Schools 
COLLEGE STATION — This time, it's all theirs.
With a few more bullets in its holster, the vaunted A&M Consolidated rushing attack outgunned Belton's passing attack in a shootout to outright win the District 12-5A championship, 56-49, on Friday at Tiger Stadium.
Led with a career-high 297 yards and five touchdowns from senior tailback Chris Nutall, including 224 yards on 11 carries in the first half, the 5-foot-8 slasher shredded the Belton defense for touchdown runs of 23, 19, 23, and 51 yards to power the host Tigers to a 42-21 first half advantage.
"I felt like nobody could stop me," Nutall said. "Every time I touched the ball, I felt like I was going to score."
With a chance to force a three-way tie atop the district standings with a victory, Belton struggled to tackle any of Consolidated's four-headed backfield monster, especially in a first half in which A&M racked up 383 of its 567 total rushing yards and scored on its first five offensive possessions.
"I'm disappointed because if we'd have played as well the first half as we played the second half, we would have won," Belton coach Rodney Southern said.
The second Division II seed out of 12-5A, Belton will play 11-5A's top seed Longview in a 5A-Division II bi-district game at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 13 at Dallas' John Kincaide Stadium. Longview has advanced to the 4A-Division I state finals each of the last two seasons.
Despite throwing a pair of first half interceptions — the first on Belton's first offensive play of the game and the second on his final pass attempt of the second quarter — Texas-bound quarterback David Ash nearly brought the other Tigers back.
"When you make a mistake, you give them a possession, that's the difference for us," Southern said. "Because we know we're going to struggle to stop this kind of running offense, but nobody's stopped them."
Accounting for 458 yards of total offense and six of Belton's seven touchdowns, Ash pulled the Tigers within a score at 49-42 with a 3-yard run to cap an incredible 17-play scoring drive that took up 5:46 off the clock.
But again, after stopping Consolidated in its tracks with a fourth-down turnover-on-downs on its previous possession, Belton's defense was carved up by A&M's ground game.
Nutall capped an 11-play scoring drive with an 11-yard touchdown, his career-high fifth of the game, to essentially put the game away with just 1:53 remaining.
Connecting on his final six pass attempts of the game, Ash led Belton right back down the field, scoring with 22 seconds left on a 16-yard strike to Adrian Henderson. But it was too little, too late.
Ash finished with 394 yards on 31-of-51 passing and four touchdowns while rushing for 64 and another two on the ground. With his effort, Ash broke the Belton single-season passing record with 3,073 yards, surpassing former Tiger quarterback Brock Rumfield's mark of 2,771 set in 1993.
After A&M took a 21-7 first-quarter lead, thanks to 108 yards and three touchdowns by Nutall, Belton cut it to within a score with a 1-yard touchdown run by Ash that capped a 15-play, 75-yard drive with 8:17 to play in the second quarter.
Consolidated's next touchdown — a 9-yard scamper by Clinton Banks — started a run of three scores in a matter of 33 seconds.
Ash struck two plays later on back-to-back passes to Henderson, capping a 20-second scoring drive with a 21-yard touchdown from Ash.
It was only 13 seconds later that Nutall broke a 51-yard run on the very next offensive play after an onside kick attempt by Tyler Pate — that was originally recovered by Tramaine Rose at the Consol 49-yard line — was ruled obstruction of a fair catch attempt.
