Wofford visits Mercer in key SoCon game
The Mercer football team has been a thorn in the side of top-level competition coming to Five Star Stadium in recent seasons. In addition to victory over the thirdranked University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2015, the Bears nearly had a similar result in the 2016 season opener against The Citadel.
This season Wofford comes to town.
The Southern Conference’s game of the week features two of the most talented teams in the league as well as the two coaches with the most experience in it, when the Bears host the Terriers at 1 p.m. Saturday.
Mercer (1-0), currently receiving votes in both FCS Top 25 polls, have played the Terriers close in their last two meetings, falling 31-21 last season in Spartanburg, S.C., and 34-33 in the 2015 meeting in Macon, Ga., the difference being a missed Bears extra point in overtime.
“Obviously this is a big game for us,” Mercer coach Bobby Lamb, formerly at Furman, said at his Tuesday news conference. “It’s certainly a game we’ve been pointing to for a while, and we know we have to play our best for four quarters to even have a chance. When you look at each game against them, they’ve made one more play that counts, so what we’ve got to do is make one, two more plays to give ourselves an advantage.”
After four seasons of John Russ as the Bears’ quarterback, they have turned to redshirt freshman Kaelen Riley from Calhoun (Ga.) High School to run the offense. He got off to a good start, with 206 yards and three touchdowns passing and 54 yards and two scores rushing in a 48-7 rout of Jacksonville in the season opener.
His second test will be harder, with the Terriers returning a stout defense that saved them in a 24-23 win over Furman with an interception on a two-point attempt in the game’s final minute.
“From one game, he did a nice job of running the offense and created a lot of scores. He threw the ball well,” Wofford coach Mike Ayers said Monday at his meeting with the medias. “Their skill kids have great top-end speed, and the backs are quality backs. In our league, every week you’re going to face good people, and Mercer’s no different.
“They’ve got some guys that can go and play the game and it will be a challenge for our defense, but I feel like with a good week of practice we can be ready for this.”
Samford braves storm
Halftime and a storm may have been the break Samford needed in its season opener.
Down 10-7 after a half against Kennesaw State, the 17th-ranked Bulldogs had to brave a threehour rain delay in Birmingham, Ala., but were able to come back and edge the Owls 28-23. The game, which started at 7 p.m. EDT, didn’t end until almost 1 a.m.
The Owls had compiled 330 yards of total offense in the first half, compared to 95 for the Bulldogs. The score would have been worse had it not been for a missed field-goal try, a fumble and an interception for KSU.
Samford coach Chris Hatcher said the Bulldogs didn’t talk about much during the halftime period, but they did a lot with the extra time.
“We asked them to go in there and take their pads off,” Hatcher said. “We cut their tape; we had plenty of snacks. Our operations crew has a contingency plan every time we go on the road or at home in case we have a delay. Fortunately, this was the first time we’ve had to actually put it into place. Our guys handled it extremely well.
“We were able to make a few adjustments that maybe we wouldn’t have been able to make in a shorter halftime period. Fortunately for us, our guys really came out in the second half, especially the third quarter, and played extremely well, which put us over the top, and then we just hung on and won the ballgame.”
Preseason SoCon offensive player of the year Devlin Hodges finished with 241 yards and four scores, completing 10 of his 13 passes for 174 yards in the second half, which led a team replacing seven offensive starters to a long-unfolding win.
“The positive is all of the mistakes we made were self-inflicted mistakes,” Hatcher said. “You have to realize this is the first game, a lot of these guys have never played, especially offensively. We did make some mistakes in the kicking game, but we played really well in the kicking game.
“The big thing this week is, hopefully we’ll just improve in our fundamentals. Maybe the butterflies are gone from having a game under our belt. But I’m really proud of the guys. They fought through adversity. We were down at halftime in a very close game. Things weren’t really going our way, and then you throw in a three-and-a-half-hour break on top of that, and we were able to come out and play extremely well in the second half, so that is the biggest positive that I took from the ballgame.”
Players of the week
Western Carolina quarterback Tyrie Adams and Wofford safety Malik Rivera and kicker Luke Carter were named SoCon players of the week.
Adams accounted for 377 yards of total offense in the Catamounts’ 41-18 loss at FBS member Hawaii. He passed for 270 yards and a touchdown and rushed 23 times for a career-high 107 yards.
Rivera finished with 10 tackles and was great late for the Terriers, intercepting the go-ahead two-point-conversion pass in the game’s final minute. Carter averaged 42.2 yards on four punts, made a 44-yard field goal and was 3-for-3 on extra-point tries.