Durzblog

Donald Brown carried 36 times for 214 yards and the winning touchdown, a 7-yard effort in overtime, to barely lift UConn to a 12-9 victory before a sparse "18,000" (announced) in hurricane conditions at Lincoln Financial Field.

The Huskies trailed 6-0 at the half and looked to be in trouble throughout the game. Uconn managed to tie the game up on two second half field goals as the defense stopped the Owls from putting anything else on the board in regulation. Edsall elected to go on defense after winning the OT toss, the visitors held the Owls to a field goal before the Huskies got the ball and scored. In doing so....Dodging a major bullet in Philly.

UConn blew several scoring opportunities, some, but certainly not all can be attributed to the nasty playing conditions. The team will have to become much more crisp if things are going to go well this season. To recap some of the blunders, Kicker Tony Ciaravino was 2 of 5 on field goals, including a 47-yarder that could have given the Huskies a 9-6 lead with 2:33 left in regulation. In the first half, Tyler Lorenzen coughed up the ball on the goal-line (the low point of the game) and he also missed a wide-open Michael Smith in the end zone and threw an early interception (though the ball was tipped).

A win is a win, as they say, but Edsall's boys will need to be much better. After seeing some of the other miZerable BE results this week -- the league is wide open.



Some quotes below from Edsall and from an understandably upset Temple HC, Al Golden.

Does Temple always blame other factors for their losses, what happened to the high road? It was a great effort out of them (once again) and they will be a very tough MAC teams this year -- no doubt. But the better team won this game, Uconn had 21 first downs to the Owls 10, out gained them 379 to 278 and out rushed them 293-128

The Temple coach ranted about a blown call (which he was right about) after the game and then offered this "We should have won this game, but we did enough to lose it," Golden said. Thanks coach, out rushed by 200 yards, you were lucky to be in the game.

That being said, the guy is a very good coach and he was clearly gutted after the game. I did like this quote, explaining why he went for a 4 and 1 on HIS OWN 34,

"It speaks to everything we are trying to do here. What I mean by that is, it's easy to punt the ball. Anybody can punt the ball. It's conventional wisdom. But you know what? We are trying to change 30 years of this crap, and I want to show them that we are going to go for it and make it right here. There is going to be a day, I pray it's sooner rather than later, that we are going to make that yard."

A relieved, Rand Edsall said,
"The kids knew what they needed to do, and we went out in the second half, got it tied, got it into overtime and found a way to win."

"It doesn't matter if it's the NFL, if it's high school or if it's college, there's going to be games like this that you ... hope you can do enough when you don't play your best to be able to find a way to win."

Up Next:
Saturday vs. Virginia, 7:30 p.m., on f#c*ing ESPNU. The Cavaliers beat the Huskies 17-16 last year in Charlottesville on a misplayed snap. The conference could use some help in a battle of the 5th and 6th best BCS leagues.