Scots Dominate in conference opener

September 23, 2016

The Scots football team opened conference play this past Saturday with a strong home performance against the Ripon Red Hawks. Monmouth’s offense was effective early with two deep touchdown passes by quarterback Tanner Matlick. The first a 51-yard bomb to receiver Brock Thoms followed on the next drive by a 35-yard connection with speedster Yansay Williams. The Scots defense kept the Red Hawks offense under wraps all day as they sacked Ripon quarterback Griffin McNeal six times, limiting the QB to a total of 52 passing yards on the day. Monmouth closed the first-half with touchdown off a 2-yard pass from Matlick to halfback Konnor O’Keefe to go into intermission with a 21-0 lead over Ripon. The Scots offense kept the momentum rolling out of the break scoring a touchdown on a 28-yard touchdown rush by back DeAndre Wright.

From that point on, the offense stumbled through the rest of the game failing to put any additional points on the board with a drive ending on a Matlick interception, followed by an offensive sequence capped off on a 40-yard field goal that was blocked by Ripon. Head football coach Chad Braun had this to say when asked about failed opportunities to put points on the board, “I told our guys, obviously they’re going to be disappointed because you know we had an opportunity to put up a lot more points than what we did today. But it’ll be a goodlearning experience for our offense, not everything is going to go our way all the time but our guys have great character they’ll learn from it and comeback, but by no means am I disappointed with our guys, they played hard and we’ve just got to clean up some of our execution a little bit.” The Scots defense was dominant all day though holding the Red Hawks offense under 300 total yards of offense as well as forcing and recovering a fumble.

Monmouth took care of business to open conference play with a 28-0 win at April Zorn Stadium as they keep their sights set high moving deeper into the conference schedule. The next game will be away from home as the Scots will travel to Lake Forest for another Midwest Conference showdown.

Tate Heiple
Contributing Writer