As you can see by the score this one was a real barn-burner, not exactly a defensive battle but an exciting game non the less. Danny was still out with his hamstring injury and will be for at least a few weeks so the team brought in a new QB to fill in. His name is Tom Zetts and he started for four years at 1-AA Youngstown State in Youngstown, Ohio (also Tom's hometown). He got the call Monday and was out here by Thursday afternoon just in time for practice. Good thing too as we were facing the top offense in the league led by QB Jake Johnson aka "J Twice" the self-proclaimed "positologist" who in addition to playing for the Catania Elephants spends his spare time shooting photography (check out his blog "Really Playing for Pizza"... pretty funny). Anyway he played at Arizona then bounced around the NFL and Canada before landing in the IFL and he brought along a pretty sophisticated offense. They also have a really talented receiver from a DII school in Texas named Matt Eperson, who was one of the best receiver's I've lined up against. As good as they were on offense though, there defense was equally as bad if not worse (as the score shows).
The game played out like a Rocky movie, with both teams throwing hay makers and not bothering to block or duck out of the way. On offense everything was clicking for us. Clausch and I were running well and Tom did a great job spreading the ball around. On defense we threw everything but the kitchen sink at them but they had a true pro style offense and we could never get a bead on what they were doing. We did manage to come up with a few stops though including a forced fumble on the opening drive. After missing a tackle on Eperson, I managed to chase him down and punched the ball out from behind. That and a blocked PAT put us up by 8 at halftime but in the second half nobody could stop each other. They started going for two each time and were slowly clawing away at our lead. In the middle of the fourth they tried an onside kick which one of our guys clearly fell on and came up with away from the pile. For some reason their guys jumped up all excited and started pointing in their direction. The little welp of a ref must have pissed down his leg being in mafia country and sided with the home squad. I thought Andrew was going to lose it for good. We failed to stop them again and they went up by 1 with a two point conversion. At this point it was a one possession game and whoever had the ball last would win. After trading scores again we were still down by one with about 2 minutes left. We marched down the field mostly running the ball not wanting to leave too much time on the clock. The drive stalled out though with 22 seconds left and on a critical 4th down Tom was pressured and had to heave it down the middle. Marco went up between 2 defenders and somehow came down with it to keep our hopes alive. What happened next was one of the coolest things I've seen on a football field. Everybody was running up to the line of scrimmage and Andrew was yelling from the sideline to kill the clock. Amid all the confusion, Tom looked over to Corey and blatently yelled "fake". Luckily they didn't have any Americans on defense to understand what was coming, and without anybody else knowing (including the head coach) Tom faked the spike and then tossed one up to Corey who was all alone in the endzone. I watched with amazement from the backfield as Corey made the easy catch. Touchdown, panthers up by 6! We staved off their final hail mary attempts to avoid overtime and it was a good thing too because we had to run back to the airport in order to catch our flight!
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