Battle of the Worst (is over) in Daytona
Dan Ryan
Friday March 30, 2001
The Predators have played here a couple of times. Nice crowds for preseason – six grand one year, four grand the next. We even bought 2,000 ducats in advance for a regular season Bobcats-Preds tilt in 1998 before wildfires almost burnt the city to the ground and the modest little sporting event got cancelled.
But there were no Predators in the Ocean Center Thursday. Okay, the Bart Starr of Arena Football (That’s Head Coach Jay Gruden for you folks who haven’t picked up on my running joke) did show and razzed his buddy Ben Bennett, now the Bobcats’ offensive coordinator. (more on that later) The Preds’ stat crew lent a helping hand, also, but you don’t shell out $10 to see a stat crew.
Give us the two worst teams in the league last year and we’ll give you our response. Thanks, but we’ll wait until the Preds come back or we get our own AF2 team somewhere down the road.
Can you blame us? It’s the day before the last of the major special events (Black College Reunion, which is basically a glorified traffic jam) and the weather’s awful. We’ve gone from Speedweeks (a downer after losing Dale Earnhardt. Do you think if a Predator played got killed, the Orlando Sentinel would raise a big stink to request those autopsy photos?) to Bike Week to a Spring Break that was larger than we thought. We’re a little worn out these days. I myself, have six more hours of the Sopranos to catch up with.
Our staff posted the game stuff on the other side of the site, so click on those links for the outstanding local coverage and stay here for some stuff I couldn’t concoct on a 10:40 p.m. deadline.
Then again, this was your basic preseason contest: Pretty much unremarkable. Stewart Patridge solidified that he’s a good back-up to Rickey Foggie as the Bobcats’ QB with a 9-play drive that gave Florida its only lead of the contest and the game. Rookie Nick Ward made the plays (2 INT and one TD) and will make the team because of that.
Todd Hammel to Ben Bronson is going to be a good passing combination. Bronson had a great TD catch in double coverage and will be the best receiver in the AFL that everyone will forget because the Bears are a traveling team. And lastly, let`s dispense of the formalities and name John Hahn AFL executive of the year for what he has in store this year for running a traveling team.
Oh, yeah, Bennett and Gruden.
Perched over the west end zone, Gruden took the opportunity to heckle Ben Bennett midway through the second quarter.
"Show some guts, Bennett, call a bomb," Gruden yelled.
Bennett, the former Predator QB who staged many an epic game with Gruden in the 90s, looked up and smiled. Two plays later, he called the bomb, but the pass went incomplete.
"That’s my mentor, Jay Gruden," Bennett kidded afterwards. "I aspire to be him.’’
And we would have aspired to see them both play.
Dan Ryan has been involved with all forms of arena football since 1988, including writing for ArenaFan when Joe Kauffman and Tim Capper aren’t killing his columns because they don’t get his jokes or perspective. His day job is at Bethune-Cookman University, which has produced both an NFL Hall of Famer (Larry Little) and an Arena Football Hall of Famer (Stevie Thomas) and his hobby is tracking how many f-bombs Adam Markowitz drops in the chat room on game nights.
