Aedan Borges ran and threw for 420 yards at Fairhaven in October, and Thursday he leads Case back for the playoff rematch

SWANSEA Aedan Borges threw for 262 yards and two touchdowns at Fairhaven on Oct. 16, ran for 158 yards and three more, made 11 tackles and kicked three extra points, the Boston Globe reported. Joseph Case lost that night 45-37, on a Fairhaven touchdown with 21 seconds left, the Standard-Times reported. On Thursday, Nov. 5, Borges and the Cardinals go back to Fairhaven for a 6:30 p.m. rematch in the Division 6 Round of 16, against the defending state champions.

Case is 6-2 in coach Mike Cloutier's first season, the No. 11 seed, and the team the Globe picked as the sleeper of Division 6. Fairhaven is 8-0 and seeded sixth. The 37 points Case scored in October are the most anyone has scored on the Blue Devils this fall, and more than Case had scored against them in the previous five meetings combined, by both schools' schedules.

Tale of the tape

Joseph Case and Fairhaven, side by side

	Joseph Case	Fairhaven
Record	6-2	8-0
Division 6 seed	No. 11	No. 6
Last five games	4-1, outscored opponents 216-81	5-0, outscored opponents 212-85
Points scored	275, 34.4 a game	328, 41.0 a game
Points allowed	99, 12.4 a game	105, 13.1 a game
Allowed, other seven games	54, 7.7 a game	68, 9.7 a game
Shutouts	2 (Tri-County, Bourne)	2 (Bourne, Greater New Bedford)
Vs. Bourne	Won 64-0 at home	Won 42-0 away
Vs. West Bridgewater	Won 35-8 away	Won 22-13 at home
Vs. Seekonk	Won 39-14 at home	Won 56-28 away
MIAA power rating	2.28; average margin 8.88	6.68; average margin 12.63
League (MaxPreps)	3-1, second in SCC Gold	4-0, first
Offense (Globe preseason)	Spread	Triple option
Head coach	Mike Cloutier, 1st season	Derek Almeida, 7th season
Lead player	Aedan Borges, sr., No. 2: 1,352 rushing, 1,098 passing, 24 TD	Jackson Ponte, jr.: 1,004 passing, 16 TD, 1 INT
Defensive playmakers	Anderson Emard, jr.: 2 fumble-return TDs at West Bridgewater	Carter Frates and Jackson Williams: 7 INT combined
Kicking	Borges: 42-yard field goal at Tri-County, 3 of 3 extra points at Fairhaven	Jackson Dane: 8 of 8 extra points at Seekonk
2025 season	4-7, playoff team	12-1, Division 6 champion
Meetings since 2021	0-6, 59-255	6-0, 255-59

Records and seeds come from the MIAA's bracket and its final Division 6 power rankings; every score, total and average is our count from the schedules both schools post on Arbiter Live; the league marks are MaxPreps'; player totals are the Globe's from its Nov. 1 playoff preview; Borges' number is from the roster Case posts on MaxPreps; the kicking lines are from the Globe's Players of the Week reports and the Standard-Times' Week 7 roundup.

Where Case measures up

On defense, Case has allowed 99 points, six fewer than Fairhaven, and outside the game at Fairhaven it gave up 54 in seven games. It shut out Tri-County and Bourne and held Sharon/Dedham, which came in at 5-2 a week after its quarterback threw for 346 yards, to its lowest score of the season, by MaxPreps' automated reports.

The three teams both schools played point the same way. Case beat Bourne by 64, West Bridgewater by 27 and Seekonk by 25, a combined 138-22. Fairhaven beat the same three 120-41, and West Bridgewater led the Blue Devils 13-0 before they rallied for a 22-13 win, the Globe reported. Case won at West Bridgewater; Fairhaven played that one at home.

The MIAA's power rating, which caps each game's margin at 14 points and adds the average rating of a team's opponents, put Case behind Fairhaven, 2.28 to 6.68. Both teams' opponents rate below zero on the MIAA's scale, Case's at minus 6.60 and Fairhaven's at minus 5.95, so neither schedule separates them much. Most of the gap is average margin, where Case's two losses count against it, by the same table.

