Carolina Completes Season Sweep of Buffalo
Tom Ando
Tuesday June 19, 2001
The loss was Buffalo’s first at home in over a year, which excited the Cobras. “It’s big for us because we had been 0-for-three on the road,” said Cobras quarterback Fred McNair who threw his first interception of the season in the winning effort. “We made some changes offensively, we put new plays in and coach does a good job of calling the plays. It’s good to win on the road, and it’s a big win for us. That put us on top of our division.”
McNair finished the game 19 of 28 for 213 yards and four touchdowns, while his counterpart Jim Kubiak went 21 of 38 for 246 yards and three touchdowns.
“We didn’t play hard enough to win obviously,” said Kubiak. “It’s disappointing, but the only thing we can do is buckle down and go out to Nashville and win. That’s the only thing we can do. That’s what we’re going to set our sites on.”
Kubiak seemed to have miscommunications all game, while teammate Wille Latta, who had two rushing touchdowns, never seemed to get a grip on the game either.
“I feel terrible. I don’t know what to say,” said Latta. “I came out early and they did a lot of double coverage on me, and kind of took me out of the game.”
With Latta beginning to draw more attention from opponents, he makes the Destroyers miss their big play receiver Kevin Mason back even more.
“Mason has always been an asset to the team,” said Latta. “We’ve been missing him since the day he went down, but that’s what happens in football, you just got to continue to play hard. We came out tonight and we had a good game plan. We had our chances and just didn’t capitalize.”
The Destroyers came out rather dull in the first half before catching on. “The first half was horrific at best,” said Destroyers coach Ray Bentley. “That’ll happen though, and that’s why you play 60 minutes. We came out in the third quarter we had things going -- we had ourselves in position to make a ballgame out of it and we fought to the wire. It’s a difficult one.”
The key play in the game happened with just over a minute left in the third quarter. Buffalo had just stopped Carolina on a goal-line stand, and on the ensuing play, the Destroyers bobbled the snap, which resulted in a safety.
“It was a tough play. There was a lot of tough plays in the game,” said Bentley. “I can’t sit here and say that one play made the difference in the ball game. We had ample opportunities to re-gain the momentum and do the things we needed to do to pull that one out of the fire. We made far too many mistakes in the ball game to expect to win.”
The Destroyers game plan was to make very few mistakes, but according to Bentley, that was not the case Sunday afternoon.
“That’s the trick, you know? More football games are lost than are won,” said Bentley. “I can’t fault the effort; my guys played hard and I think that they fought until the end. We made too many mistakes; we had too many problems and some of them were critical and too big to overcome.”
The Cobras now sit on top of the Eastern Division over Buffalo by a half game.
“I think you’re seeing throughout the league a lot of parody. A lot of teams are knocking each other off, said Bentley. “It’s going to really come down to who gets hot going down the stretch, so we’re going to work to make sure that it’s Buffalo.”
"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.
