By Brittany Burke
On Sept. 3 the Blue Devils sat back in the second half and barely won against the Southern Connecticut Owls. This weekend the CCSU football team came alive in the third and fourth quarters against James Madison University, which kept them in the game losing only by five, 14-9.
Rather than gaining a comfortable lead in the first half, CCSU went into half time down by seven points. The third quarter was uneventful when it came to movement on the scoreboard, but at the beginning of the fourth Juan Duque kicked the first field goal of his career, getting CCSU on the board and cutting the deficit from seven to four.
“We’re a tough team, we’re mentally tough, but I was a little worried because last week…we didn’t play in the second half, we just didn’t compete and I don’t care who you play, if you don’t compete you’re not gonna do well,” said Jeff McInerney, head coach for the Blue Devils. “We were up 28-0 and we thought we had the game won and we didn’t and that’s scary.”
JMU’s score could have been much higher if it wasn’t for the big stops made by the Blue Devils defense. Two interceptions made by the Blue Devils stopped JMU drives, which could have potentially turned into points on the board.
“Any time you get turnovers you’re going to slow them down,” said McInerney. “One was in the red zone, Lorenzo Baker tipped it and made a great play and Tyrell Holmes picked it [and JMU] tried to beat Chris Linares deep and he made a great play and those are huge.”
JMU’s momentum was briefly stunted, but the team still managed to come back and score for the second time in the game with 3:10 left to play in the game.
CCSU had a chance earlier in the fourth to build on its recently kicked field goal but the team couldn’t capitalize. A fumble was forced on the kickoff return and recovered by CCSU, but the failed fake field goal attempt resulted in no points.
“I learned a lot about this team, as a coach we all got to do better,” said McInerney. “I don’t want to just say it’s players. We got some things that when you look back and reflect on decisions, not the field goal fake, I’d do that 100 times over, but there’s certain situations you might reconsider and you just got to learn and keep it in your memory banks.”
Despite the lost opportunity CCSU, lived up to its reputation once again by coming back in the fourth quarter. With close to three minutes to play in the game CCSU’s Chris Tolbert rushed in for a 3-yard score, but a failed two-point conversion left just nine points on the board to JMU’s 14.
Gunnar Jespersen was back in the action after being taken out in the game against Southern Connecticut. Against JMU, Jespersen threw for 140-yards, but also had two interceptions. Of the 146 rushing yards, Brian Fowler rushed for 93 of them.
“If he can keep doing that against a very good team nothing but good can happen,” said McInerney. “I was very pleased with Brian’s effort and the line they blocked there’s no run if you can’t block.”
Even though the team cut the loss to five, McInerney is adamant that a close second best isn’t good enough. The team is faced with yet another road game this weekend against Wagner, which is also the team’s Northeast Conference opener.
“We got to stop the run and stop the deep ball on defense and on offense we got to continue,” said McInerney. “We’ve got to have a break-out game for the whole game, for 60 minutes. A lot of our struggles were because of JMU’s athletic ability. They can run; they’re the fastest team we’ll play…way faster than other people we play in our league, but with that said we have to be consistent and score points and if we can get up to 30 points a game like we’ve been, and that’s gonna be tough against a good Wagner defense, we scored 38 against them at home, but we’re gonna have to score points, sure up the run on defense and be sound with the kicking game like we were.”
CCSU makes its way back to Arute field for a Sept. 24 game at 12 p.m. against Monmouth