A new coach and a strong summer

Cloutier was named Case's head coach in February, the New England Football Journal reported. He came to Swansea after one season at Falmouth and five at Dedham, where his teams made two Division 5 Elite Eight runs, the Enterprise of Falmouth reported. In a message to his Falmouth players that the Enterprise published, he explained the move: "The school in the town we live in opened up and they wanted me to take the coaching job there." The Globe's preseason predictions picked him as the new coach who would make the biggest impact in Division 6.

He inherited a team that went 4-7 and reached the playoffs in 2025, playing a tournament game at Norwell, by Case's 2025 schedule on MaxPreps. Over the summer the Cardinals qualified for the Northeast 7v7 New England championship in passing league play, and 55 players came out for camp, a strong number for a school in this division, the Globe's preseason preview said. "We had a really strong start," Cloutier told the Globe. "We had a great summer in the weight room and passing leagues. Defensively, we are a very strong team that can create some problems and offensively, we have a lot of different ways to attack people with the depth that we have."

The season, game by game

Case opened Sept. 11 with a 12-7 home loss to Diman, by the schedule the school posts, and lost only once more. On Sept. 18 it beat Southeastern 21-6 as Borges ran for 104 yards and two touchdowns and threw for 150 yards and a third score, junior Brett Silva ran for 121 yards at 7.6 yards a carry, and the team ran for 240 yards, by MaxPreps' automated recap built from the team's statistics.

In a 31-0 road win over Tri-County on Thursday, Sept. 24, Borges threw for 187 yards, ran for 133, accounted for three scores, made seven tackles and an interception, kicked a 42-yard field goal and made all four extra points, the Globe reported in naming him a Player of the Week. Case beat Bourne 64-0 on Oct. 2, its widest margin, with senior Matt Bogdan running for 72 yards and a touchdown, by the MaxPreps recap. On Oct. 9 Borges ran for 181 yards and two touchdowns and threw for 135 and a third score in a 39-14 South Coast Conference win over Seekonk, the Globe reported.

At Fairhaven on Oct. 16, Case trailed 16-7 at halftime and 29-14 after three quarters, then scored 23 points in the fourth, by the MaxPreps line score, before Liam Pickup's 18-yard run with 21 seconds left won it for Fairhaven, the Standard-Times reported. A week later Case won 35-8 at West Bridgewater behind 136 rushing yards from Borges and two fumble returns for touchdowns, of 83 and 43 yards, by junior Anderson Emard, the Globe reported. It closed the regular season Oct. 30 with a 41-14 win at Sharon High School in which Borges piled up 400 total yards and accounted for four touchdowns, and the Globe named him a Division 6 Player of the Week again, as it had after the Tri-County, Seekonk and Fairhaven games.

The roster, by the numbers

Borges, No. 2, does almost everything. The Globe calls him a senior quarterback and one of the more underrated players in the division; the roster Case posts on MaxPreps lists him at running back and free safety; and he kicks. Emard, No. 14, a junior receiver and free safety, and Silva, No. 25, a junior running back, were the two juniors the Globe told readers to watch before the season.

Senior captains Cooper Bert, No. 4, a tight end and outside linebacker, and Cole Rego, No. 5, a middle linebacker and tight end, were the players the Globe said Case would rely on in the passing game, and Bert leads the receivers in the statistics Case has entered on MaxPreps, which run through mid-October. Bogdan, No. 10, a receiver and cornerback, has an interception in those statistics, and junior tight end and defensive end Troy Medas, No. 34, has a touchdown catch.

The roster puts seniors Cameron Garcia, No. 66, at guard and tackle, Kaiser Shahdan, No. 72, at tackle, and Gavin Vital, No. 75, at guard and defensive tackle, with senior defensive ends Malakai Dowling, No. 8, and Noah Cabral, No. 16. With Borges, Bert, Rego and Bogdan, that makes nine seniors, and Thursday is the first playoff game of their final season.

