Aiden Thomas has the whole town freestyling this week, so we tried one. Aiden, please do not respond to this.
Friday night, Traylor Stadium packed to the rail,
Sunnyvale rolled in 4-0 and rolled out 4-1, end of tale.
Forty-nine to twenty-eight, the scoreboard don’t stutter,
Raiders came for a statement, left with a stutter.Zade Taylor: thirteen of fourteen, don’t blink,
One-fifty-five through the air and two in the ink.
Then a buck thirty-four on the ground and two more —
Four touchdowns, one incompletion. Settle the score.Tayveon Horne right behind him, one-oh-eight and three,
Kipton Neighbors four for seventy-two, catch the G.
They had a three-year starter and a playoff résumé,
We had the big guys up front saying not tonight, not today.Metzel asked for one more step, they went and took a leap,
Look down the sideline — Coach is nodding to the beat.
Non-district’s in the books, four and one, no stress,
Two Fridays off, then Pleasant Grove, let’s address.October 9th, mark it, that’s when it counts double —
The G is on the move and somebody’s in trouble.
Now we hand the mic back where it belongs,
Dude took an 8 Mile beat this week and made it his song.
We just count the yards and try to keep it tight —
Aiden’s got the freestyle. We got the recap. Good night.
The gist
- Gilmer 49, Sunnyvale 28. The Buckeyes are 4-1 and close non-district play with three straight wins over Kilgore, Sulphur Springs and now a Raiders team that walked into Jeff Traylor Stadium 4-0.
- Zade Taylor was the game. #2 went 13-for-14 for 155 yards and two touchdowns through the air and added 134 yards and two more scores on 17 carries. Kipton Neighbors caught four for 72 and a touchdown.
- Tayveon Horne went for 108 and three. Seven Buckeye touchdowns on the night: four from Taylor, three from Horne. Two backs over a hundred yards in the same game.
- The defense held Sunnyvale to 28. A team that came in 4-0 and averaging 45.0 points a game, held 17 below its own average, on a Friday when the pregame message board was talking about giving up 60.
- The season number is still 199 points allowed in five games. The direction is right; the destination is not there yet.
What happened
Wednesday's post on this site put the whole game on one sentence: Hold Them Under 30 or We Own It. The Buckeyes held them under 30. Sunnyvale walked into Jeff Traylor Stadium 4-0 and averaging 45.0 points a game — per the Gilmer Mirror's Joe Dodd pregame notes, the Raiders had scored 30 or more in every game to date and hung 36 on Van Alstyne the week before. Friday they finished with 28.
The final was 49-28, at home, in the last non-district game of the year. The shape of it looked nothing like the last time these teams met. In the 2024 area playoffs — the reference point for a lot of the pregame conversation — Sunnyvale intercepted three Gilmer passes and held the Buckeyes to 220 total yards on the way to a 27-17 win. This Friday, Zade Taylor threw the ball fourteen times and completed thirteen. Two of them went for touchdowns. Nobody picked off the other twelve.
The key we published held. The prediction people were pricing in for us — that a defense giving up 40 a night was going to get one more shootout — did not. That is the fact this recap starts with.
The guys who did it
- #2 Zade Taylor, QB. 13-for-14 passing for 155 yards and two touchdowns. 17 carries for 134 yards and two more touchdowns. Four total scores, no interception, one incompletion. Against the program that picked him off three times a year ago.
- #5 Kipton Neighbors, WR. Four catches for 72 yards and a touchdown. Twenty percent of the passing volume, half the passing touchdowns, and the deepest chunk plays on the sheet.
- Tayveon Horne, RB. 108 yards and three touchdowns on the ground. Half the Buckeye touchdowns on the night came from the back who is not the quarterback, which is the other reason Sunnyvale never got the ball back with the clock on its side.
- The whole defense. Not a position group, not a front, not a secondary — all eleven of them, all night. Sunnyvale came in 4-0 averaging 45.0 a game and had scored 30 or more in every game it had played. Cayson Maupin came in with 13 touchdowns against one interception in four games and never got near that pace. The unit this whole town had spent a month worrying about put a good offense 17 points under its own average, and it did it for four quarters without the scoreboard bailing it out. Nobody on that side of the ball is in the box score headline and every one of them is the reason there is a headline.
The defense, this week and the season
The trend line for points allowed by the Buckeyes this year, in order, is 52, 31, 50, 38, 28. Nobody who has followed this stream over the last three weeks needs to be told what has been said about that number. The last three recaps put it in the title. It belongs in one this week too — but it belongs somewhere different.
This game is the argument against a shootout narrative getting priced in. Twenty-eight points, against a 4-0 team averaging 45, from a defense the pregame board was expecting to give up 60. Three of the last four opponents scored 38 or more; this one, the highest-rated of the four by both major 4A-II power rankings, scored the fewest. The cumulative number for the season is still 39.8 points a game allowed. That does not travel to December in Class 4A Division II. But the shape of Friday is the shape you would want it pointed at.
