The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Cross-ed up
Crusaders spoil Bulldogs’ return with last-minute field goal
They looked in moments like the football team the Yale Bulldogs seem to think they can be, the team that was picked second in the Ivy League to Princeton. They looked at others like a team that hadn’t played a game for real in almost two years.
After the teams traded punches, as Yale coach Tony Reno put it, a last-minute Holy Cross field goal gave the Crusaders a 20-17 victory at the Yale Bowl.
“Do I think that we can play a lot better? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah,” Reno said. “This was a really good opportunity for us to kind of gauge what we needed to work on and see where we’re at while trying to win a game.
“We just need to get a lot better. That’s what we need to do.”
Yale led 14-0 in the second quarter, fell behind 17-14 in the third and tied it in the fourth before Derek Ng’s 47-yard field goal won it with 48 seconds to go.
The Crusaders got the ball near midfield and converted on a fourth-down quarterback sneak to set up the winning field goal.
“It was kind of like one of those heavyweight fights. We kept trading punches, trading punches, and then you feared that whoever had the ball at the end may just have one more punch in them,” Reno said.
“They threw and landed one more punch than we did at the
end of the game. That was kind of the difference in the game.”
Holy Cross is 2-1, with a loss to Merrimack between wins in Connecticut over Yale and UConn. The Huskies host the Bulldogs on Oct. 16, Yale’s fifth game.
The Crusaders produced a few huge fourth-quarter defensive plays. Walter Reynolds intercepted Yale’s Griffin O’Connor’s pass to effectively end things. Linebacker Jacob Dobbs sacked O’Connor twice on third down.
Yale’s had a few, including a Deonte Hinson passbreakup on fourth down early in the fourth. But the Crusaders took the lead in the third quarter after a 63-yard pass play beyond a blown coverage put them on the Yale 2. There were a few tackling issues.
“We’ve been working on execution and the ability for us to do what we wanted to do,” linebacker and captain John Dean said. “I didn’t see it today.”
Yale had passes just slip past fingertips, particularly early, plays that might’ve let the Bulldogs take more of a stranglehold on the game. That’ll come, Reno said.
Zane Dudek rushed for 69 yards on 15 carries. O’Connor connected with tight ends Jackson Hawes and J.J. Howland for touchdowns. Howland’s went for 74 yards, tying for the 13thlongest pass play in Yale history; the one it matched connected Heisman Trophy winner Clint Frank with Flick Hoxton against Maine in 1937.
It wasn’t enough. “We say all the time to the team, we use the phrase ‘E plus R-squared equals O,’” Reno said. “The event happens, but the response is twice as important as the event itself, and that determines your outcome. This is our R-squared moment. We’ve got to respond, and we’ve got to get better.”
The Ivy opener is this coming Saturday at the Bowl against Cornell, which lost its season debut 31-21 at home to Virginia Military Institute.
Yale used sophomore lefty Nolan Grooms at quarterback in several situations, including the entirety of one drive late in the third quarter until the Bulldogs faced fourth-andlong.
Reno compared it to the New Orleans Saints’ usage of Drew Brees and Taysom Hill last year.
“Griffin’s the starter, and Nolan comes in in situations that he does certain things,” Reno said. “We thought the Saints gave a lot of people issues doing that. We really modeled ourselves that way.”
The crowd was 3,987 as football returned after a year’s absence. The Ivy League canceled competition in the 2020-21 season amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“For myself, I was grateful to be out there and actually playing football again,” O’Connor said. “It was awesome to be able to play another team with my teammates. At the end of the day, we want to win.”