Canton Sports Guy: Bulldogs Unleashed

Editor’s note: The Canton Citizen is pleased to introduce the Canton Sports Guy, a new biweekly column by CHS alumnus Chris Peltier. Future Canton Sports Guy columns will be exclusive to the print edition and our new e-Citizen.

A new fall sports season is now officially underway, and fans of Bulldog athletics have to be thrilled with the way that their teams have started.

The Next Megatron? QB Brian Hagan has a stud WR to throw to in senior Derrick Harris. (Mike Barucci photo)

On Friday night in Bedford, the CHS football team made it two in a row with a dominant performance against the defending D4 north champs. The Bulldogs absolutely steamrolled the Bucs in this one, scoring 29 straight points before allowing a late touchdown. Senior Jahron Reynolds had a pair of rushing touchdowns, while senior quarterback Brian Hagan passed for a score and ran for another one.

This is not the first time that Canton has started fast against nonleague competition, but there seems to be a different feel with this year’s squad. A few Hockomock League victories and perhaps even a playoff berth seem entirely realistic from this vantage point.

And it isn’t just the football team that is off to a fast start for the Bulldogs. In fact, as of Friday night, Canton teams had a combined overall record of 17-3-3, which equates to a gaudy winning percentage of .804. Only three teams have lost a game or a meet thus far, and five teams were unbeaten heading into this week’s action, including the volleyball (5-0), golf (4-0), boys soccer (3-0), and girls soccer (1-0-2) teams.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of our beloved Boston Red Sox, who continue to dwell in the AL East basement, with hopes of securing even a Wild Card birth long gone. With Dustin Pedroia out for season-ending surgery, hopefully the Sox can look ahead to starting fresh next year and avoid any more injuries as the season fizzles out. Since you won’t be seeing any of the Sox in the playoffs, keep an eye out for them on area golf courses.

However, there may be a silver lining to the clouds of defeat hanging over Fenway. The Red Sox laid an egg in the 2012 season (69-93) and came back to win the World Series the next year. Correlation? Causation? It’s beyond me, but the point is, “There’s always next year.”

After losing last week to the Miami Dolphins (no, seriously, the Dolphins), the New England Patriots put a hurting on the Minnesota Vikings 30-7. Tom Brady looked leaps and bounds better than in Miami, and Julian Edelman is starting to show his potential as the steady and solid connection Brady can trust — something that has seemed to be lacking in recent years. I could dissect this game much further, but let’s remember the Vikings were without their best player — and one of the best in the league — in Adrian Peterson. The Vikings running back missed Sunday’s contest after being indicted on charges of reckless or negligent injury to a child after allegedly using corporal punishment on his young son.

That will segue perfectly into my obligatory Ray Rice mention. For those currently living under a rock, the NFL has been in the news a lot the past couple weeks — not just ESPN and sports columns, but across every conceivable media. A video was released allegedly showing an altercation between Rice and his fiancée in an Atlantic City casino. NFL commissioner Roger Goddell is also coming under fire for his (mis)handling of the situation and subsequent (alleged) cover-up.

If it turns out to be true that Goodell had seen the video months ago and still gave Rice a slap-on-the-wrist suspension of just a couple games, he needs to resign immediately and face criminal charges himself. It seems as though the league hands out suspensions by picking a number of games out of a hat — Michael Vick put dogs in a ring to fight to the death. Donte Stallworth killed someone driving drunk. Numerous players have been caught smoking marijuana. You may as well throw a dart at Goodell’s “Wheel O’ Suspensions,” because that’s about how much sense some of these suspensions make.

NFL Countdown gave us a nice serving of irony the other night, because who is better served to tell us how a member of the NFL should behave than Ray Lewis, who as we all know is 100 percent innocent of any wrongdoing in the stabbing death of a man during a Super Bowl after party. Did I say “as we all know?” … because I meant “as his plea bargain dictated.” Heck, he even got a statue in Baltimore. If you haven’t seen the clip, fellow former player-turned-commentator Cris Carter makes Lewis look like a fool on air, not being shy about how he feels Lewis should have been removed from the league as well.

It’s good that issues of violence, and especially domestic assault, are being brought to light in lieu of these awful stories, but let’s not forget that to a lot of people they are just that — stories. Who broke the Ray Rice video? Gossip trolls at TMZ. I’m not knocking them; for an organization most known for chasing celebrities to take pictures of their body parts falling out of clothing, this was actually a pretty decent stab at actual journalism. However, I fear that when the next OLB gets arrested after fighting a bouncer at a strip club, or a young draft pick gets a DUI, these issues will unfortunately fall to the back burner, and eventually off the stove completely.

Stay tuned for the next installment of Canton Sports Guy. Have a question or a comment? Send to submissions@thecantoncitizen.com.

Short URL: https://www.thecantoncitizen.com/?p=26908

Posted by Canton Citizen on Sep 18 2014. Filed under Featured Content. Both comments and pings are currently closed.