Danes try to build on win
Ualbany goes on road against Maine after its win over N. Hampshire
One early loss in a normal college football season can be punitive enough. Absorbing a setback when the schedule has been cut in half can be devastating, which gives the University at Albany reason to feel relieved after its opener last week.
For the second straight weekend, Ualbany is headed to New
England for a Colonial Athletic Association game, but the Great Danes’ trek there for a Saturday afternoon meeting with Maine was made a lot easier coming off an impressive 24-20 win over New Hampshire last Friday.
To be sure, there are a lot of areas to clean up, as is customary after a season opener, but it’s easier when you’re one-sixth of the way through the schedule and still unbeaten.
“Once you have a first game in, a confidence can rise, and that’s the importance of winning that first game,” Ualbany coach
Greg Gattuso said. “I can see that the O -linemen have a little more of a comfort level, and that gives us a chance to play well this week, I hope. If we can improve in the areas we can control ...”
Gattuso then rattled off a list
that included penalties, missed tackles, misalignments, missed blocks and mistakes in the kicking game.
Because of COVID -19 concerns, fall football at the Football Championship Subdivision level was canceled and an abbreviated spring schedule implemented, which for Ualbany consists of six games. Three of the final four will be at home.
“This spring season is kind of a strange bird,” Gattuso said, “and we’ve just got to keep playing hard and trying to win games. There’s no tomorrow at some of these games.”
Maine already can feel the pain of a shortened season. The Black Bears lost their opener last week 37-0 at Delaware.
“Ultimately we didn’t do the things we needed to do to move the football,” Maine coach Nick Charlton said. “That’s where it started. We didn’t play well enough on (special) teams and had a lot of uncharacteristic mistakes, too many penalties. Defensively we gave up too many big plays. The guys were playing hard. They were just out there for too long.”
Defense was where Ualbany shined in the opener. After giving up 121
yards on New Hampshire’s first two drives, the Danes held the Wildcats to 65 yards the rest of the way. UNH’S second touchdown came off a blocked punt, and the third was off a turnover deep in Ualbany territory.
The Danes had two red-zone stands in the final three minutes to seal the victory over what at the time was the 14th-ranked FCS team.
“I was impressed with our resiliency,” senior defensive lineman Ibn Foster said. “We faced a lot of adversity throughout the game. Late in the game, things got a little hectic, but battled through, stayed together, never got our heads down. We never thought we were defeated.”
“We’re a resilient group,” senior defensive back Hayden Specht said. “We’re a little bit of an older group. We’ve been in this situation before. We knew our back was up against the walls two times, but we just found a way.”
Offensively, the Danes will try to ride the right arm of sophomore quarterback Jeff Undercuffler, particularly if defenses focus on 2019 CAA rushing leader Karl Mofor (28 carries, 85 yards), as New Hampshire seemed to do. Undercuffler was 23-for-36 for 192 yards and three touchdowns.
“One common thing between the northern schools, for the most part, is we all play a similar brand of football, or certainly try to,” Gattuso said. “There are going to be a lot of similarities in the type of game it’s going to be, the type of physicality it’s going to take to win this football game. We want a tough road game. Not many teams are winning on the road in this new spring season. We played a pretty good football team and won, and now we’re going to have to try to do it again.”