Destroyers Travel to Orlando to take on “Champs”
Tom Ando
Friday July 13, 2001
The Predators, fresh off of a 46-53 loss to the Florida Bobcats on Sunday, look to strike back in the win column by beating the stumbling Destroyers. Buffalo was also embarrassed on their own turf last Friday by the Toronto Phantoms in a 61-26 blowout.
For the Destroyers, it’s been one tough struggle.
“It’s been a tough three weeks for the Buffalo Destroyers, four weeks actually if you count the bye week. Fortunately we’re still in first place; imagine that, so that’s how I’m looking at it,” said Destroyers head coach Ray Bentley. “I got to look at things in a positive light and I think that’s part of the problem. We have high expectations. Then when you fall short of that, people tend to get negative and they want to point fingers and they want an explanation why and they want to place blame somewhere. I don’t think you can do that until it’s all over and this thing is not all over yet. So at that point in time, we’ll take a look at it, dissect it and find out what happened, but right now we don’t have time to do that, we’ve got to get ready and keep fighting.”
To keep fighting, Bentley and his Destroyers must get consistent play from the once-stable quarterback position, where Bentley has yet to name a starter for Friday’s game.
“I think he’s (Jim Kubiak) pressing too hard,” said Bentley. “If I were to say one thing about it, I would say he’s put too much pressure on himself and he’s trying to make too many things happen by himself, as opposed to just relaxing, letting it flow, and just play the game. I think that’s gotten caught up in some things mentally more than anything else and that’s been his problem.”
Whether it’s Kubiak or Damone Scott at QB, Buffalo will have to face a fierce Orlando defense.
“I think that their defense is maybe not playing the way they were last year when they won the championship. They’re approaching that level; they have a great secondary with (Damon) Mason and (Kenny) McEntyre back there and Bret Cooper as a two-way is experienced in this league,” said Bentley. “They’ve seen it all, they’ve done it all, they give you some different looks and try to confuse you and they build the team, Orlando does, around the pass rush. They bring it pretty good, so we’re going to have to protect the quarterback and give him time to make the proper decisions so we can get the ball out and we’ll also have to mix things up a little bit so we can slow the rush down. And that’s what the game plan is. We’ll show them a lot of different things and make them have to respect the screen (pass) and the running game and things of that nature. That’s really the basic plan that we have. Shoot, we plan it every week, we just have to go out and execute it.”
With two weeks left in the season, McEntyre has recorded nine interceptions, while Mason has four, adding 99 tackles. Buffalo won’t be focused entirely on Orlando’s defense however, as they prepare for the charged offense led by Siaha Burley
“He’s one of the most explosive players in the Arena Football League and it’ll be quite a challenge for us to shut him down, but that’s what our intent is,” said Bentley. “We’ll shuffle our defensive backfield in order to match up properly with him and I think that is going to put us in position to do the things we need to do. The rest of their receivers are good, solid receivers. Their quarterback, (Craig) Whelihan, when you give him a chance, and you let him sit back and throw the ball, he’ll pick you apart. The big key for us is to get the pressure on him and get him out of the comfort zone, and when you get him moving around, running around, that’s him out of his comfort zone and we’re going to do some different things in order to get that.”
Bentley didn’t stop there either. He feels his team needs to pick up the slack on special teams as well, which, for Buffalo, hasn’t been to special of late.
“We need to pick that up. When we were winning games and when we were doing well, we were doing so because of special teams in my mind. We were winning the special teams battle in those games that we were winning, and that hasn’t been the case the last couple weeks,” said Bentley. “We have worked with techniques this week and we’ll work it again when we get into their arena and we’ll make sure we’ll take care of that part of the game. It’s a huge part of the game and we feel that we’ve been taking care of that business and from here on out, let’s re-emphasize. It’s always been a huge point of emphasis for me and I make personnel decisions based on who can play special teams, so those guys have to answer. That’s our general plan going into this one and we’re down but we’re not out.”
Bentley feels his team is in an excellent situation, as they head for “The Jungle.”
“We’re going down to a hostile environment, taking on the defending ArenaBowl Champions, the Orlando Predators. We’re in the playoff hunt; what a great opportunity for the football team and I preached that this week and we talked about staying positive.”
To stay positive it is necessary that the Destroyers regain something that they seem to have lost weeks ago.
“Our pride is on the line given our last couple performances,” said Bentley. “And you’re going to see us come out and we’re going to retake that, we’re going to get it back.”
"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.
