Sprint Football: Mansfield cruises to 40-2 victory

The Mansfield University sprint football team has only won five games in its three years as a full team. Four of those victories have come against Princeton.

The Tigers (0-2) continued a losing trend on Saturday afternoon in a 40-2 loss to the Mountaineers (1-1), missing an opportunity to capture a win against a relatively weak Mansfield squad. The Tigers fell to Mansfield 10-6 last year, the closest they have come to winning a game in over a decade.

The Mounties’ offense ran the ball through the heart of the Tigers, picking up 322 rushing yards and scoring five touchdowns on the ground. Drive after drive, a platoon of more than half a dozen halfbacks broke from the mud and into the secondary, continuing drives and ultimately putting the game out of reach for the Tigers.

Junior safety and co-captain John Moffat, who finished with an impressive 21 tackles, said that the Tigers entered the game hoping to shut down Mansfield’s triple-option running game and force the Mounties to beat them through the air — a strategy Cornell successfully used the previous week. But the Tigers’ stack defense could not do the same.

Moffat also explained that throughout the game, the Tigers’ 34-man team could not keep up with the constant reinforcements of the Mounties’ sprint football squad.

“We don’t have a lot of guys on our roster, so when people get tired, that’s what kind of happens — games get out of hand,” he said. “We can play with any team in the league, just not for four quarters, because we don’t have enough guys.”

Unlike many of its competitors, Princeton’s sprint football team does not recruit athletes.

The Tigers struggled just as much on the offensive side of the ball. Junior quarterback Jaison Zachariah completed only two more passes to his own team than he did to the Mansfield defense, which picked him off four times. Senior running back Kevin Infante carried the ball 29 times but only picked up 64 rushing yards. Moffat attributed the offensive struggles to the muddy field.

“The pass game was definitely thrown off by how muddy the field was,” he said. “Our whole passing game was never really in sync because guys couldn’t set their feet or make their cuts.”

The lone Princeton score came in very unusual fashion — on a blocked point-after attempt late in the second quarter following a 24-yard Mounties touchdown run. Junior lineman John Wolfe blocked the kick attempt which ricocheted into the hands of Moffat, who ran the ball 98 yards for a defensive two-point conversion.

Moffat said, however, that he was proud of how the Tigers responded to a physical Mansfield team.

“I would say if there was bright spot in the game it was how physical we played,” he said. “We got quite chippy with them and played through the whistle.”