” Starnes said. “We wanted to come out with a vengeance. That’s what we did.”

Call Star reporter Kyle Neddenriep at (317) 444-6649.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IHSAA football: Plainfield blows out Franklin, closing in on Mid-State