Quakers jump on sprint football early, ease to 38-12 victory

Though the sprint football team could not extend its winning streak to two games on Friday night in a 38-12 loss to Penn, the Tigers did show sparks of newfound confidence and successful execution in their season finale at home.

Princeton (1-6 overall, 0-4 Collegiate Sprint Football League) outscored the Quakers (3-3, 1-3), 12-7, in the second half, but the Tigers could not overcome Penn's 23 first quarter points. Senior running back Frank Langston ran for a seasonand career-high 107 yards on 24 rushes in the loss.

"We were able to run the ball the best we have all season," sophomore quarterback Alex Kandabarow said. "As a result we were able to generate more points against [Penn] than we were able to at the beginning of the year."

The Quakers struck early and often in the first four minutes of play as the team scored two rushing touchdowns. Just under two minutes into the game, Penn's running back Scott Pickett scored on a 58-yard touchdown run. Pickett ran for 135 yards on 14 carries and recorded two touchdowns in the game.

Just two minutes later, after an unsuccessful Princeton possession, the Quakers scored again on a 45-yard scamper by JT Hutchinson. Hutchinson, Penn's second-leading rusher, racked up 80 yards on only 10 carries. With these two quick scores, the Quakers led, 14-0, with 10 minutes, 55 seconds left in the first quarter.

Later in the quarter, it was the Penn special teams unit that came up with a big play, blocking a punt on the Tigers' 43-yard line, picking it up and scooting up the sideline to the Princeton 12-yard line.

The Tiger defense held, however, and forced the Quakers to settle for a 24-yard field goal.

After an interception that gave Penn excellent field position, Pickett punched in his second score of the game from the one-yard line, increasing the Quaker lead to 23-0 at the end of the first quarter.

The scoring barrage continued as Penn quarterback Mike Loguidice found receiver David Derr for a 13-yard touchdown just before the half. The Quakers tacked on the two-point conversion.

The inspired Princeton squad, however, scored the only points of the third quarter after recovering Loguidice's fumble on the Penn 12-yard line. On third-and-12, Kandabarow found senior receiver Cleland Welton for a 14-yard score.

"I really wanted to get Cleland a TD in his final game," Kandabarow said. "I had been throwing him fade balls all week in practice, and I knew he was able to beat the corner who was covering him, so I gave him a fade route and let him go up for it."

Kandabarow finished the game with 14 completions for 114 yards, but he also threw two costly interceptions in the first half.

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The Quakers countered Welton's TD with a score of their own as the team scored yet another rushing touchdown, this time from three yards out.

The Tigers capped the game's scoring with a meaningless six-yard Langston touchdown run at the end of the game on a six-play, 68-yard drive.

"We have finally implemented a much more diverse run offense than we had implemented at the beginning of the year," Kandabarow said. "We had maybe four running plays [early on], but now we have over a dozen, and that has made our run offense much less predictable and harder to defend. We even implemented a new play at halftime that our line thought would work well against their defense, and it did."

Though Penn racked up 406 yards of total offense to Princeton's 270, the Tigers had more first downs (17-15) and more plays run (73-64) than the Quakers.

The game, however, was decided in the red zone, where Penn scored on four of five tries. Princeton converted on just two of four red zone visits.

The Tigers can now look forward to building on this season's win, their first in 40 games.

"I, and most of the team, think this can be the point where we turn the program around and start to win games," Kandabarow said. "As one of our seniors said, we don't want to be the team that broke the streak, we want to be the team that turned the page on the organization and that made it a winning team again."