By Brian Weaver
When I arrive at Chris Felton’s room at Central Bucks West High School, the former West head football coach hits the lights and turns on the projector. I’ve already told him I’m writing a feature on the Bucks’ two star players and captains, Ted Conrad and Matt McMurdo, so he has the game film ready for me. The next 15 minutes are like opening up a visual textbook.
“Watch this,” Felton says as we sit down. “It’ll be the first play you see. Teddy makes a good move, and then runs over three guys.”
Sure enough, Conrad loses a man at the line of scrimmage with a cut and breaks to the outside, flying down the right sideline. He hits one, two, three players inside the ten. All of them drop, bowling pins in his lane. Touchdown: West.
Ted Conrad has never been a secret weapon. The fullback/linebacker been on the radar since middle school, one of those players coaches see and start to shape their team around in advance. C.B. West has been in transition, a program looking to find its feet in the years since Central Bucks South split off.
The program improved a game this year, moving from 2-8 to 3-7 and losing two of those games while driving for the winning score. In this system, Felton and his staff needed people to lean on, people like Conrad. And yet in a rebuilding phase, with all eyes and hopes riding on him, having most of the weight on his shoulders has never bothered Conrad.
“I actually like that,” he says of the added expectations. “It’s motivation, what makes me work hard. I’ve got to live up to their expectations.”
Matt McMurdo, on the other hand, was a different story. He didn’t play much during middle school and admits football was not all-consuming at that point. Felton didn’t know what he was getting when McMurdo, a two-way lineman, began summer workouts for the Bucks before the 2006 season.
“I’d heard about Teddy, but McMurdo was kind of a surprise,” Felton remembered. “It’s not an uncommon thing. Some guys don’t play much in middle school and end up doing well.”
All this is not to say that high school football wasn’t a goal for McMurdo. He and Conrad were in elementary school during the glory days of C.B. West football. During the late 1990s, when Mike Pettine’s Bucks were winning back-to-back-to-back PIAA Quad-A state championships, McMurdo was an avid supporter.
“I was a huge fan growing up. My parents had season tickets, we went to all the state championship games,” he says, his gaze drifting back a few years. “I still have a signed football from one of the quarterbacks in my room.”
Given this, the moment wasn’t lost on him when he finally got his chance to pull on the black and gold. As a sophomore, he became a starter, and since then has completely focused on football, putting his full effort into the sport.
“This is why you don’t jam the line of scrimmage,” Felton smiles. The box is stacked. The opponent is looking for the run. Conrad reads the defense, and within five steps is completely free over the left guard, into the secondary clean and going half the field for the touchdown.
Conrad knew that in almost every game, this sort of play was coming, eleven opposing players with their crosshairs right between the 3 and 1 on his jersey. He grins when he thinks of the times that he looked up to see a handful of extra helmets between the hashes.
“A couple times they’d call the gap out,” he remembers. “The linebackers are faking blitz, and I’m just like, ‘All right, let’s do it.’”
Coming into the year, it was no secret that C.B. West would lean heavily on Conrad in their play-calling. Their passing attack was young and inexperienced, and Conrad was a returning Division I prospect. The Bucks would have to rely on an offensive line that gave up inches and pounds to almost every team that they played.
McMurdo did everything he could to get his line ready for a season that would find him and his mates having to push the run forward almost every play for not just Conrad, but also tailback Rashaad Williams. Felton could see in his captain’s behavior that the senior had right mentality to lead the charge.
“I’d catch McMurdo coaching teammates up in practice,” Felton recalls. “This program’s always been built on the idea that you play like you practice. I never had to worry about getting those guys motivated. He was responsible for making vital calls on the line during the game.”
The line, anchored by McMurdo, never wavered, and he cites their desire as the reason they were able to accomplish as much as they did. In the Bucks’ last game of the season, he knew that Hatboro-Horsham needed a stop in the last minute as C.B. West, holding the lead, looked to run out the clock if they could convert on fourth and one. McMurdo lined up on a 300-pound lineman and dug in, remembering that before the game he had told his teammates they had to win this game.
Sure enough, West converted. The play sealed the game, snapping an 11-game home losing streak for the Bucks and sending the seniors out on a high note with a 33-31 victory in their finale. McMurdo shrugged it off as business as usual and quickly praised Conrad as a huge reason the line looked good.
“They called our number a lot, so you knew teams would know if it’s third-and-three, we had to run the ball,” he says. “They’d stack the box. It just came down to us wanting it more most of the time. Teddy would always want it more than whoever was tackling him. If you look [at film], he never gets tackled solo. The plays where Teddy gets the ball, he does not stop moving his legs.”
It’s Conrad going left. He’s hit once, twice, pushed back five yards behind the line of scrimmage. His legs keep moving, he bounces outside, and there he goes, black and gold and into the scorebook.
In the midst of West’s recent downturn, Conrad and McMurdo admit that teammates reading the coverage of the team in local media got some players down. The pair largely ignored it and urged their teammates to do the same.
