Bentley Feels his Destroyers are a Team of Leaders
Tom Ando
Friday April 20, 2001
In the wake of the win, the players voted quarterback Jim Kubiak, offensive specialist Bobby Olive, and wide receiver/linebacker Eddie Brown as team captains, with two additional captains to be named each week. Bentley believes every player is a leader. "I believe we have 24 captains on this football team. Every man in the house has the capabilities to be a captain. They`re all captain material, and when you have that, you have a chance to be special."
 Jim Kubiak managed to lead his team to victory in his first week as a starter. Image courtesy of Tom Ando |
Olive was Buffalo`s leading receiver with 11 receptions, 137 yards and three touchdowns. Bentley believes it will be difficult for any team to stop Buffalo`s go to guy. "To me, the way to cover Bobby is to keep him in front of you and pound his skinny little butt when he gets the ball, but he`s too elusive. Nobody can get a good shot on him. That`s what I`d do. I`d try to beat him up, but I don`t think you can. You just can`t catch him or hit him."
This week the Destroyers will host the New Jersey Gladiators, who were on the wrong end of a 52-21 final score last week against Carolina. The Gladiators were down 27-21 to Carolina in the final minute of the first half, when quarterback Connell Maynor hit wide receiver/linebacker Lawrence Samuels for a touchdown that would have tied the game, but rookie fullback Asa Francis made an illegal shift and the play was called back.
Maynor, who was ArenaBowl XIV MVP, and Jamie Fox`s double in "Any Given Sunday," finished the game 13 of 24 for 108 yards, one interception and a pair of touchdown tosses. Bentley believes the Destroyers have what it takes to shut him down.
"He likes to make the big play. He likes to throw the ball deep, so we`re gonna try to make sure our secondary doesn`t let anybody get behind them, and sometimes he`ll get impatient if we do that, and he`ll try to force something in there and we can take advantage of it,” explained Bentley. “The other thing you have to do is contain his scrambling ability. He does a great job of pulling the ball down and creating at that point. So two things can happen, he`ll run it or he`ll scramble around long enough so that one of his guys can get open, so we`ve emphasized with the secondary that you have to cover from the snap until the whistle. The whole way. You can`t peak into the backfield, and see what`s going on. You`ve just got to cover your man. We`ll also have our jack linebacker spying, so any time Connell tucks the ball and starts to run, I`ve got a guy that is assigned to him. Then it`s a one on one situation, and we can expect that our guy will win."
 Ray Bentley knows how to motivate Image courtesy of Mike Wright |
Buffalo receiver/linebacker Darrick Branch, who was inactive last week, returns Friday for his first game of the season, and that excites Bentley. "He`s got a little bit of an axe to grind because I sat him down last week, so I expect a great performance from Darrick. If there`s one knock on Darrick, it`s that sometimes he doesn`t play physical enough, so that`s the challenge that I put to him, I wanna see him play physical, and I believe he will."
Next week the Destroyers will travel to New York to take on the Dragons in the first of their two-game road trip.
"Touchdown" Tom Ando is a free lance writer from South Buffalo, NY and has been covering the Arena Football League in one capacity or another since the 2000 season, when he was 17 years old. Tom Currently writes for Sports & Leisure Magazine in Buffalo covering the NLL's Buffalo Bandits and NCAA Division I football. In 2001, Tom was the only writer in the country to cover the Houston "Travelin' " Thunderbears, where he befriended his mentor John F. "Hondo" Hahn.
