Gators Prepare for Conference Opener

Sep 26, 2006

Football Game Notes (Updated 9/27) (PDF)

MEADVILLE, Pa. – The Allegheny College Gators come into their North Coast Athletic Conference opener with a 2-1 record, the first time the squad has won two of its first three games since the 1998 team went 2-1 before finishing the year 8-2.

This season the squad comes into their fourth game of the year set to face off against 0-3 Denison after their bye week. Despite going into the bye week with a dominating 52-7 win over Hiram in which the offense was hitting on all cylinders, rushing for 300 yards and passing for 302, the week off could not have come at a better time for the squad.

“I think right now it came at the right time because we were banged up,” said head coach Mark Matlak. “For whatever reason over the last few weeks we have gotten nicked in every game, and we really needed to heal and rest up.”

The Gators take the gridiron against Denison for the first time since 2003 due to the NCAC’s power rated schedule. The series, which started when both teams came into the NCAC, started well for Denison, as the Big Red won three of the first four meetings. The tide quickly turned, however, as the Gators have won each of the last 17 meetings, scoring at least 30 points in every contest since 1990.

An underlying point for the coaching staff is to keep the squad focused on Denison this week, and not to look ahead to next week when the team travels to Crawfordsville, Indiana to face off against the defending league champion Wabash College. “Our tone since we have started camp is that any team can beat anybody,” said Matlak. “We certainly are not head and shoulders above any body in the league. We are capable of winning all of our games, which I told our kids. We’re capable of winning at Denison – but you have to show up and play. We are going to take it one weekend at a time, concentrate, and really hunker down on that. We’re not any better or any worse than anyone else. We’re just as good as everyone else. We just have to earn it and work at it.”

In their last game, the dedication game for the newly renovated Frank B. Fuhrer Field on September 16, Hiram and Allegheny battled to a halftime score of 10-0, before the Gators erupted in the third quarter for five touchdowns, running away with the eventual 45-point win. Seniors Jimmy Savage (North Canton, Ohio/Hoover) and Dallas Robinson (Wooster, Ohio/Northwester), a quarterback and receiver, teamed up for career highs in yardage, Savage throwing for 302 yards and Robinson receiving for 135. Mario Tarquinio (Charleroi, Pa./Charleroi), a senior running back, missed his career high in rushing yards by just three, grounding out 213 yards on his 22nd birthday.

“Our quarterback has played very good for three weeks,” noted the head coach. “We were just clicking in the first half and executing. We just had some missed opportunities in the first half. That doesn’t surprise me. We are protecting well and catching and throwing it well.”

Defensively, the team held the Terriers to just four drives of 10 or more yards in the game, with two of those drives, a 63-yarder in the first half that ended with a missed field goal and a 79-yard drive for a touchdown against the Allegheny second and third string, that accounted for 142 of their 241 yards in the game.

“We are learning,” commented Matlak. “We are a young crew. A lot of our guys have not played before and we have some injuries that we have to deal with. We just have to keep at it on that side of the ball.”

Denison comes into the game looking to snap their current five-game losing streak dating back to last season. The Big Red has scored 14 points in each of their games, but have given up an increasing number of points, 20, 27 and 31, in consecutive games. In their last game, a 31-14 loss to Gettysburg College, Big Red running back Fred Lee rushed for a season best 135 yards on 17 carries, including a 53-yard touchdown on Denison’s first drive of the game, but it was not enough as Gettysburg gained 446 yards in the game, 283 on the ground, in the 17-point loss.

Kickoff is set for 1:00 p.m. at the newly renovated Deeds-Piper Stadium in Granville, Ohio.

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