Football takes down Cornell with late surge

The Columbia football team raced out of the gate, scoring two touchdowns in the first minute on Saturday against Cornell, but needed a spark off the bench in the second half in order to secure its third victory of the season with a 30-20 win over the Big Red in Ithaca.

Running back Zack Kourouma took the handoff on the Lions’ first play from scrimmage from freshman quarterback Sean Brackett—who started his third consecutive game—and ran between the tackles on the left side, going 80 yards untouched into the end zone. In just 10 seconds, the Lions led 6-0, after freshman kicker Greg Guttas missed the extra point.

On Cornell’s first play from scrimmage, senior quarterback Ben Ganter threw left for Horatio Blackmon who was running a comeback route, but Columbia’s sophomore cornerback Ross Morand cut off the pass for an interception. The Lions took advantage of the great field position and after Brackett hit Mike Stephens for a 19-yard gain, he kept the ball himself on the option for a four-yard touchdown run. Freshman Dean Perfetti replaced Guttas and made the extra point to put the Lions up, 13-0, just 55 seconds into the game.

The Big Red quickly turned the tables on the Lions, though, as on the first play of their next possession, senior running back Randy Barbour scored on a 55-yard run on a play eerily similar to Kourouma’s touchdown. Columbia went backward on its next drive, and Cornell took over at the Light Blue 35-yard line after a 15-yard punt return by Bryan Walters. Three plays later, Walters pulled down a 12-yard touchdown pass that tied the game at 13 less than five minutes into the game.

Perfetti rounded out the scoring in the first quarter with a 33-yard field goal—his first career field goal—that put the Lions up, 16-13.

The Big Red began the second quarter with the ball and a pair of long passes helped them drive down the field and take the lead. First, Ganter hit Blackmon for a 37-yard gain. A few plays later, Walters split Morand and senior strong safety Andy Shalbrack in the end zone and Ganter found him to put the Big Red up, 20-16.

Cornell’s lead could have grown later in the quarter, but kicker Brad Greenway ended the Big Red’s 17-play drive by missing a 27-yard field goal wide right. The Big Red was knocking at the door at the Columbia 16-yard line, but a sack by Lou Miller, combined with a personal foul, pushed the Cornell offense back to 3rd-and-29. On that play, Walters made a great catch that set up the Big Red with 4th-and-1, and Ganter ran a sneak to the five-yard line for the first down. Cornell couldn’t punch it in, and Greenway’s miss kept the score at 20-16. The score held until halftime.

“At halftime, I told them that we had to score five points more than Cornell scored in the second half, that we were going to have a 20-minutes bus ride home because that’s about how long it takes to get home if you win a football game, [and] that it wasn’t a ‘winnable’ game. We had to come out and win the game,” Columbia head coach Norries Wilson said.

The Big Red again drove across the field on its first possession of the second half, but Columbia free safety Adam Mehrer came up with an interception to stop the drive. Mehrer’s pick set the tone for a half in which the Lions would pick off five passes.

After the interception, the Light Blue started at its own 44-yard line, and it looked like Brackett was going to put them in position to score. On 2nd-and-5, the freshman quarterback made a great run to the left side that gained 26 yards, but he was stripped by Hugh Stewart when he tried to cut inside for more yards. That fumble might have hurt the Big Red more than it helped, though, as the Lions replaced Brackett with senior Millicent Olawale on their next possession.

Olawale had missed the Lions’ past two games with a shoulder injury and though he was physically able to play, Wilson had decided use him in a reserve role and start Brackett because he had practiced most of the week with the first team. The senior quarterback didn’t look rusty at all on his first series going 4-for-4 for 28 yards, but Nico Gutierrez fumbled after catching a screen and the Big Red recovered.

Shalbrack came up with the Lions’ third interception of the day just a few plays later, and he returned it 37 yards to the Cornell 21-yard line. After a false start followed by a defensive holding penalty, a pair of runs got the Light Blue to the 1-yard line and Olawale gave the Lions the lead for good with a quarterback sneak. Perfetti nailed the extra point to give Columbia a three-point lead, but if it weren’t for his holder Jason Pyles, he may never have gotten into the game at all.

“We would have gone for two a lot, but I talked to Jason Pyles during the pregame, and I asked him if I put Perfetti in the game, would he make the kicks,” Wilson said. “Pyles told me, ‘Coach, he’ll make the kicks. I haven’t held for him all week, but he’ll make the kicks if you put him out there.’ Pyles has been around a long time, and I trust him. So we put him [Perfetti] out there, and he made the kicks.”

The Lions had a chance to add to their lead early in the fourth quarter as they got into the red zone thanks to a great grab by Taylor Joseph on 3rd-and-11. On a 1st-and-goal at the 9, Olawale tried to float a pass to Andrew Kennedy on a corner route in the end zone, but Olawale lofted it too softly, and Cornell linebacker Chris Costello pulled down the interception.

After Morand’s second interception of the game and a three-and-out from the offense, linebacker Auggie Williams—who led the team with 10 tackles—helped seal the win with a pick of his own that gave the Lions the ball at the Cornell 19-yard line with 2:09 left.

“Technically we were in [cover] two-man, and I’m manned on the back. But he stayed and blocked,” Williams said. “So I had one of two options there—either try to rush and get into the quarterback or drop off. They had crossers all day running across the field, so I felt like I could drop and try to help out underneath on someone and sure enough, the quarterback kind of gave me one.”

Following Williams' interception, Columbia got nowhere on runs on first and second down and during a timeout called by Cornell decided two things. First, the play coming out of the timeout was going to be a quarterback draw to the inside—a play the Lions had not used for some time during the game. Secondly, if the quarterback draw didn’t result in a first down, they were going to trot out Perfetti to try the field goal.

Perfetti did come out after the quarterback draw, but it was to kick the extra point following a 19-yard touchdown run by Olawale. Senior guard John Seiler and sophomore tackle Jeff Adams opened up a hole on the left side, and the senior quarterback went nearly untouched to seal the win.

The game ended in a fitting way, as safety Neil Schuster notched the Lions’ sixth interception of the day. Ganter struggled with accuracy throughout the game, which could have been a result of a lingering arm injury.

“He [Ganter] can’t, in my mind, he can’t be healthy,” Cornell head coach Jim Knowles said. “It was his senior game, [and] he wanted to play, so he’s got a lot of guts. He’s a great young man, but he’s not healthy. … The arm’s not responding to where he’s putting the ball and that means he’s got some problems.”

Ganter’s throwing issues shouldn’t detract from the stellar play of the Light Blue defense, especially in the second half. Along with the six interceptions on the day, the defense recorded five sacks and shut out the Big Red in the second half. Defensive tackle Bruce Fleming came up big in the middle, recording eight tackles on the afternoon, and Miller took down Ganter for his seventh sack of the season, which extended his league lead and made him the top sack artist in Columbia history.

For a team that has had wins slip away this season, Saturday’s win was especially enjoyable according to Wilson.

“After they lost to Yale, they had a good feeling of how it felt to play as hard as you can possibly play and lose. And today they got a good feeling of playing as hard as you can possibly play and win,” Wilson said. “We turned the ball over going in three times, and it would have been easy to put your head down and say here we go again … [but] they just kept overcoming the obstacles today.”