And let us give that side of the ball its due, because this stream has spent a month not giving it any. Holding a 4-0 team that averaged 45 a game to 28 is a real feat. It is not a fluke of one bad Sunnyvale night either — the Raiders had scored 30 or more in every game they had played. Somebody on that staff built a plan for the best offense on the schedule and the kids executed it for four quarters, which is a different thing than the effort we watched in September.
You can see the buy-in. A defense that has been getting the worst of it for four weeks could have folded the first time Sunnyvale hit a chunk play, and it did not. That is coaching, and it is players choosing to keep believing what they are being told after a month of the scoreboard arguing the other way. Credit the staff for not changing the message and credit the kids for not tuning it out.
It is not fixed. Nobody in that fieldhouse is saying it is, and 39.8 a game is still 39.8 a game. But this is what the front end of fixed looks like, and Friday is the first hard evidence that the direction is right.
Falsifiable marker for the bye and the district opener: if Pleasant Grove scores 40 on Oct. 9, Friday was a Sunnyvale-specific game and the season number is the story. If the Buckeyes hold them below 30, the shape of the last game against a good offense means something.
Around the barbecue
The smoaky game thread spent all week doing its best imitation of Sunday-morning quarterbacking. By the account of fans following the game live, one Gilmer supporter wrote he could not see the Buckeyes holding Sunnyvale under 60. Another said the offense would put up points, but the defense had to force stops — turnovers, penalties, anything — because Gilmer had not done it once yet this year. A third pointed out that both defenses had given up five touchdowns to Ferris and Paris respectively, and figured the game would come down to whichever quarterback made a mistake first.
None of the pregame doom made it into the box score. Sunnyvale did not hit 60. Gilmer's defense did not get torched. Zade Taylor did not throw a pick.
The corners of the board that spent the week telling Gilmer fans they were already booking hotels in Arlington did not have an answer on Saturday morning for what happened on Friday night. That is fine. The team job is not to litigate the fan job. The team job is to make the argument on Friday. It made an argument on Friday.
About that soundtrack
If you have been anywhere near Gilmer football on Facebook this week you already know about Aiden Thomas — senior running back, senior safety, and the reason the Buckeyes have their own weekly theme song. KLTV profiled him Tuesday. He writes the pregame track, works every position group into the bars on purpose, and after a win he freestyles on the spot. His words on how that works: “I know the beat beforehand that I’m gonna do, but that’s it, no words.”
Zade Taylor’s review: “We ain’t gotta listen to nothing else, we got Aiden!” Coach Metzel, who admits he bobs his head to it, called the music “a unifying vehicle to bring the Buckeyes together.” Thomas keeps it clean so the whole town can play it — “The principals are able to listen to my music without finding a clean version.”
This week’s was the best one yet. He took an 8 Mile beat and went battle-style with it, and it is still going around town. Go watch that one. Then come back and be kind about ours at the top of this page.
Our take
Enjoy this one. That is the first take, and it is not the sarcastic one. Three straight recaps on this stream led with a defensive complaint. This one does not, because this one should not. A defense that had been giving up 40 a game held a Regional Semifinalist to 28 in Jeff Traylor Stadium and the quarterback missed one throw all night. Say so plainly, and say it about the staff and the kids who kept showing up to work on it while everybody outside the building had already written the unit off.
13-of-14 with two touchdowns, in the building where the 2024 season ended on three interceptions. That is a receipt. Frame it.
Second take: the reason this game had the shape it did was the work in the trenches, and neither line shows up in a box score. Taylor does not complete 13 of 14 without a pocket, and does not run for 134 without a hole. Maupin does not finish 17 under his season average without a rush getting there when it needs to. Credit for a Friday like this one goes to the units nobody writes about, and this post is writing about them on purpose.
Third take: the schedule now hands the Buckeyes the bye they earned. Non-district is over 4-1 and the only loss is to a Pine Tree team that beat Kilgore two weeks after Gilmer did the same. Two weeks off and then Pleasant Grove at home to open district — the first game that counts for a playoff seed, and the first defensive test that lets us see whether Friday was Sunnyvale or the new shape of it.
The marker we will be held to when we write the Pleasant Grove preview: 28 or fewer points allowed. If it happens twice in a row against different offenses, the season number stops being the story and the trajectory starts being it. Last week's recap left the same test on the table and only half of it got answered — the offense kept scoring, but Sulphur Springs still got 38. This week both halves of the test moved.
Next up: Pleasant Grove
Two Fridays off. Pleasant Grove comes to Gilmer on Friday, Oct. 9 for the District 8-4A Division II opener, 7 p.m. at Jeff Traylor Stadium. The Buckeyes get to rest, teach, and re-set. The preview goes up Wednesday of that week; the argument in it will start with what happened Friday and where the defense actually is.
Non-district is done. The record is 4-1 and the last game of it was the best game of it. Make your picks.