Sports

UAPB PREPPING FOR NEXT WEEK

By Troy Schulte/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF
Thursday, November 12, 2009 12:37 PM CST

Monte Coleman doesn’t have a football game to coach on Saturday. He won’t be holding practice, either, instead giving his Arkansas-Pine Bluff team the day off on its final Saturday of the regular season without a game.

Coleman, UAPB assistant coaches and players, though, will be focused on a key Southwestern Athletic Conference matchup. And they’ll most likely be the biggest Alcorn State fans outside of Lorman, Miss.

“I wish it didn’t boil down to us having to root for somebody else,” Coleman said. “(But) that’s what it boils down to. And that’s not a bad thing.”

Thanks to a 49-42 win over Grambling State in last week’s Delta Classic 4 Literacy, Coleman’s Golden Lions are one of four teams that still have a shot at capturing the West title.

Grambling, the defending SWAC champion, is the only West team already eliminated and, after front-runner Prairie View A&M, UAPB and Texas Southern have equally tough roads to the Dec. 12 championship game in Birmingham, Ala., with both paths including those teams winning their remaining games.

That could set in forth a run-through the conference’s three-team tiebreaker criteria that won’t be settled until the season is complete. All of that, though, will be obsolete if UAPB (5-3, 3-2) and Texas Southern (4-4, 3-1) don’t receive a little help from the East on Saturday.

Prairie View (6-1, 5-0), the only team that has yet to drop a conference game, can clinch its first trip to the conference championship game with a win on Saturday at Alcorn State, putting an end to the hopes of UAPB, Texas Southern and Southern (5-3, 2-2), which still has an outside shot to reach the title game if a three-way tie involving the Jaguars, UAPB and Prairie View occurs.

On paper, the Panthers appear to be the favorite over the Braves (2-5, 2-2), who are still alive in the East. But, earlier in the season, Alcorn state lost by just six points at Southern and beat Mississippi Valley State and Alabama A&M at home on back-to-back weekends to vault themselves into the race for the Eastern Division.

Even with two straight losses at Alabama State and Texas Southern, the Braves control their own destiny. If they win Saturday and against Jackson State next week, they will make an appearance in their first championship game.

“As a coach, you always want to see how you’re kids play against the best, and this week we have that chance,” Alcorn State coach Earnest Collins Jr. said. “We’ve still got some things to play for, and our guys are looking forward to it.”

Defensive alarms

First and foremost, Coleman was pleased UAPB held on to beat Grambling on Saturday. But, after reviewing the film, especially during the second half of Saturday’s game, Coleman saw several areas of concern. For the second straight game the Golden Lions allowed at least 335 yards of total offense, almost 100 yards more than what UAPB had averaged through six games, performances that had them ranked as the league’s top defense.

The last two weeks of chasing the league’s top offensive teams, Southern and Grambling, have dropped them to second in the league in total defense, more than 35 yards behind Jackson State.

“We’ve given up way too many yards the last two games. It’s alarming,” Coleman said. “We’ve given up almost 800 yards the last two games, and that’s just not acceptable.”

The biggest concern for him, at least on Saturday, were the number of plays in which his players were beaten one-on-one, most notably during a third quarter in which Grambling gained 157 of its 267 rushing yards.

“I look at our guys and I think they’re very tough, very physical,” Coleman said.

Grambling entered the third quarter down 28-10 and after Mareo Howard’s 95-yard kickoff return it trailed 35-10. So, linebacker Alex Marley said they were expecting the Tigers, who entered as the league’s best rushing team, to pass more to get back in the game.

“They kind of caught us off guard,” Marley said. “Players have to step up and make some plays.”

The Golden Lions will have another tough task after Saturdays’ bye. UAPB visits Prairie View Nov. 21 and the Panthers boast the league’s best scoring offense (30.7 points per game), rank second in total offense (355.8 yards per game) and is the current leader in rushing (172.7).

Fairchild comes on

When the season began, big things were expected from linebacker Freddie Fairchild, a Little Rock native who spent two seasons at Arkansas, one in which he had 92 tackles and led the team with 4 1/2 sacks.

He joined UAPB last spring after being dismissed from the team at Arkansas following multiple brushes with the law. His talent wasn’t questioned, but Coleman wondered if the year away from competition would have any sort of effect.

Turns out, it did, and Coleman said Fairchild spent almost the first half of the season playing tentative.

“He wasn’t playing quite as aggressively as he is now,” Coleman said.

Fairchild had a game-high 16 tackles in last Saturday’s win, the highest single-game tackle total for a UAPB player since Tim Turner had 17 in a loss to Southern Illinois Sept. 22, 2007.

Fairchild, in his final year of eligibility, has led UAPB in tackles in three of the last four games and his 57 total tackles lead the team.

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