Two-minute drill

The Costa Mesa High football team broke its team huddle with the cheer “league champs,” after Friday’s 42-6 Orange Coast League triumph over visiting Godinez at Estancia High.

It’s a relatively new development for the Mustangs, who are 2-0 in league play in their attempt to win at least a share of the league crown for the third straight season.

Mesa won the title outright last season after sharing it with Estancia in 2007. The Mustangs have now won seven straight against Orange League competition.

“We’ve talked about this since league started,” Costa Mesa senior quarterback Todd Davis said of the cheer. “We’re going to be league champs. We want to make it three in a row, something that has never been done in Costa Mesa history. We are going to try to achieve it.”

 The Mustangs (5-3) have two league games left, Friday against Calvary Chapel (4-3, 1-1) and the regular-season finale Nov. 13 against Laguna Beach (3-4, 2-0).

The Laguna Beach game might be a showdown for the outright title.

Costa Mesa’s win, its third straight, propelled it into the CIF Southern Section Southern Division poll at No. 10.

But polls aren’t important to Coach Jeremy Osso, who had his offense twice kneel with the snap after the Mustangs recovered a fumble to take over at the Godinez 13-yard line with 1:14 left in the first half. The Mustangs led, 35-6, at the time.

“I’ve been on that [losing] end and I know how it feels,” Osso said of his sportsmanlike gesture. “The scoring could have gotten out of hand, but there’s no AP top 25 that I’m concerned with here. There’s no USA Today polls ... I mean there is [a national high school poll produced by the newspaper], but we’re not going to be in that one any time soon.”

 Seven games into the season and Corona del Mar is struggling to score points.

The Sea Kings lost at Irvine, 26-0, in a Pacific Coast League game Thursday, making it back-to-back league games they’ve been shut out.

Its the first time the Sea Kings have been blanked in back-to-back games on the field since 1985 (a forfeit loss to Calvary Chapel in 2005 came in between shutout losses to Newport Harbor and Northwood).

The Sea Kings (4-3, 0-2 in league), ranked No. 7 in the Southern Division, find themselves in a hole and amid a quarterback controversy.

Last week, junior Mitch Gardner and senior Michael Borchard split time at quarterback in the first half before Gardner took all the snaps in the second half.

“We’re trying to get a spark, somewhere, somehow, some way, and create a little competition,” Coach Jason Hitchens said. “What we really want the quarterback to do is manage the football game for us, so we’re going to try to find the person that can best do that.”

Gardner started the game and was CdM’s lone quarterback to complete a pass. He finished five for 12 passing for 52 yards and one interception.

Borchard, who started the Sea Kings’ first six games of the year, was zero for six with two interceptions.

“We’ll evaluate it,” Hitchens said as to who will start at quarterback in CdM’s home game Friday against University (2-5, 0-2). “We’ve got an extra day [since we played Thursday] to kind of get prepared.”

 Newport Harbor learned Friday which team is on its way to winning the Sunset League championship, by itself.

Edison, ranked No. 1 in the CIF Southern Section Pac-5 Division, beat the host Sailors, 34-6, in a league game, handing Newport Harbor its first league loss.

Five teams shared the league crown last year, with Newport Harbor and Edison being two of those teams. This year, Newport Harbor Coach Jeff Brinkley acknowledged the hands-down favorite to claim it outright.

“That’s why they’re the No. [5] team in the state [according to CalHiSports.com], and you can see why,” Brinkley said of the Chargers, who are 7-0, 2-0 in league.

“They’re well-coached and they have good athletes.”

The Sailors dropped to 4-3, 1-1 in league. Newport Harbor is tied for third place in league with Los Alamitos, which the Sailors upset, 23-20, on Oct. 16.

The league receives three automatic berths into the Pac-5 Division playoffs. Last year, Newport Harbor was one of two teams that missed the postseason due to a random tiebreaker process.

With three league games left, Newport Harbor is pushing forward.

“We still can get control of our destiny in terms of the playoffs,” Brinkley said.

