Vegas drops first meeting of year with Bay Area, end two-game win streak

Week 13 presented the first meeting of the season between Western Conference heavyweights with playoff implications on the line.

Vegas came up short in its first meeting of the year against Bay Area, 44-31, Saturday, June 14 from Lee’s Family Forum. Dropping the contest against the top team in the West means the Knight Hawks now have a 2-4 record against the top three teams in the conference.

“We lost to a good football team,” head coach Mike Davis said. “We started slow, didn’t execute as a group and that’s what happens. You dig ourselves into a little hole and you have to fight your butt off to get out of it. And when you play against good, quality teams it’s hard to do that.”

Even with the loss to the Panthers, the Knight Hawks are still a game above .500 at 6-5 on the year. Vegas will now have to take on an Eastern Conference foe in the Iowa Barnstormers Saturday, June 21 from Lee’s Family Forum as the second part of back-to-back home games.

Kickoff is set for 6 p.m.

“We can all beat anybody on any given day and we can all lose to any of us on any given day,” Davis said. “And that’s the beautiful thing about the West. You’ve got to show up and play your A game and it’s a heavyweight fight every week. And that’s what we signed up for.”

With quarterback Jayden De Laura under center to start a third straight game, Vegas had its first slow start under his leadership. Things took a turn for the worse on the team’s first possession of the game where the Arizona product fumbled the ball away.

Later in the first quarter, De Laura had a drive killed by taking a sack on a 4th and 5 while facing a, 6-0, deficit. On the way to a scoreless first half, the Knight Hawks had second quarter drives end by a missed field goal and an incompletion out of the back of the end zone on a 4th and 4.

Bay Area went into the halftime break up, 15-0.

“We’ve just got to start fast,” quarterback Ja’Rome Johnson said. “We had a slow start so next time we play them we can’t start slow – any game we play, we can’t start slow.”

Johnson entered the game in the second half, looking to spark something on offense. On his first drive, he’d cap it with a touchdown run despite the extra point not going through the uprights.

Johnson would earn a second touchdown run in that same third quarter on his way to 56 total rush yards and two touchdowns on nine touches. He also went 11-for-14 through the air with 93 yards and another touchdown.

That stat line rivaled De Laura’s 3-for-11 for just 10 yards.

“[Johnson] was just able to take off,” Davis said. “We kind of knew what they were going to do and we knew for us to be successful, the quarterback had to get up the field a little bit and we didn’t do that very good in the first half.”

Johnson did suffer a turnover on downs of his own, but this one came in the fourth quarter with the team down 15 points. In fact, the turnover on downs came at the goal line while the one in the first came inside the five.

“They did some good things defensively,” Davis said. “They’re very aggressive when you get inside the red zone and you’ve got to be more physical than they are and we weren’t tonight.”

Ultimately, Vegas dropped the contest by 14 points but left six points on the board in the form of missed kicks. Kicker Ben Derby had an extra point blocked in the first quarter while missing a two-point drop kick in the second quarter. Later in the game, he missed a field goal.