BANCROFT – Corry Hatch probably spent his quarantine a bit differently than you did.

That is, unless you also wasted away the hours watching old Kennesaw State and Georgia Tech football games, or trying to find years worth of Army and Navy film, or scouring YouTube for anyone who knew anything about the Flexbone offense.

The North Gem head coach lounged in his Laz-Z-Boy reclining at a desk. He stationed a notebook and computer in front of him, plugging the laptop into the television so he could notice the intricacies of the cult offense.

We’ll get to those intricacies in a little bit. For now, you just need to know they work — they did on Friday, at least.

“We just couldn’t stop the run,” Rockland coach Gerry Hunter said.

He’s right. North Gem’s Flexbone was a game of three-card monte. Whatever card Hunter and his Bulldogs flipped over, they rarely chose right. The Cowboys rushed for nearly 500 yards, controlling the clock en route to a 30-28 victory over Rockland (4-5, 0-2), its second win over the Bulldogs this season.

With eight minutes to play, that result seemed in question. Rockland quarterback Braden Permann had just hit Levi Farr for a 30-yard score, then connected with his cousin, Brigham Permann, for the two-point conversion, which put Rockland up six.

Hatch rallied his troops on the sideline. They seemed to be doing most of the rah-rah.

“This is our house. This is our game,” junior Jackson Cook yelled to the team. “Let’s go win it.”

“Yes,” Hatch responded. “Thank you.”

A few minutes later, Hatch only had to thank his son.

Bridger Hatch is a rock-solid 5-foot-10, 180 pounds. He sports envious red locks and has a little Tim Tebow in him. The comparisons are easy to make. He’s left-handed like Tebow. When he runs, he piledrives defenders to the ground like Tebow. And, like Tebow, he always seems to make magic when his team needs a spark.

With about five and a half minutes to play, Bridger Hatch, who carried the ball 31 times for 304 yards and four touchdowns, kept the ball on an triple option and darted left. He broke a few tackles and sprinted into the end zone 43 yards away to tie the game.

“One guy ain’t bringing him down,” Corry Hatch said of his son.

For the two-point conversion, Corry Hatch dialed up the triple option again. Bridger’s first two options – a dive and a pitch – were covered, so he chose door No. 3. Problem was, a Rockland pass rusher had Bridger dead to rights, his hand tugging at the purple No. 10 jersey. Bridger Hatch spun out of it, rushed into contact and got the ball over the line.

North Gem (3-5, 1-1) wouldn’t trail again.

“I feel safe when (the ball) is in my hands. It’s when I feel most at home,” Bridger Hatch said. “And our defense is amazing. They are one of the best defenses in the state, points-wise. I don’t get to play because on offense, you just have to go because this offense is so hard.”

Bridger Hatch should know.

He often walked around the house as his dad watched obscure football teams like he was binge-watching a Harry Potter marathon. He would sometimes just stare and ask, “Are we really doing this?”

Corry knew the answer had to be yes. He was hired as North Gem’s football coach earlier in the year, taking the job at a familiar school that, in a way, was foreign. He was once a Cowboy, class of ‘98. He was also once a North Gem football coach, serving as defensive coordinator from 2003 to 2007. But, back then, enrollment was somewhere around 80. Now, he said, the school is lucky if it has 45 or 50 kids.

“I came to the realization that we need to have a system that fits our personnel,” Corry Hatch said.

So his YouTube deep-dives began. And if you’re wondering why YouTube, why he couldn’t call an old coach or run what the teams he played on optimized? Well, “I never played a down,” Corry said.

So, he felt the need to be more analytical, more advanced. Sometimes that would lead him down a dark rabbit hole where he was watching old matchups between Harding University and Southern Nazarene.

“I’d break down every one of their games. Every play. Whether that’s zone option, midline option, or zone kick, whatever it was,” Corry said of Harding. “And we took all that and modified it into this.”

