First, some thank you's are appropriate.
The UMass Athletic administration should take a bow. The Albany game was an event. McGuirk looked great under our new lights with our new sound system on our new field turf field. The fireworks were awesome. I bet a good 50% of the crowd stayed to watch the show after the game ended.
The UMass Marching Band was great for the umpteenth year. The band makes these halftime shows look easy------and it's not. Thanks for the great music.
The UMass cheerleaders were wonderful as usual. Speaking of making things look easy, that cheerleader that was ticking out those wide armed push ups, was in some serious good shape!
Special thanks to the 15,112 UMass and Albany fans who took in the game. The crowd made the atmosphere. That was the second largest opening crowd in UMass history. The UMass fans gave the team a nice hand as the game ended.
Consider these games:
- Albany@UMass 15,112
- Richmond@Elon (the FCS/I-AA game of the week) 10,842
- Colgate@Stony Brook 5,808
- Monmouth@ Rhode Island (the new version Rams open at home) 3,220
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Then there was the game. The good:
Tony Nelson was all he was cracked up to be and then some. He averaged 8.6 yards a carry. He rushed 20 times for 171 yards and one TD. Nelson didn't fumble the ball and he didn't cramp up. He was flat out the best UMass player on field.
Punter Brent Arnold (47.5 yard average) and kicker Armando Cuko (62.0 yard average) in their 2.0 version did really well. Cuko kicked the extra points half way to Sunderland and also hit his kickoffs well. In the still, humid air, Arnold boomed several punts. A little better coverage would have helped. If we could have downed one of those punts on one yard line, it would have really put some pressure on the Great Danes. JUCO Terrance Farris was close to the ball on special teams all game.
Ian Jorgensen made a great one handed catch for a TD.
UMass broke Korrey Davis' redshirt in the first game as he had seven carries for 19 yards.
And the bad:
UMass players were dropping like flies with cramps (which was not happening to Albany, BTW). The constant change in offensive linemen did not help the offense, which was limited to 16 first downs and 307 total yards. UMass had only 92 net yards passing and Liam was at an unheard of low for him with a 50% completion rate.
Our tackling in the first quarter was awful. It looked like we were trying to play flag football. We were whiffing on tackles all over the place. As the game went on, that improved. The defense began to get pressure on Esposito and the hitting picked up. McCarty still averaged 5.2 yards per carry.
Albany is a good team. They were 8-4 last year and undefeated in the NEC. They were also the unofficial Patriot League champs as they beat playoff bound Fordham 23-20. Albany has a definite chance of beating Hofstra, UNH or Delaware.
All in all, the first quarter was terrible, but we worked our way through it. On to Holy Cross.
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The team was not the only ones not in game form. I left my image-stabilized zoom lens home and I was getting some serious blur in my images by the second half.
I made up a 54-image Picasa Web Album. It's here . Click on the "slide show" or view one-at-a-time.
Hope you enjoy the images.
