Wildcats Eyeing Playoff Birth
Keith Murphy
Thursday June 27, 2002
Cape Fear has spent the last few weekends chasing the division leading Richmond Speed and have finally overcome a two game deficit to tie the Speed with a Cape Fear Richmond showdown looming in three weeks. Despite the focus on that upcoming match up, Siegfried doesn’t believe his players will lose their focus. “Based on the fact that we’ve played a couple of teams with less than good records and they’ve almost beaten us. I think that’s enough to keep these guys focused. We haven’t dominated anybody, except the first game of the season when we happened to catch Norfolk when their quarterback gets knocked out in the first series (Cape Fear 69, Norfolk 19). Other than that game we haven’t comfortably beat up on anybody. Every game we’ve had has been close late into the game. Sometimes, like the Carolina game, we’ve been lucky to win. I mean when a guy fumbles the ball going into the end zone with no one around him . . . that’s when I looked at my coaches and said, ‘hey, this is just meant to be.’”
On the other side of the field, Mohegan boasts the fifth best passing attack in the league and Siegfried admits he is mystified as to their inability to win. “I have no idea [why they are only 3-9]. I watch them on film and all I see is them attacking secondaries like crazy and having success. It seems that over the course of the second half little things happen that hurt them. A turnover here or a penalty there.”
Cape Fear’s biggest problem this season has been injuries. Siegfried joked that his equipment manager wasn’t even bothering to sew the players’ names on their jerseys because so many players wound up on injured reserve. “I’m still bringing guys in and the players look at me like ‘jeez when is this going to end?’ What they have to realize is that I don’t bring guys in to make players worry. We’ve got a whole bunch of guys on injured reserve right now. Every week it’s a circus in this office trying to decide if we want to go with an extra big guy or if we want to go with an extra little guy. It’s crazy.”
The Wildcats got both good and bad news on the injury front this week. “We’ve got Kelvin Suggs back on the field.” Siegfried explained, “He’s a natural defensive back.” Suggs is a 6 foot one inch WR/LB from East Carolina. Suggs’ addition makes the top ranked Wildcat defense even more formidable, “We’re becoming more of a defensive team every week. I keep dressing more defensive players. It’s not in my nature to dress defensive players as receivers; but when I’ve got a guy who comes in and gives a huge spark to the team like Kelvin Suggs did I’m going to reward him and keep him on the field. In turn the other receivers have to step it up. When you have three natural defensive backs in the game at one time and combine that with a defensive line that gives you a pretty strong defensive unit.”
The bad news on the injury front is that Matt Burstein is still out. “There’s a certain spark that Matt Burstein brings to the game. We’re hoping to get him back next week.” If the ‘Cats get him back, then they will be fielding a new receiving corps for the fourth straight week.
Siegfried says that the biggest lesson his young team must learn is how to apply the coup de grace. “ We’ll build up a two touchdown lead on teams and then we’ll let them right back into the game. That’s something we must work on. We’ve got to learn to forget about the score and keep playing full tilt for sixty minutes. Any lead is not good enough in this game. No matter who we play we never seem to get and hold a comfortable lead.”
Kickoff is set for 7:30 pm at the Mohegan Sun Arena in New London Connecticut.
Dr. Murphy has nearly 20 years of media experience ranging from radio to the Internet. He has served as webmaster for two AF2 teams and the football team at Fort Valley State University. He is a professor at FVSU and directs www.bunniwerks.org, a non-profit rabbit rescue organization. He has been commissioned as a Kentucky Colonel. Murphy is also serving as a first party editor of af2 stories for ArenaFfan. For more information about Dr. Murphy see: www.keithmurphy.info
