A solid defensive scheme by New Ulm Cathedral’s defensive coordinator Jesse Nosbush was a big key to the Greyhounds’ 8-0 win over Minnesota Valley Lutheran Friday night.

It was a game where the Cathedral defense held the Chargers to less than 100 yards total offense.

“That was a combination of our offense hanging onto the ball, running the ball and burning time off of the clock,” Nosbush said. “And then playing solid team defense. They run the option and they are a good team. We just had to play disciplined defense.

“We saw some things on film where we thought that our guys could pretty well match up. We did a lot of one-on-one coverages with our cornerbacks. Jacob Berg had a heck of a game and Luke Gieseke played really well on the outside. We felt that our guys could run with them. We put our playmakers in spot where they needed to make a play.”

Nosbush said that they knew that the Chargers were a run first team.

“We wanted to try and make them throw,” he said. “In high school, it is tough to throw the ball down the field.”

Nosbush also thought that defensive linemen Josh Kretsch, Luke Mages and Noah Thompson all were solid on the inside for the Greyhounds.

“That was a big part of what we were trying to do with our defensive scheme. We played without a safety, so our linemen and linebackers had to make sure they got it done because there was nobody behind them. We blitzed more than we have in the last couple of games.We did not give up any big plays.”

Nosbush said that even though Cathedral was 0-2 going into the game, the players stayed positive in practice.”

“Our defensive game plan was spot-on,” Cathedral head coach Denny Lux added. “We have not had a shutout for a while.”

Cathedral’s last shutout came in the 2016 season when they blanked Lakeview 16-0.

CHARGERS OFFENSE SPUTTERING: For the second straight game, the Minnesota Valley Lutheran Charger failed to score a touchdown.

“We have got to find some consistency of being able to drive the ball,” Chargers head coach Jim Buboltz said. “We did move the ball a lot better in the second half — had a lot more first downs — and we kept the pressure on them. That made our defense better. We had an incredible defensive effort Friday. To keep Cathedral to only one touchdown and a throwing touchdown at that. Our defense played very well. But we need to get our offense up to speed a little bit.”

Buboltz was also glad to see that his squad not commit turnovers.

“We did not have any turnovers (MVL was plus 3 in the turnovers) but we are having difficulty getting consistent effort to keep people out of our backfield or putting too much pressure. That is shutting down our veer offense with people loading the box and blitzing.”

With that in mind, Buboltz said that he will insert Mason Cox as the starting quarterback this week and move sophomore Luke Thompson from quarterback to wide receiver.

“Mason had a nice second half (Friday) and we will move Mason to quarterback for a while. It looks like he wants to do that and our guys are rallying around him. We will go forward with that for a while and we will get it figured out.”

EAGLES COULD BE UNBEATEN: It may sound unbelievable, but the New Ulm Eagles’ football team could realistically be 3-0 right now after a 28-24 win over Maple River.

New Ulm was coming off a comeback 28-20 win over Belle Plaine last week. The Eagles lost 16-6 to Redwood Valley in their opening game in a contest that could have gone either way.

“I would love to go back and play Redwood again,” New Ulm head coach Eric Kaufmann said. “But that was the first game that they had with me. Even though that was a loss, it was good game for us. Winning two games in a row now really helps our confidence, especially going into our game at Worthington next week.”

Kaufmann said that he does not know yet if he has a good team or not.

“But we are getting better every week and that is what I tell everybody — we need to get better every week and cut down our mistakes. When I asked the kids after the game Friday if we can get better, they all said they can be a better team. They want to keep learning and if we keep learning, we will be a better football team.”