TANNER— The disappointment on the faces of the Tanner High football players said it all Friday night as they made their way toward the locker room.

Their hopes of repeating history had come to an end. Sulligent’s 52-14 victory put a stop to the Rattlers’ undefeated season.

“Like I told these guys, a lot of people probably didn’t expect us to win this many games,” Rattlers’ coach Laron White said. “But once you get a good core group of kids, anything can happen. We had a good run. We played well and I’m proud of them.”

The Blue Devils opened scoring with 9:13 in the opening quarter on a 28-yard pass from quarterback Caleb Masey to Dominique Bonmar for the 6-0 lead.

On the opening possession for Tanner, quarterback Dominique Randolph fell on his shoulder wrong, but managed to tough it out and hit C.C. Lucas on a 70-yard pass a couple of plays later to take a 7-6 lead. Sulligent responded with a 15-yard pass to Robert White to regain the lead. Massey found the end zone again on 3-yard run to end the quarter.

“The field position battle really hurt us bad in the first half because they had so much speed and talent,” White said. “When we got the ball, we just couldn’t get anything going.”

Both Randolph and Tray Cosby left the game in the second quarter and never returned.

“Once Tray and Dominique went down, that was over 85 percent of our offense,” White said. “We were really behind the eight ball at that time, but our guys didn’t quit. They played well and played as hard as they could.”

Sulligent scored twice more in the second quarter and three times in the third quarter to put the final nails in the coffin.

The Rattlers scored once more with 48 seconds remaining in the game on a 2-yard run by Terrell Baugh.

“You can’t win playoff games with penalties,” White said. “We had too many. We’re just going to try and go back and get it right for next year.”

The loss ends Tanner’s season at 12-1.