 CdM running back J.D. Abbott missed his second straight game, but the team’s leading rusher might return this week.

Hitchens said he expected the cast on the senior’s left ankle to be taken off on Monday. Abbott will undergo therapy this week and see if he’s healthy enough to play again.

“We’ll see how he looks in practice,” Hitchens said of Abbott, who got hurt in CdM’s 27-0 nonleague victory against Magnolia on Oct. 2. “Obviously we have to gauge his level of conditioning because it has been almost a month since he has played. “But if it looks like he can do some things in practice, and the doctor releases him, then we’ll get him out there Friday night again.”

 Sage Hill Coach J.R. Tolver said he read an article to his team written after Junior Seau signed with the Patriots on Oct. 13. The reporter asked Seau how he planned to be used in the New England defense and Seau replied, “Just give me a helmet.”

Tolver said a similar quote could be used for the Lightning, who have had to move things around plenty. But after his team lost at Linfield Christian on Friday night, 56-0, Tolver acknowledged the team missed its senior leader, running back/linebacker Dusty Orrantia, who was out for the second straight game due to illness.

Without Orrantia, who leads the team with 412 rushing yards and five touchdowns, the Lightning (5-2) had trouble establishing the run against the Lions (7-0). In the first half, which ended with Sage down 35-0, Lightning ballcarriers managed just 10 yards on 15 carries.

 Playing at Linfield Christian, the host Lions might have felt like Sage Hill was returning to the scene of the crime. Two years ago, then-senior quarterback Jamie McGee led a long touchdown drive in the final minute as the Lightning came from behind to shock Linfield, 36-35.

But Linfield Christian has outscored Sage Hill by a combined 156-32 in three meetings since then. Two of the three games have been shutouts, the other a 62-32 victory in the first round of the 2007 CIF Southern Section Northeast Division playoffs.

Linfield senior running back Austin Maranville, who rushed for 142 yards and four touchdowns Friday night, said he remembered that game two years ago. At the time, he was a sophomore receiver.

“We definitely have been playing them a lot lately,” Maranville said. “We like playing them. It’s always a fun game.”

 Davis threw five touchdown passes, believed to be a school single-game record, in a span of 16 minutes, 37 seconds in the first half Friday.

After completing just one of his first four passes, he connected on seven straight, threw one incompletion, then hit receivers on his next two throws. His final three completions of the half produced touchdowns of five, 71 and 65 yards.

Davis also had a 65-yard TD connection to senior Josh Erno, for which Osso gave Erno credit.

“He came to me on the sideline and told me no one was lining up inside of him,” said Osso, who called for a post pattern on which Erno gutted the Godinez secondary.

“At that point, [Erno] was the only receiver who hadn’t scored a touchdown, so I wanted to feed him.”

 The third game of a rough Sunset League stretch for Newport Harbor ends Thursday.

The Sailors opened league play against then-No. 6-ranked Los Alamitos, followed up by last week’s game against No. 1-ranked Edison. They meet No. 6-ranked Fountain Valley Thursday.

Going into each of the first two games, the opponents were undefeated. The next one is as well as Fountain Valley is 7-0, 2-0.

“They’re all tough in this league,” Brinkley said.

 Since rejoining the Sunset League in 2006, Edison has been the only league team Newport Harbor has not beaten.

 The shutout loss wasn’t an ideal final nonleague game for the Lightning, who play host to Brethren Christian Friday night in their Academy League opener. But Tolver said he wasn’t too concerned.

“The thing about this game is that it can do one of two things,” Tolver said. “It can send our season into the toilet or we can refocus and try to attain the goals which we set for ourselves. I’m hoping it’s the latter. We’ve got a veteran team and they want it; they want to do well. I see us playing well [this] week.”

 Estancia High returns to action Saturday after a bye week. The Eagles (4-3, 0-1) meet Godinez at Segerstrom High.

Coach Mike Bargas’ squad is trying to halt a two-game losing streak.

— From staff reports