On social media, where most everyone is an expert, the De La Salle football program has been taken to task in recent seasons.

Not nearly good enough, some wrote, and some of them being alums of the Contra Costa school defined by decades of football excellence. Others wrote that the storied Spartans have become a disappointment.

Paul Doherty begs to differ. The Folsom Bulldogs coach will vouch for the staying power of De La Salle, which may not sport the national No. 1-ranked powerhouse clubs that once went 12 successive seasons without a single defeat, but rest assured, DLS still has a lot of De La Stomp to its game.

Relying on its old-school power running game and a stout defense, De La Salle topped the Bee No. 1-ranked Bulldogs 14-7 in a whopper of a nonleague finale between Northern California powerhouse programs on Friday night at Prairie City Stadium.

DLS burned up the clock, sustained long drives, led 7-0 at the half and ran out the final 3:01 in Folsom’s first home game of the season. Folsom’s last game on the blue field was last December in the CIF NorCal Division I-AA title game, a 17-14 setback to De La Salle, which avenged an earlier 24-20 loss to the Bulldogs in Concord.

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The Spartans (3-2) rushed 61 times for 308 yards, attempted just six passes for 17 yards and had the ball for nearly 33 minutes, the formula for success to stall a prolific Folsom team.

“De La Salle is impressive as always,” Doherty said. “I hear all this noise that De La Salle has fallen off, or that it’s not the same. Well, they are the same. Watch them fire off the ball, athletic dudes who defend, guys who tackle. They’re still tried and true, 40 years later. They’re still great.”

Doherty challenged his players after the game to up their game because no one has pity for the Bulldogs. Folsom lost its season opener at NorCal No. 1 Serra of San Mateo, 21-14, and now prepares for the gauntlet that is the Sierra Foothill League, starting with Bee No. 2 Oak Ridge, which comes for a visit on Sept. 29.

Oak Ridge coaches were on hand to watch this game. The same for Granite Bay coaches and others in the SFL as most of Folsom’s league rivals had a bye week.

Folsom (3-2) has won seven SFL crowns since entering the league before the 2014 season and nine CIF Sac-Joaquin Section banners since 2010, including the last two in Division I, but the Bulldogs are ripe to be plucked if they can’t get on track offensively. On Friday, that was a credit to the DLS defense.

Derrick Blanche scored on a 2-yard run for a 7-0 DLS lead with 7:29 left in the second quarter. Toa Faavae slipped into the end zone on a 1-yard play to make it 14-0 with 2:57 to go in the third. Blanche had 123 yards rushing on 23 carries and teammate Dominic Kelley had 108 yards on 25 carries.

Ryder Lyons, Folsom’s gritty and skilled sophomore quarterback, hit Abram Woodson for a 9-yard touchdown with 10:16 left to play. Lyons kept the Bulldogs in the game, throwing for 170 yards on 15-of-21 passing while rushing for 72 yards on 19 carries.

Rematch in NorCal finals?

De La Salle won the first two meetings of this series, in 2012 and 2013 NorCal title games, and the teams split the last four meetings before Friday. The teams could face off again, in a NorCal final, if Folsom can win another section title and if DLS wins its 31st consecutive North Coast Section championship, a remarkable reminder of how formidable that program is. But no one is looking beyond Monday’s practice.

DLS over a 30-year stretch ending in 2021 went 316-0-2 against Northern California programs. Folsom remains the only Sacramento-area program, not including those from Stockton or Modesto, to beat the Spartans, who started playing varsity football in 1972. Folsom beat DLS 28-27 in the 2021 NorCal finals and 24-20 in a regular-season game last fall. DLS leads the all-time series 7-2.

DLS expectations and reality

Justin Alumbaugh was a star linebacker for the Spartans in the late 1990s who later became an assistant coach. He’s in his 11th season as head coach. He joked earlier Friday that life was easier as an assistant coach — coach your position guys and head home. Now, he burdens the entire load, and he doesn’t shy away from a challenge, though he he may bristle a bit at any notion that his program has hit the skids. The Spartans, for example, reached a state final last season.

“I’m very proud of my work here, what we’ve done as a staff, this program,” Alumbaugh said. “I was talking to an alum and I told him if we had the schedule now that we did when I was a senior, the first games, we’d be unbeaten at this point. NorCal football is better than its ever been. It’s a testament to all of those programs. We have to get better ourselves. That’s our job. We’re trying to get everything as right as we can.”

That includes going back to the running game, the veer-attack that has devoured teams for decades. The ploy worked marvelously last week in a 24-10 win over St. Mary’s of Stockton and again against Folsom.

Alumbaugh said after Friday’s game: “I loved our grittiness. I loved our toughness. That looked like a game I could have played in the ’90s. I don’t want every game to be just like this. We have to advance ourselves and get better in many areas, but I know we had the ball a lot longer than they did. And our defense — when you can hold a team as talented as them to seven points — you’re doing something right.”

Alumbaugh said earlier in the day of his role as the head coach of such a high-profile program: “When you’re the head coach at De La Salle, there are a lot of expectations. I hear it. I don’t want us to lose games. It can be myopic if people are only worried about the won-loss record. We are staying true to who we are. We want to win football games, but the most important thing is to get them to play as a team, to graduate, to be productive team players in life, at work, as a father, with family.”