Lafayette-Colgate: How far have the Leopards come?

Lafayette Coach John Garrett checks the play card with quarterback Sean O'Malley.
Photo courtesy of Lafayette sports information.

One of the first salvos of the week was fired on Monday when, on the Lafayette Sports Fan Forum, a poster named “killaBee” asked a question: “So, does anyone believe the defense can shut out Colgate?”

Later the same day, another poster named “edge29” posted, “I’m hoping Garrett was playing possum with the offense up until this week.”

No Lafayette football game since “Lehigh 150” has meant as much as Saturday’s matchup with the Raiders. I mean, the college has a “Fill the Hill” promotion in which the first 1,000 fans entering Fisher Stadium will receive a free T-shirt – which will leave out all those Markle parking garage tailgaters who wait until the last minute.

Or, you can bring non-perishable food items to the gate and receive a free ticket for each item. That’s a steal-deal if I ever heard one.

And it’s Senior Day, when a bunch of players who have gone from the peak of a Lafayette-Lehigh game that brought nearly 49,000 spectators to Yankee Stadium and ended in a 27-7 Leopards’ rout, to the valley of two seasons that produced a total of just three wins in 22 games. The thought of this gang ending the frustrations of 2015-16 is interesting.

Oh, yeah, then you have that main event that can keep dreams alive. The Leopards were picked to tie for last place in the Patriot League in a preseason poll of coaches and sports information directors.

Playing a November game that could keep them in first place in the league going into the season finale Nov. 18 at Lehigh was unthinkable on Sept. 23, when Lafayette was 0-4 and had given up 166 points and scored only 53.

The offensive output hasn’t gotten any better. The Leopards have scored just 48 points in the klast five games. But the defense has been lights out, allowing just 68, with 38 of them coming on the only loss in that span.

That brings us back to the comment at the top of the story. I’m not positive who “killaBee” is, but I have a pretty good idea. Having followed him for more than three years, I think he might have some inside information about things that happen on that side of the ball.

Brandon Bryant (33) wraps up a Princeton runner. Photo courtesy of Lafayette sports information.

My answer to his question: No, I don’t think the streak of eight scores quarters will go to 12 against a Colgate team that is playing just as well as the Leopards on defense and is scoring 40 points per game offensively in the last month.

And my response to “edge 29” is that I can’t believe that head Coach John Garrett, who was the offensive coordinator at Richmond last year and at Oregon State a couple of years earlier, took over the reins of a struggling program and not to everything possible to make something possible happen immediately.

I know that he’s said more than once that wins and losses don’t matter to him to him; it’s just about getting better every day. Despite the fact that he’s said week after week that things have improved, the record is what the record says it is. That is that the Leopards have not gotten the job done in Garrett’s strongest area. The offense has scored only one touchdown in four of the last five games. He talks about being only inches away from making good things happen, but I don’t believe he wanted to play the game this way just so he’d appear weak by the time the final two games of the year rolled around.

Colgate is not Bucknell or Georgetown. Coach Dan Hunt was an assistant coach with Dick Biddle for 19 years. Since Biddle retired and Hunt succeeded him, Colgate has won 16 of 22 league games. I’ve wondered many times how coaches manage to get high-quality athletes to spend four years in Hamilton, N.Y., but that success has carried over to the Hunt era and no program in the Patriot League is more respected than the Colgate Raiders.

I inferred it was a miracle when the Leopards defeated Holy Cross for Coach Garrett’s first victory. But looking back now, the Crusaders were already sliding downhill before the Lafayette game and when that slide continued, Tom Gilmore lost his job.

I was not as surprised by the Lafayette’s win over Fordham, which has lost the advantage it had a few short years ago before scholarships took hold leaguewide. I was pretty sure the Leopards were going to defeat Bucknell, but the offense laid a couple of big eggs that day – one that gave the Bison two pick-6 TDs and another that didn’t produce offensively. And until the last couple of minutes, I was afraid the Leopards might do it again at Georgetown, but the defense just wouldn’t let it happen.