Six meetings, one close one

Both schools' MaxPreps schedules show Fairhaven winning every meeting since 2021: 24-0 in 2021, 49-6 in 2022, 49-6 in 2023, 42-0 in 2024 and 46-10 last Oct. 30 in Swansea. Case scored 22 points in those five games combined, by our count. Then it scored 37 in one night at Fairhaven this October and cut the margin from 36 points to eight.

The program has been to a Super Bowl. The MIAA's all-time Super Bowl records list Case against Cardinal Spellman on Dec. 5, 1992, and Spellman lists 1992 as its Division 4 Super Bowl title year. This is Case's second straight trip to the state tournament.

Our read: what Case needs Thursday

This is our analysis, drawn from the records above. Fairhaven's triple option wants to keep the ball and wear a defense down with long drives, like the 19-play drive that put Fairhaven up two scores late against West Bridgewater on Oct. 2, the Globe reported, and this year Jackson Ponte's 16 touchdown passes punish a defense that sells out to stop the run. The one team to beat Fairhaven in two seasons, West Bridgewater, did it last fall by forcing three turnovers, the Globe reported. Case has players built for that: Emard's two scoop-and-score returns came in one game.

On offense, Case's spread puts the ball in Borges' hands as a runner and a passer, and in October that produced 420 yards and five touchdowns from him alone, by our math from the Globe's line. The October game turned on two Fairhaven plays, Liam Pickup's 52-yard fumble return for a touchdown and his 18-yard run with 21 seconds left, the Globe and the Standard-Times reported. In our read, if Case holds on to the ball and keeps pace on the scoreboard, it gets a fourth quarter it can win. The field is Fairhaven's artificial turf, a change from the grass Case plays on at home, by the Globe's preseason listing.

What Fairhaven brings

Fairhaven is the defending Division 6 champion, as the Standard-Times noted, and has won 15 straight games since its only 2025 loss, at West Bridgewater, by its MaxPreps and Arbiter Live schedules. The Globe reported that Fairhaven graduated 10 of its 11 offensive starters from last year's team. Ponte, a junior, has since thrown a school-record five touchdown passes in one game, at Seekonk, the Standard-Times reported. In the Globe's playoff preview, senior Carter Frates has 414 receiving yards and nine touchdowns, junior Jackson Williams has 264 receiving yards and four touchdowns, and the two have combined for seven interceptions. Against Case, junior Maddox Joseph ran for three touchdowns, by the Standard-Times' account, and senior Aidan Donnelly broke off a 76-yard run, by the Globe's.

Thursday night: time, place, tickets, stream

Kickoff is 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 5, at Fairhaven High School, 12 Huttleston Ave., by the MIAA's Division 6 bracket and both schools' schedules. The game moved up a day from the Friday date first listed. From the Round of 16 on, the MIAA sells tournament tickets only online, through GoFan, at $9.40 for a Round of 16 football game, general admission with all fees included, by its ticketing and price pages. The NFHS Network, which holds the digital rights to MIAA tournament games, lists a subscription stream on both schools' pages.

Buy tickets on the GoFan page for Case at Fairhaven, the event both teams' MaxPreps schedules link, or start from the MIAA's tournament ticketing page.

The winner moves on to the Round of 8 against No. 3 Abington or No. 14 Wilmington, who play their Round of 16 game the same night, at 7 p.m. at Memorial Field, by the MIAA's bracket.

Thanksgiving comes back too

Case's schedule has it at Somerset Berkley on Thanksgiving, Thursday, Nov. 26, at 10 a.m. at Hanson Memorial Stadium, whatever happens Thursday. The rivalry dates to 1930 and returns for the first time since 2022, the two school districts announced in January, and the winner keeps the 49ers Trophy for a year. "We as a school community feel it is a great time to play Somerset Berkley," said Athletic Director Anthony Palladino, a former Case coach, in the districts' announcement. Swansea Superintendent Scott Holcomb said the district had "taken the past few years to cultivate our high school football program, and we feel it's ready to return to this time-honored holiday competition."

Thursday's final will be on the Friday Night Scoreboard, the Fairhaven side of this matchup is in our Fairhaven preview, and every South Coast playoff game is in our bracket story.

Label: Reported by us, from the town's posted records.