By Brittany Burke

The cloudy sky and threat of rain that surrounded the CCSU campus Saturday morning didn’t divert the loyal Blue Devil family and friends from filling up the Kaiser three hours before kickoff. Blue pop-up tents could be seen throughout the lot, occupied by alumni, fans, groups of students, and the team families.

The excitement heightened as the marching band made its way to the stands and the anonymous students in the blue and lime green suits ran around hyping up the tailgaters. All the commotion was in support of Blue Devils homecoming, the most highly anticipated home game of the football season. In spite of the dismal weather, people had hope that the Blue Devils would rebound from last week’s loss and come away with a win over the Sacred Heart Pioneers, but that didn’t happen.

“I’m a senior and this one hurt man, it really hurt,” said London Lomax. “This is the last time me and Gunnar and a lot of us get to have a homecoming and I think we all got to take pride in that. We all got to take pride in not just about me or about Gunnar but as a team we’re tryin to build a tradition, trying to build a winning tradition all this is done for us and we have to come together we really do.”

As the afternoon wore on it was clear that the Blue Devils would not regain its momentum, and for the second straight week at home, CCSU lost, this time to the Pioneers 37-24. The last time the Blue Devils lost back-to-back games was in 2003.

“I think this team, it started out okay, we got a little bit of a bad break when Gunnar broke his hand, but for some unknown reason when we win two championships we can’t get over the hump and it starts and stops with me,” said Head Coach Jeff McInerney. “Obviously players have to hold on to the football, but when you get caught up about winning championships you forget the little things that you have to do to win games and unfortunately for this team we haven’t been doing that for the past two weeks and when you don’t do those things you won’t win.”

The Blue Devils took an early 14-0 lead in the first quarter with touchdowns coming from Chris Tolbert and Deven Baker. Tolbert came away with seven on the Blue Devils’ opening drive with a 15-yard run.

“It’s been apparent here lately that we get up on people and we can’t just run away with football games like we should,” said starting quarterback Gunnar Jespersen. “I don’t know if we’re just getting in this lull where we just play tight football games and that’s what we do here at Central, but that’s not how we win football games and we shouldn’t have had a sputter where we did.”

With Brian Fowler out of the lineup for Saturday’s game, freshman Darius Lee stepped in as his replacement, scoring in the second quarter off a Lomax forced fumble, the thirteenth for the Blue Devils this season.

In under a minute to play going into the half SHU struck again with a 9-yard run from Greg Moore. Moore found the end zone twice against the Blue Devils, putting his team within one score of CCSU.

The Blue Devils might have forged ahead early in the game, but the second half was an entirely different ball game. CCSU allowed SHU to gain momentum and outscore the home team 23-3, with 16 unanswered points.

“It’s been a challenge for this team we just couldn’t do 60 minutes we could do pieces then it’s almost like we get bored with it … That’s how you lose games, you get up 14-0 and we don’t do the little things right and again that starts and stops with me and that’s the only answer I have. I don’t want to make an excuse because that’s very disappointing, I do not like mediocrity and that’s what I saw,” said McInerney.

A 50-yard touchdown completion from Tim Little to Robert Dim seemed to be the final strike as SHU took the lead from CCSU for the first time all game. After Dim’s touchdown to make the game 28-24 the Blue Devils were never able to gain the advantage back.

Instead SHU found both the uprights and the end zone one more time before the game clock ran out.

Ball security was the main issue of the day, with CCSU’s Nick Bacarella, Raul Debenenditis and Tolbert fumbling the ball and Jespersen throwing two interceptions.

The Blue Devils may have lost the homecoming game, but the team can’t dwell on the two-time defeat. Next Saturday CCSU travels to UMass to take on the Minutemen in an out-of-conference game at 6 p.m.