Brandon Thompkins scores seven TDs in performance for the ages for Preds
Adam Markowitz
Friday April 29, 2016
Old school Ironman football might be dead, but Brandon Thompkins put on about as good of an Ironman show as you'll see in this day and age on Friday night. He scored seven TDs in a 76-56 win for the Orlando Predators over the Cleveland Gladiators, and he created a bit of history in the process.
Thompkins unleashed a fury on this night, catching TDs of eight, six, 28, 14 and 10 yards to go with a two-yard rushing touchdown and a 58-yard kickoff return for a score. He finished with 361 all-purpose yards, one of the highest marks in the history of the Preds.
Thompkins' performance was one for the ages in Predators history. Barry Wagner once scored seven touchdowns in a game in 1995, and he holds the league's all-time record for all-purpose yards in a game with 434.
The wide out also became the first player in over two years to log seven total touchdowns in a game. The last was Darius Reynolds, who found the end zone seven times for the Iowa Barnstormers against the Pittsburgh Power. There have only been six examples of games in which players have scored seven touchdowns since 2011. Thompkins has now done it twice.
When Thompkins was playing with the Spokane Shock in 2012, he amassed seven TDs against Utah.
Thompkins won Playmaker of the Game honors for his efforts in Cleveland, and he certainly has the inside track to some postseason honors with over a quarter of the season now gone. He's got 1,173 all-purpose yards and 16 TDs over the course of his first five games. If he keeps up on that pace, he'll finish the year at 3,754 all-purpose yards, a mark which would break the AFL record of 3,708 yards by P.J. Berry for the New Orleans VooDoo in an 18-game season in 2011.
Lewis Gets His Kicks
On Friday night, Mark Lewis broke the all-time record for PATs made, a record which stood for quite a while held by Remy Hamilton. Lewis now has an even 1,100 point afters converted in his 12-year career, the last six of which have been with Orlando.
No active kicker has more than 390 made PATs to his credit. When you figure that the highest scoring teams will put 130 touchdowns on the board over the course of a season, it would take Marco Capozzoli another six full seasons of kicking PATs at a high level for him to run down Lewis.
You hate to say that a record will never be broken, but by the time Lewis is said and done with, it's tough to see how anyone will be able to run that mark down.
