The Academy Football team (4-1) experienced a big letdown on Saturday, October 2nd, putting a damper on Homecoming Weekend. Expectations were high for the previously undefeated Cadets, but they could not pull out a victory against Bishop Maginn (3-2), losing 35-23. I wrote last week that if the Academy defense played as well against Maginn as they did against Cairo-Durham then they would win the game. In short they didn’t as they allowed five touchdowns, three rushing and two passing. The team has done this before this season and won. This time their offense was the culprit. Senior running back Zay Richardson had a rather pedestrian offensive day by his standards, rushing for 127 yards on 25 carries and scoring a single touchdown. He had a bigger impact on the defensive side, picking off a Maginn pass and ran it back 52 yards for a touchdown which gave the Cadets a brief lead, their only one of the game. This was a game where the team really missed injured junior quarterback Hunter McCarthy as they had no one to pass the ball downfield to score quickly late in the game. McCarthy’s replacement, junior Jelani Currie, looked tentative in the pocket and many of his passes were either thrown too lightly or were just plain inaccurate. Though he was very evasive against the Maginn pass rush and looked like a young Michael Vick out on the field. That kind of quarterbacking will beat teams like Cairo but as Saturday showed, it will not beat good teams.
The team will look to bounce back against a team that is even worse than Cairo Durham. The Cohoes Tigers are 0-5 and their highest scoring game so far this season is 13 points and that was against Cairo. They’ve scored 39 points through five games and they’ve given up 183 points. Academy will likely be looking to make a statement and have a bounce-back-game against Cohoes so things could get ugly. Senior linebacker and fullback Dimitrius Thomas said, “We had a tough loss against Maginn. We were down on ourselves for a couple days but we have to get back to the gridiron to face Cohoes this week and I think we’ll win.” The Homecoming loss dropped the Cadets into second place in their division behind undefeated Ravena. The Cadets can only hope to avoid a late season collapse like last year and need the upcoming Cohoes game to get them back to their winning ways