Alcorn’s 444 yards, 6 TDs lead Burlington Central to blowout win over Prairie Ridge

Following a dominating 52-21 win over Prairie Ridge Friday night, Burlington Central coach Brian Iossi called Jackson Alcorn “the best quarterback in the state of Illinois that no one knows about.”

While those may sound like rather big words to some, they probably didn’t see the Rockets senior throw for an astonishing 444 yards and six touchdowns against a perennial state power.

On a day that Burlington Central likely qualified for the playoffs for the first time since 2014, Alcorn completed 24 of 34 passes to seven different receivers. He even added a nine-yard touchdown scramble for good measure as the Rockets nearly matched the point total that Prairie Ridge had given up in the first six weeks of the season (57-52).

“I knew it when I met him when he was in seventh grade,” Iossi said. “I just knew he was different. To come out here against a team like that … behind him we knew it, we trusted it, we knew that was the way to go to put the ball in his hands and let him make the plays. And what’s he did. He executed it to perfection.”

The game started off like any other game involving Prairie Ridge (5-2, 5-2). The Wolves took the opening kickoff and marched 80 yards, the last 22 coming on a touchdown run from Giovanni Creatore. It was 7-0 with 4:28 left in the first quarter.

That was the last lead the Wolves would have as Alcorn took over.

After a running play on its first play, Burlington Central (5-2, 5-2) called 22 consecutive pass plays to end the first half. The result were four touchdown drives including scoring passes of 25 yards to Chase Powrozek, 13 yards to Lucas Kerr, and 21 yards to Gavin Bergemann. That allowed Burlington Central to take a 28-14 lead into the locker room.

Prairie Ridge pulled within 28-21 on a one-yard run from Creatore midway through the third quarter. However, the momentum was short-lived as on third down, Alcorn read the zero coverage perfectly and hit Rocco Boss on a 65-yard bomb of a touchdown.

Those two connected seven times for a whopping 200 yards and three touchdowns.

“It comes to just trust, honestly,” Alcorn said. “(Coach Iossi) and I talked before the game about how we’re going to do the stuff that we know how to do, but we’re going to go into that empty package and air it out if we need to. After that we just kept rolling with it and rolling with it. They didn’t make any adjustments, and we just kept stomping on them honestly.”

The Wolves were their own enemy offensively. Playing with backups at key positions, they fumbled the ball eight times in the game, losing four of those. Three of those turnovers came after halftime, helping turn the ball into a surprising blowout.

Adding literal injury to insult, Creatore, who rushed for 172 yards on 30 carries, went down to an injury and did not return, although signs pointed to him being able to check back in had the game been close.

“We shot ourselves in the foot a lot,” PR coach Mike Frericks said. “We usually don’t turn over the football, and I think we did four times tonight. It was not our brand of football. We kind of got out of it and never got a grasp of the game like we normally do.”