By Darren Sands
If you were football coach Joe Gardi on last Saturday, you had to know that facing the No. 25 ranked team warrants that your best players play. You know that your best players can put up 45, sometimes 62 points without really having the ball. Another coach, in another league, has an office around here in Hempstead, and he said it best when he said you play to win the game. He was right. Still, with one eye on Bobby Seck’s knee, the trainers and team doctors determined that Seck was unable to play.
Enter, Anton Clarkson.
“I really feel had [Seck] had been playing we’d have beat them,” coach Gardi said. “But it was going to take a miracle cure for us to allow him to play.”
Seck dressed, and even participated in pre-game warm-ups. Head football athletic trainer Christopher Grosskopf sternly refused to comment on the decision making process.
Seck’s injury came in the fourth quarter of a game in which he made record breaking seem cliché. Yes, reporters struggle with dealing how not to talk about Bobby Seck.
The 9,298 folks gathered in the western corridor of the state of Virginia, still reeling from the defeat suffered at the hands of I-A opponent, seventh-ranked West Virginia.
The story, however, was the Pride’s inability to stop two players it will not soon forget, in Maurice Fenner and Alvin Banks. Both combined to lead a ground attack that ran for a total of 326 yards. The sophomore, Fenner, had three touchdowns, helping his team to a 31-21 win over the Pride. James Madison improved its record to 3-1 (2-0 Atlantic 10), and the Pride fell to 2-2 (1-1) on the season.
The Pride jumped out of the gates quickly and got down to the Duke’s 25-yard line when Anton Clarkson called an audible that was supposed to result in a run play for running back Terry Crenshaw. Crenshaw never heard the audible and the muffled handoff was recovered by James Madison’s Michael Brown.
On the ensuring drive, JMU quarterback Justin Rascati and the James Madison offense marched down the field 77 yards and scored on a four-yard run by Maurice Fenner. It was a drive Fenner started with a 24-yard run.
“[James Madison] manhandled us,” Gardi said. “Their offensive line might just be that good.”
The Dukes ran the ball 60 times, which is further evidence that if Pride opponents can dominate the time of possession, they have a good shot at winning. Heck, if teams keep this up you almost have to wonder if it is just a matter of time that the defense could wear down.
“It’s not so much being tired, but you get frustrated,” safety Sherief Little said of the disparity in time of possession. “If you do two things right on first and second down, and on third down someone blows an assignment, it just eats away at your morale. We worked this week to try and correct that.”
Junior receiver Devale Ellis certainly lived up to Dukes’ head coach Mickey Matthews’ praise as a “spectacular talent.” Ellis, a Brooklyn native, caught four passes, one of which was a 21-yard touchdown from Clarkson that tied the game at 7. Ellis ran back two kickoffs for 102 yards, including a 56-yarder that put the Pride at the James Madison 44-yard line. The drive ended in a 1-yard touchdown by Anton Clarkson that tied the score at 14.
“It wasn’t good enough because we didn’t win,” Ellis said of his performance.
The Dukes went on to score 17 unanswered points, capped off by a 34-yard field goal attempt by James Madison’s David Rabil. A late touchdown to Charles Sullivan with 4:25 left in the fourth quarter was the last hope for the offense which, really missed its quarterback. The Pride tried to get the ball back for a quick strike on an unsuccessful onside kick.
“[The defense] is playing their heart out,” offensive coordinator Warren Ruggerio said. “We have to contribute. It’s a team game and we have to score more points and on Saturday, we certainly didn’t hold up our end of the bargain.”