DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. - It was about as close as you could get to a heavyweight championship fight taking place on a football field Saturday at Municipal Stadium.
For 3-1/2 quarters, South Carolina State took Bethune-Cookman's best offensive shots and were out-pointed both on the scoreboard and the statistics department. Yet the defense enabled the Bulldogs to maintain a puncher's chance late in the nationally televised contest.
With S.C. State holding a one-point lead with four minutes left, the Wildcats prepared to land the knockout punch. Instead, the Bulldogs countered with a lethal blow in the form of Dominique Ellis' 55-yard interception return for a touchdown which sealed a 26-18 victory over Bethune-Cookman in a matchup of two of last year's three co-Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference champions.
"I actually knew it was coming," Ellis said. "They had ran it on me earlier. I played it bad. I knew from the whole jump. I knew it! I knew it from film study. (Defensive coordinator Mike Adams) had us ready."
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Bulldogs pull past Wildcats in 4th quarter to win, 26-18
DAYTONA BEACH -- Brian Jenkins picked up a stat sheet and read the numbers out loud again and again. "We had 397 total yards. They had 211," Bethune-Cookman's coach said. "We had 245 passing. They had 54." If was as if he was trying to make sense of it all.
B-CU dominated the stat sheet but lost the battle as South Carolina State relied on special teams and defense to rally past the Wildcats 26-18 in a key Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference game Saturday before a near-capacity crowd of 9,463 at Municipal Stadium.
The Wildcats, normally as adept at holding onto the ball as they are at knocking it away from their opponents, had five turnovers. The big one was Dominique Ellis's 55-yard interception return for a touchdowns with 4 minutes left to give the Bulldogs a 26-18 lead.
B-CU quarterback Jamarr Robinson, who threw three of his four interceptions in the second half, was picked off a final time with 25 seconds left in the game.
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B-CU can't hold on
DAYTONA BEACH -- Coaches never forget big games. And they never forget any and every small detail of big losses.
In the moments immediately after such occasions, it's hard to hide the honest emotions, which explains why Brian Jenkins gave a quick but definitive jab to the makeshift table in front of him as he worked through his post-game press conference Saturday night.
"Two plays . . . two plays," Jenkins said just before delivering a blow to the table.
He was thinking back to a pair of late-game punt returns his team gave up -- two returns brought about by missed assignments, Jenkins said. Jenkins, a stickler for detail, isn't high on missed assignments. When they lead to touchdowns, which lead to defeat, what you get is a head coach who, through 14 games at Bethune-Cookman, has never been this frustrated after a game.
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