They turned to their work ethic to inspire their teammates. The two refused to quit, even though Conrad admits the thought of slacking off would slyly work its way into his psyche from time to time.
“It’s easy to quit when you’re working that hard, to think, ‘Ugh, I can stop now,” he says. “I just keep going, and usually it pays off. Matt, it’s the same thing- he’s the hardest worker I know.”
“I think a lot of it was setting an example,” McMurdo says. “It’s just an attitude that starts in the offseason. You can’t sit there and babysit everyone, but you hope they take after you.”
They did. Junior teammate Dan Mastrangelo, a lineman on both offense and defense, took his lead from Conrad and McMurdo.
“You’d see the two of them after practice, and they’re always just doing an extra set of bleachers or running extra sprints,” Mastrangelo explains. “They’ll always tell us before the games that this is West football, and we need to win the game.”
“I’d tell them we’re still here,” McMurdo says. “I’ve had players from other teams tell us we’re a really physical team. We never quit. Everyone was disrespecting us because we had some bad seasons. It was something you saw from the papers, from the towns, from the kids at school- it was something you just used as fuel. I think that’s one of the reasons we were such a physical team.”
The two train hard all year round to stay in peak physical shape. Both wrestle in the offseason, yet, remarkably, that commitment couldn’t dent their football work schedule.
Felton, for one, could not name a single workout they missed unless it was for a wrestling tournament. Team lifts, pass reads, other activities…they didn’t skip a beat - not even Conrad, the District 1 champion at 189 lbs. They set the bar high, a fact that was not lost on their coach.
“You get a handful of those kids and they inspire a handful of other kids - that’s how you build a program,” Felton said. “You can only build a foundation on people with strong character. Teddy and Matt are the type of guys you can build a program on.”
He even goes as far as to call the players “throwbacks,” as high a compliment as one can get. Felton was here in the mid-1990s, a 1995 graduate who played with the players who led the Bucks to their four championships in that decade. (The Bucks also won in 1991.) He knows those teams and points to Conrad and McMurdo’s work ethic, their drive, and notes that these two would fit seamlessly with the historic teams the school has produced over the years.
“Watch this hit. This kid’s a Division I-AA player, too.” It’s third-and-two deep in West territory, and C.B. East, on the other side of the ball, looks to run. They go left. McMurdo sees it coming from his spot at linebacker, and he delivers a thundering hit – the smack is audible from the camera deck at the top of the stadium. East will settle for the field goal.
“[McMurdo]’s bringing his feet big time. That’s a knockout. That kid was getting up wobbly.”
McMurdo smiles modestly at this one. He remembers the play.
“I figured they’d run, they’d been running the ball all the way,” he said. “I decided to make my read. I just read that guard, and his first step was a zone blocking step.”
Mastrangelo laughs at this one, too.
“McMurdo just annihilated him,” he says, eyes lighting up as he remembers the hit. “He stopped him dead.”
Both McMurdo and Conrad were two-way players. They didn’t just play both sides of the ball, but also applied one to the other. For McMurdo, playing linebacker while thinking like an offensive lineman did nothing but help his performance. He needed all the help he could get this year, as he just made the switch to linebacker for his senior campaign.
Coming into the year, the Mohawk-topped senior had played only defensive line. The shift was a tough transition, and he was the first to admit that the adjustment was a tough one to make, especially in just one year. Felton liked what he saw, though. More than that, he saw McMurdo as a way to not only stabilize but improve his linebacker corps.
“The thing about him that was so impressive about him playing linebacker was his instincts. He helped us against teams we’d had trouble with in the past. We would limit his reads and let him just fly to the football.”
McMurdo’s on offensive line again. The run goes right. McMurdo pancakes his blocker, lays him flat as Roseanne singing the national anthem. The player rolls over, finds his feet, and turns just in time to get flattened by McMurdo a second time.
The two now have their sights set on the world beyond War Memorial Field as they look to play football in college. Both are good students, and they’re now looking at Patriot League schools to play in Division I’s Football Championship Series. As hard as they’ve worked through high school, they look to do even better things.
Conrad will also consider wrestling in the league, which would carry his family’s torch nicely – his uncle wrestled at Patriot League power Lehigh. With that season right around the corner, both Conrad and McMurdo look to follow a big hit in football this year with a solid season on the mats. The sport is definitely a change of pace.
“You go really intense [in football] for 15 seconds, then you get a breather,” McMurdo says. “Wrestling is an intense two-three minutes where every part of your body is tightened muscle and you’re just straining.”
“Wrestling, you don’t ever really get a break,” Conrad laughs. “In practice, we do a lot of live wrestling, and it gets all your muscles ready to go. I’m trying to keep my pact with myself to run two to three miles after each practice, too.”
With that, I let Conrad go. Wrestling practice is about to start, and he needs to get changed and get into the gym.
There’s work to do.
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