More Kool-Aide! Saturday, September 12, 2009

UMass demolished Albany tonight, 44-7. UMass ended up forcing five turnovers, be it by tipped balls or knocking the snot out of the quarterback who dropped the ball or ripping the ball out of receivers hands sort of like Teddy Bruschi did to the Colts in the Divisional Round in January of 2005. The offense was pretty unstoppable. WR Victor Cruz had two touchdowns, a 3 yard reception and a beautiful finger tip catch which turned into 67 yard touchdown catch (a lot of YAC on that one...probably 40 yards or so). UMass benched all the starters after a while and that gave RB Jon Hernandez (I had never heard of him) an opportunity. He got a 1 yard TD and followed that up with a 58 yard run for a Touchdown UMass's next offensive snap.

Quarterback Kyle Havens was good in his home debut. My initial impression is he's not Liam Coen, but he'll do. Then again, my initial impression of Liam Coen was "Who is number 12 and why isn't Tim Day still starting? This is crap!" so I guess he's ahead of Coen in that regard. Every once in a while he'd made a mistake and it was always overthrowing the ball. And not just barely overthrowing either. I wouldn't even be close. In fact, on the Cruz 67 yard touchdown, I think Havens overthrew another receiver because firstly the other receiver jumped up to try to catch it and secondly Cruz came sprinting across the field and made a spectacular catch. Either it was overthrown or perfectly placed... and based on other plays I'm going with overthrown. Havens needs to work on that.

I do really like Havens' attitude though. He's a junior college transfer and last week after the Kansas State game someone asked him if he could talk about the difference between playing against Kansas State and playing against community colleges. He said "There is no difference. Football is football and it doesn't change." After the media member pushed him he said "I guess there were 50,000 people here, so that's different." This week he had a couple of similarly confident/arrogant answers that make me love/hate players depending on if they're on my team or not.

The one bad thing is wide receiver Jeremy Horne left the game with a slight concussion. It happened in the first half and he didn't return, though Coach Morris said after the game it was precautionary and he should be ok for next week's game against CAA opponent Rhode Island.

BC probably won. They were winning 24-0 at half when I left and when I got to the car and turned on the radio, they scored another touchdown to make it 30-0. Then I decided as that game was almost as boring as the Northeastern one I'd be better off listening to music and I shut it off.

Oh yeah, in CAA news, UNH beat FBS team Ball State tonight. I don't think UNH has lost to an FBS team since I've followed Atlantic 10/CAA football. Looking it up, they beat Army last year, Marshall in 2007, Northwestern in 2006, and Rutgers in 2004. 2005 they didn't play an FBS team, but as that New Hampshire team was pretty much the best ever going 11-1 before losing in the second round of the playoffs, I think they would have beaten whoever that year too.

Last time an FBS team beat UNH was Central Michigan in 2003. Why does anyone in FBS still schedule them? Do they enjoy paying for embarrassing defeats? Is it cause all the cool FBS programs are doing it? The next three victims are Pittsburgh in 2010, Minnesota in 2012 and Boston College in 2013.