Offense sputters in loss
Great Danes manage just 120 yards after score on opening drive
A night that started with so much promise for the University at Albany football team deteriorated into a 16-14 loss to the University of Rhode Island on Saturday before a home-opening crowd of 8,144 at Casey Stadium.
The Great Danes fell to 0-2 overall, 0-1 in the Colonial Athletic Association with a game at Syracuse next Saturday starting a run of three straight road games.
UAlbany began the game with a 92-yard touchdown drive but finished with just 215 yards of total offense. The Great Danes also had three critical special-teams errors with URI (2-0, 1-0) running back a punt for a touchdown and two botched field-goal attempts.
“You can’t win in this league playing the type of football we played,” UAlbany head coach Greg Gattuso said. “It’s a shame. Lacked discipline, and we’ve got to be better.”
Asked how concerned he is, running back Karl Mofor replied, “To start 0-2, nobody wants to do that, so we’ll just have to keep moving forward and pick it up next week.”
URI seized a 16-14 lead on C.J. Carrick’s 22-yard field goal with 13:25 remaining.
The game ended when UAlbany quarterback Jeff Undercuffler was sacked on fourth down at his own 42 by Rhode Island’s Andre Blackett with 22 seconds left.
“We tried to cut (Blackett) and he jumped over (the blocker),” Gattuso said. “There’s
nothing Jeff could do about it. That guy’s wide open. We’ve got to protect.”
Twice UAlbany lined up for 46-yard field goals and never got the ball to kicker Dylan Burns. The first was on the final play of the first half and the second came with UAlbany trailing 16-14 with 5:24 to play. Both times holder Braeden Zenelovic, the backup quarterback, couldn’t handle the snap from Tristan Sokach-Minnick.
“Nothing wrong with (the snaps),” Gattuso said. “The holder dropped both of them.”
Undercuffler was 19 for 35 for 166 yards and a touchdown and
Karl Mofor ran 26 times for 75 yards and a score.
“I don’t know the answer right now (on offense), but I will know the answer as we move forward here,” Gattuso said. “We’re obviously not scoring enough points to win games. We gave up two touchdowns related to kick returns and the defense played their guts out after that. We’ve got to to better than this on offense. Special teams were kind of up and down. It was some really good things and really bad things. I have no idea what’s going on with some of that. It needs to get fixed.”
UAlbany retook the lead with a 67-yard, 11-play touchdown drive in the third quarter. Mofor completed the march by plowing in from the 2 for a 14-13 advantage with 3:36 remaining in the quarter.
URI took a 13-10 lead on a 50-yard punt return by Coby Tippett for a touchdown with 14:05 remaining in the second quarter. Tippett, the son of Pro Football Hall of Famer Andre Tippett, made a spin move to avoid UAlbany’s AJ Beatty and was gone.
UAlbany made it look easy on the game’s opening drive. The Great Danes moved 92 yards on nine plays, including Undercuffler’s 51-yard pass to Mike Gray down the right side to the URI 38. Then Undercuffler threw a 7-yard touchdown pass to Gray, who stretched the ball over the goal line, for a 7-0 lead just 4:46 into the game.
The UAlbany defense gave up a touchdown on URI’s first drive, but kept the Rams offense out of the end zone after that and still lost.
“It’s definitely frustrating, but there’s nobody to blame here,” UAlbany senior linebacker Danny Damico said. “They scored more points than we did, so we obviously didn’t do a good enough job, both sides of the ball. A lot of sharpening up to do.”