Jeff Kahntroff/Student LifeNeither the Bears’ offense, their defense, nor their special teams are as consistent as the team’s tendency to play close games.
For the fourth time in four weeks, the Washington University football team played a game that came down to the last drive. So far, they’ve been on the successful end on two of those drives and on the disappointing end of the other two drives. On Saturday night, however, Brandon Roberts made an open field tackle on the Rose-Hulman Engineers’ quarterback, Jared Tharpe, two yards shy of a first down to seal the Bears 24-19 win.
The Bears jumped out to a 17-0 lead in the first quarter as Nathan Szep connected with Brad Duesing on touchdown passes of 25 and 18 yards. Szep finished the game 23-41 for 280 yards to go along with those two touchdown passes. More importantly, though, he led the Bears with a balanced offensive attack that included almost 100 rushing yards to go along with his 280 passing yards. In fact, the two teams combined for nearly 900 yards of total offense.
After racking up over 190 yards of offense in the first quarter, it was the Engineers that finally started to click offensively in the second quarter. Fighting out of a 17-0 hole, Jared Tharpe threw two second quarter touchdown passes, including one in the final ten seconds to cut the Bears’ lead to 17-13 at halftime.
In the third quarter, the Bears’ special teams, which has struggled in previous weeks, gave the team a huge lift. Tory Meyr broke free and blocked an Engineer punt only a minute and seven seconds into the third quarter, and the ball was picked up by Joe Rizzo, who returned it 19 yards for a Bear touchdown.
“We put in our punt block unit for the outside man. I wasn’t even the guy who the punt block was set up for,” Meyr said. “There wasn’t a whole lot to it, I just happened to get there in time.”
The special teams took more reps in practice this past week to correct the problems of the last two games. However, on Saturday night, they came up with a 40-yard field goal and the game’s winning touchdown. “Our desire for improvement will continue. We just said to ourselves we have got to get this done,” Meyr said of the special teams.
In the fourth quarter, the Engineers were given a final chance to win the game. However, these Bears are veterans of the two-minute drill, and their experience proved too much for the Engineers. Senior middle linebacker Brandon Roberts made an open-field tackle on Jared Tharpe on fourth-and-twelve with just five seconds left in the game to preserve the Bears victory.
“Illinois Wesleyan did score on us last week, so we learned from our mistakes. We didn’t see it as a pressure situation, we just took it upon ourselves to get the job done,” said Meyr describing the Engineers final drive.
Meyr also commended the special teams performance. “We made progress in learning our assignments, understanding our assignments, and minimizing our mistakes,” he said.
Next Saturday, the Bears will play at Rhodes College before coming back to Francis Field to play traditional rival Trinity University.