This is what Corry Hatch refers to as a modified Flexbone offense. One, both he and Hunter said, they’ve never seen used in eight-man football. It’s basically a triple-option with more intricacies. Teams with lesser talent — like Army and Navy — often employ it because, if they can master it, it’s almost impossible to prepare for in a week.

It’s built upon small ground gains, plus a quarterback who can decipher defenses and reads as plays are unfolding, not pre-snap. That can cause problems, too. For instance, Corry said, 2nd and 10 to North Gem feels like 2nd and 20 to a normal offense. Should that situation happen, though, as it did many times Friday, Corry doesn’t change his gameplan. It’s still trying to make the best blocking and option reads based on the defense.

“In fact, basically, 3rd and 9 is a run down 90 percent of the time,” Corry Hatch said.

Even crazier, given all those Army and Navy bouts Corry Hatch watched, all the times he geeked out watching Kennesaw State’s 6-foot, 230-pound fullback Bronson Rechsteiner run it to perfection (“Dude is boss,” Hatch said), all the emails with coaches around the country who teach the offense — he has just a 10-play playbook.

Hundreds of hours of film compressed into 10 plays.

If that’s not impressive enough, if your mind isn’t yet blown by the amount of time and energy Corry Hatch devoted to coaching a small Eastern Idaho eight-man football team for almost no money, consider how he decided to approach the Cowboys’ first game this year against Rockland — a 33-22 victory in September.

He got the film of the Bulldogs’ first three games of the season and, again, sat in his Laz-Z-Boy and plopped his computer and notebook on the desk. This time, there were no new concepts worth checking out.

Instead, he watched every play they ran for the season. Before each new snap, Corry would chart the down and distance, the formation Rockland employed pre-snap and, eventually, what player got the ball.

Then he did the math and played the law of averages.

“We went into that game over at Rockland knowing, ‘In this formation, this guy got the ball eight times, this guy got it two times and this guy got it once,” Corry Hatch said.

“I’m kind of a nerd.”

Perhaps. But at least he’s a nerd celebrating a win Friday night.

Rockland (4-5, 0-2) will now take part in an away state play-in game sometime next week against an opponent still to be decided.

North Gem (3-5, 1-1) will play at Horseshoe Bend next week for its state play-in game.

NORTH GEM 30, ROCKLAND 28

R 12 0 8 8 — 28

NG 8 6 0 16 — 30

FIRST QUARTER

R — Braden Permann 25-yard pass to Wes Matthews (Two-point conversion no good) 4:53

NG — Bridger Hatch 24-yard run (Hatch run) 1:50

R — Braden Permann 60-yard pass to Brigham Permann (Two-point conversion no good) 0:43

SECOND QUARTER

NG — Bridger Hatch 3-yard run (Two-point conversion no good) 0:15

THIRD QUARTER

R — Braden Permann 45-yard pass to Levi Farr (Braden Permann pass to Brigham Permann) 1:37

FOURTH QUARTER

NG — Bridger Hatch 1-yard run (Hatch run) 9:32

R — Braden Permann 30-yard pass to Levi Farr (Braden Permann pass to Brigham Permann) 8:17

NG — Bridger Hatch 43-yard run (Hatch run) 5:05

PASSING: NG — Bridger Hatch 4-6-40-0-0 … R — Braden Permann 23-38-423-4-1

RUSHING: NG — Bridger Hatch 31-304-4, Brett Yost 22-132, Chayce Low 5-33, Austin Lloyd 5-21, Trent Irick 1-3 … R — Brigam Permann 11-41

RECEIVING: NG — Logan Corta 2-32, Chayce Low 2-7 … R — Levi Farr 6-162-2, Brigam Permann 9-161-1, Teague Matthews 6-67, Wes Matthews 2-27-1, Wyatt Henderson 1-6

DEFENSE: NG — Austin Lloyd 12 tackles, six passes defended, Logan Court 8 tackles, 1 INT, Garrett Leavitt 3 tackles, Brett Lost 2 tackles for loss … R — Jaron Libberton 9 tackles, Wes Matthews 9 tackles.