The Dirigo defense held Maranacook to 90 yards of offense in Friday’s 10-0 victory. Cooper Sullivan/The Times Record

READFIELD — The rivalry between Maranacook and Dirigo may have carried over from eight-man to 11-man football, but the offenses didn’t. At least not on Friday night.

The Class D South schools combined for only 256 total yards of offense and 10 points, but fortunately for the visiting team, the Cougars had the majority of the yardage and all of the points as they scraped out a 10-0 victory.

“Let’s just say it was an ugly win,” Dirigo coach Craig Collins said. “Sometimes that happens, so you go back to watch film to see what happened. It wasn’t pretty — too many mistakes — but hey, a win’s a win.”

Junior running back Tanner Bradeen scored the game’s only touchdown, an angry run of 5 yards out early in the second quarter, after the Maranacook punter unintentionally kneeled down at the 5-yard line while trying to pick up a low snap. Quarterback Hudson Lufkin ran in the two-point conversion to make it 8-0 for Dirigo.

The sophomore QB contributed another two points right before halftime, this time on defense with a 7-yard sack for a safety. That was the last time either team reached the end zone until the postgame huddles.

Maranacook head coach Skip Bessey said he “couldn’t ask for a better performance” from his defense, which forced three turnovers on downs and five punts on 10 drives, while holding the Cougars to 166 total yards. Offensively, however, was a different story.

“Defense was exceptional,” senior Jack Crosby said. “I think every single one of us did really well, all 11 heads to the ball, just playing really smart and really physical defense. I think offense just didn’t execute. It’s been a consistent problem, something we just keep working to fix. I think we’re just struggling to diagnose the problem, but also I have hope we’ll get there eventually.”

Bessey believes the answer is inexperience.

“I think half of my offense, (this) is their first time ever starting on (offense) so, I mean, I chalk it up to that,” Bessey said. “We had a game plan. We’re going to try to run a little bit of bully ball with them tonight, and they did a great job stopping us. We just couldn’t move the ball tonight, and we had a lot of penalties that shot ourselves in the foot when we were actually moving the ball. That kind of hurt. But again, a lot of those kids who made those penalties were first-year players.”

Maranacook (2-3) committed 10 penalties, while Dirigo (4-1) committed six.

Bessey added: “It was a little aggravating for me, but I think overall, I mean, I’m not unhappy with the effort. I was telling them over there, their effort on both sides of the ball was great from the beginning to the end. We just couldn’t do anything offensively.”

The Black Bears were only able to gain 26 yards of offense in the first half and 64 yards in the second half. Dirigo also intercepted two passes, but neither turnover resulted in points.

Normally a RPO-style spread offense, Bessey shifted Maranacook’s attack to feature his two senior running backs, Crosby (15 rush, 64 yards) and Cobey Dunn (8 total touches). Production stalled, because earlier in the season, Collins switched from a 5-2 defensive front to a 4-3 formation, which put Lufkin as an outside linebacker. He was a frequent visitor in the Black Bears backfield Friday.

“They would go motion, and that was kind of my indicator to come up on the play,” Lufkin, who made five tackles for loss, said. “They weren’t going to be passing the ball much, so that was good. We did a lot of game plan throughout the week, a lot of game plan. We stuck to it and did our job.”

“We’re seeing everything that we knew we would,” Dirigo junior defensive back Owen Smith said. “So we just kept to what we were doing and communicated if we needed to change anything.”

Both Lufkin (9 of 19 for 84 yards passing; 13 rushes for 38 yards) and Smith, who intercepted a pass and reeled in three receptions of his own, attributed the Cougars’ slow start to their bye week.