The Leopards are ranked 121st out of 123 FCS teams in total offense for the season, and that's the ticking time bomb this week. They cannot afford to let Colgate get an early jump. The Raiders have scored 96 points in the second quarter this year; Lafayette has given up 95 points in the same 15-minute span. That's scary.

Colgate is averaging 181.2 yards per game rushing this season, and stopping the Raiders’ run has always been a challenge for Lafayette defenses. Here are the rushing numbers in recent games: 235 last year, 205 in ’15; 171 in ’14; 197 in ’13; 531 in ’12; 216 in ’11 and 288 in ’10.

Coach Hunt says that this year, he has an alternate weapon for opponents who load up on the ground game: Grant Breneman, a freshman quarterback, who has been intercepted just twice and has thrown 15 touchdown passes.

“We can go and really develop the pass game,” Hunt said on a teleconference call on Tuesday. “It doesn’t have to be play action. A lot of times in years past, everything we did was based on our running game and the [defense’s] reaction to that. We still like to run the football, obviously, but I think the way our receivers have come on, we can flat-out call a pass play that doesn’t have to be play action or anything dependent on the defense overplaying the run. That really allows us to become more balanced and multiple. Makes it more dangerous. The pass game something we can lean on as opposed to having to be set up by the running game. One helps the other because we throw better.”

Hunt says the key on Saturday could be in the turnover department.

“One of the things we talk about, we want every drive to end with a kick. Sometimes it’s a punt and that’s fine, but you can’t turn the ball over. We played Bucknell right after their game with [Lafayette]. Bucknell got two defensive TDs. We can’t let the defenses create offense for their team. That’s something we’re harping on this week and, hopefully, we can protect [Breneman] well enough that he can continue to make the good decisions he needs to make.”

Garrett talked about Breneman on Tuesday, too.

“He’s a good player and he’s been real efficient and effective,” Garrett said. “He’s had a great touchdown-to-interception ratio and there are a lot of good veteran players around him that are making plays so he doesn’t have to feel like he has to generate all these spectacular plays. He just plays within the system, throws the ball where it’s supposed to, gets them in the right play in the run game. So, he’s really managing the game well. He’s assignment sound where they want to get the ball in the run game and the pass game.”

Garrett was asked if his quarterback, frosh Sean O’Malley might be pressing at times to make the big play instead of taking a shorter, but easier one. O’Malley has been intercepted 12 times to go along with his 12 touchdowns.

“Sean does a pretty good job of staying within himself and in the system,” Garrett said. “He’s not that type that would play outside of his responsibility. We just need to execute better, all positions, and usually it’s not just one position breaking down all the time, but a combination of things. We’re getting better each week. There were some really good plays in the game, and we need to keep stockpiling more and more of those together.”

Asked what had been O’Malley greatest areas of improvement in his roiokie season, Garrett said, “Well, immediately, for this Georgetown game, what I liked was how he took care of the ball. He was 17-for-25 and no turnovers. That was the difference in the game. Their quarterback turned the ball over. Our quarterback did not turn the ball over. He made some good decisions with the ball that enabled us to remain in the game and not let it blow up in their favor. That doesn’t seem like a big thing but those decisions are really key. The times that we’ve been most successful have been when we don’t turn the ball over and we became hard to beat. That’s limiting penalties – only one penalty against Georgetown -- and no turnovers, that’s hard to beat. We have been making that a theme all year. The other component of lethal combination is explosiveness; we need to generate more explosive play When you’re hard to beat and explosive that’s when your offense really works.”

So, I’ll be paying attention to the two quarterbacks on Saturday. This is the biggest game of the year to date for both of them, simply because of the championship ramifications.

Which one will handle the pressure better?

Better yet, which one will get the most help?

I’ll be picking the Raiders, but I watched that 2013 team defeat two nationally ranked teams late in the year – Fordham, then Lehigh – to win the championship. A freshman quarterback led the way that year for the Leopards. Drew Reed was unreal. O’Malley has not yet shown that same flair.

Can he? We’ll see.