HILLSBORO — Chillicothe faced little resistance on the road Friday night, and Cartae Ligon faced even less. The Cavaliers handed Hillsboro a 55-15 loss in front of its home crowd in Week 9, behind a rushing performance that turned a conference road trip into a highlight reel.
Ligon needed just 14 carries to gain 263 yards and score five times — an average of nearly 19 yards every time he touched the ball. By the time Hillsboro’s defense found an answer for him, the game had long since been decided.
Ligon was the headliner, but he was not the whole show. Trace McAllister added three carries for 50 yards, and both Zeb Martin and Marshay McKinley tallied rushing scores in the victory, as Chillicothe’s ground game overwhelmed the Indians from the opening quarter on.
In total, the Cavaliers ran just 38 plays and racked up 416 yards — better than 10 yards per snap. It was the kind of efficiency that ends games early: few plays, long gains, and a scoreboard that kept moving.
The defense did its part as well. Chillicothe surrendered 239 yards on the night, 218 of them on the ground, and never let Hillsboro turn its rushing success into points that mattered. The Indians moved the ball between the 20s but finished with just 15 points against a defense that stiffened whenever a drive threatened to become a score.
The result continues a season-long pattern in the area’s Week 9 landscape, where lopsided scores dotted the Friday night scoreboard — but few were as one-sided, or as individually spectacular, as the one in Hillsboro.
Chillicothe improves to 8-1 with the win, rolling into the final week of the regular season with its ground game in peak form. For a team built to run, a 263-yard, five-touchdown night from its lead back is exactly the tune-up a playoff run demands.
Hillsboro, meanwhile, is left with the film of a night it will want to forget — and the rest of southeastern Ohio is left with a warning: with the postseason a week away, stopping Ligon and the Cavaliers’ rushing attack is a problem nobody in the region has solved yet.
