The Bad Apples were victorious last Sunday during the 2008 Loyola Flag Football intramural men’s league game at Lusher Field. The new champs finished the Voodoo league season undefeated with a 7-0 record, beating the field by a combined score of 161-19. The Bad Apples defeated Sigma Phi Epsilon, Just Us and Hung Over Sunday, despite missing incumbent starters Ryan Murphy, marketing junior, and Ryan McGuane.
“I knew we had a good team this year,” Bad Apples senior center Robbie Sproul, criminal justice junior, said. “We were all hungry for a championship.”
The Bad Apples defeated every team they faced throughout the regular season, leading up to their winning performance in the playoffs. Each Sunday, the team seemed to gel more and more, and never seemed to slip up on the way to victories over Sigma Alpha Kappa, the Law Dawgs, Manslaughter and another victory over SAK.
With their victories on Sunday, the Loyola champions will move on to compete in the annual Voodoo Bowl Championship at Brown Field on Tulane’s campus Dec. 3. The Bad Apples will represent one half of the top two Loyola men’s undergraduate teams facing off against Tulane’s top two men’s undergraduate teams for all the marbles next month. The top co-ed team from Loyola’s Corec Havoc League, the Phi Kappa Psi/Theta Phi Alpha team, will also compete against Tulane’s top co-ed team.
“The top two men’s undergrad and top co-ed teams will compete against Tulane,” Assistant Director of Loyola Intramural Sports Zach Bracey said, “although we haven’t officially worked out all of the details just yet.”
The Bad Apples defeated Hung Over in the 3:30 p.m. championship game with a characteristic three touchdown victory. Scott Gilliland, international business senior, helped his team’s cause by recording three interceptions and a long touchdown reception off of a fly route from fifth-year senior and team captain “Miami” Mike Castaneda in the championship game. Castaneda finished the championship game with two touchdown passes, the bomb to Gilliland and a short intermediary pass to Sproul. Sproul caught the football at the 6-yard line, and made two would-be tacklers miss before spinning into the end zone. Castaneda also ran one in late in the second half.
Both Castaneda and fellow fifth-year senior “Big Ed” Winston were relieved to have finally notched their first Loyola Intramural Championship, after coming close in football and basketball last year with their old team, the Zions Lions, which the loss of several graduating seniors including Ron Worrell and Marley Lovell weakened.
The Muslim Student Association/Loyola Asian Student Organization defeated the Theta Phi Alpha/Phi Kappa Psi team after a last-second comeback performance by the MSA/LASO’s. Despite coming up short, the Theta Phi Alpha/Phi Kappa Psi team will likely still represent Loyola in the Voodoo Bowl Championship Series.
In other news Sunday, the Sloppy Roast Beef Eaters won the Men’s Alumni Championship for the Maroon League, with back-to-back victories over the Swamp Donkeys and MSB Supremacy. Like the Bad Apples, the Sloppy Roast Beef Eaters also finished the season undefeated.
Dan Pitta can be reached at [email protected].
