- Michigan
The Time Of Their Lives – Mott’s Fahr, Osborne Make For Perfect 48 Hours On & Off Football Field
Cue Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte from the old 48 Hours action-comedy films. This kind of stuff is made for the movies.
Coach and quarterback combined for the perfect 48 hours at Waterford Mott High School, as Corsairs football coach Chris Fahr had a miracle baby boy and junior field general Kalieb Osborne went crazy on the record books to open the playoffs.
Osborne scored a combined 9 touchdowns in Mott’s 77-63 win over Saginaw Heritage in the Division 2 district semifinals Saturday, throwing for 280 yards and 3 touchdowns and rushing for 325 yards and 6 scores to tie the modern-day MHSAA record and break the Oakland County single-game mark for most total touchdowns accounted for in one contest.
Mott (8-2) will tangle with Midland (9-1) in the district championship game this week in Midland. Osborne (6-5, 210) is once again putting up glitzy numbers. He has thrown for 2,365 yards and 17 touchdowns, while rushing for 1,631 yards and scoring 29 touchdowns on the ground so far this season. During his sophomore campaign, he combined for more than 3,000 total yards, too.
Last year, Osborne led Mott to its first-ever district crown. Just days later, as the Corsairs prepared to square off with Livonia Franklin in the regionals, Fahr and his wife Candace, lost their baby. It took its toll on the couple’s mental state and the team’s morale. The Corsairs lost 43-26.
Back on Friday, almost exactly a year later, the Fahrs welcomed their son Kane into the world, a “rainbow baby” partial to the color blue worn by his dad’s perpetually scrappy Mott Corsairs gridiron gang. The next day, Fahr’s Corsairs went wild and dropped a 77-point bomb on a high-quality Heritage club in honor of their coach, his wife and their newborn child.
The same crew of referees that officiated the 2021 regional finals against Franklin, were on hand to ref the Heritage game to kick-off the 2022 postseason.
“I’ve truly come full circle, those refs who were coming over giving me their condolences last year in the regionals, we’re shaking my hand and congratulating me on my new son.” Fahr said, “It was a half hour before kick-off and we were all getting emotional, crying, hugging. That’s how surreal it was, almost eerie. I don’t know those men at all. I had never seen them before last year’s regionals and hadn’t seen them since until last Saturday. I was going on 72 hours of no sleep. I was running on adrenaline and the love of my players, my family and the Mott community. They were two of the best days of my life. It was all love. It couldn’t have been more perfect.”
Fixing to be a frontrunner for Mr. Football in 2023, Osborne rose to the occasion last weekend and made sure his coach knew him and the rest of the team had his back.
“Kalieb put his arm around me in the walk-thru before the game and he said, ‘I got you, we got you,’ at that point, I knew it was a wrap. I knew we were about to go bonkers,” Fahr said.
Osborne is a 3-star recruit and currently holds scholarship offers from Central Michigan and Toledo. Because he plays in the lesser-known Lakes Valley Conference, his notoriety for prowess with a pigskin in his hands hasn’t fully reached the masses.
Fahr isn’t concerned,
“They’ll know soon enough,” he said. “His game is the truth. He doesn’t need the headlines and recruiting stars to know he’s a great football player. Those will come in due time, He just wants to win. The competitive excellence factor with him is off the charts. He’s making history and he helped make my journey back from a dark place last year a whole lot brighter.”
