UB football team lets an early lead slip by
UConn rebounds from losing half to gain 38-20 win in Toronto’s International Bowl
TORONTO — Fifty years after the 1958 team turned down a bowl bid for honorable reasons and 38 years after the school gave up big-time aspirations in the sport for economic reasons, the University at Buffalo basked in the glow of postseason football.
For a while, at least.
Coach Turner Gill’s Bulls cashed in on five Connecticut fumbles to take a 10-point first half lead, but ended up losing to the Huskies, 38-20, before a record International Bowl crowd of 40,184 in the Rogers Centre on Saturday afternoon.
The crowd was swelled by strong support from UB, which sold out its allotment of 10,500 tickets for the game. It seemed more than half the crowd in the dome was rooting for the Bulls.
The loss dropped UB to a final 8-6 record in what will go down as the proudest season — and easily the most exciting one — in the school’s modern football era.
“I’m so proud of this football team,” Gill said. “Buffalo is not going to be a one-year wonder. Our seniors created a legacy of expectation of winning now.”
UB got two field goals by A. J. Principe and touchdowns by Ray Anthony Long and running back James Starks to take a 20-10 lead in the second quarter. Long scored when he recovered a fumbled punt in the end zone. Starks ran over from 4 yards out one play after UB had recovered another fumble by UConn’s return teams.
The Bulls took a 20-17 lead into halftime, but could not hang on, not in the face of a 261- yard rushing performance by UConn’s junior tailback Donald Brown, who ran 45 yards for his team’s first touchdown and set up another with a 75-yard gallop in the second quarter.
Brown’s output gave him the national rushing title with 2,083 yards and after the game the UConn star announced that he would give up his final year of college eligibility and enter the NFL draft in the spring.
UB was held to a season-low 237 yards of total offense by UConn. The Bulls managed only 10 first downs. Their offense was especially ineffective in the second half.
Still, the Bulls looked like they were headed for one of their patented wild finishes to pull the game out. Their hopes were suddenly snuffed, however.
Trailing 31-20, UB moved the ball from its own 8-yard line to the UConn 5. But on third down, quarterback Drew Willy’s pass to the right corner of the end zone intended for Naaman Roosevelt ended up in the hands of UConn linebacker Dahna Deleston.
In a dramatic turn of events, Deleston took the interception 100 yards the other way to make it 38-20 with 2:15 left. Gill’s Bulls had finally run out of miracles after pulling out wins over Temple, Army and Akron before their victory over Ball State in the Mid-American Conference championship game.
The 1958 Lambert Cup champion UB team took part in the pregame coin toss. That team gained fame after it turned down a Tangerine Bowl bid because its two African- American players would not be allowed to participate in the game.
UB dropped the sport in 1970 for economic reasons. Football came back in the late 1970s, and it took another 29 years to get to Saturday’s big day in Toronto.
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