HANOVER – The concept was sound against a team that a week earlier had scored touchdowns on 60- and 46-yard passes. Stop the big play and see if a Monmouth team seemingly not built to play ball control can beat you with extended drives.
Turns out they could.
The Hawks strung together touchdown marches of 11 plays and 75 yards, 14 plays and 80 yards, and eight plays and 72 yards before erasing a seven-point Dartmouth lead with 12:56 remaining on a nine-play, 50-yard TD drive.
Fittingly, they finished their day off with a 13-play, 56-yard possession that set up the 25-yard field goal with 1:09 remaining that brought the visitors a 31-28 win Saturday afternoon before 4,417 at Buddy Teevens Stadium.
Monmouth, picked second on the CAA preseason poll and “receiving votes” in the top-25 rankings, improved to 3-2 with its second consecutive road win.
Dartmouth fell to 0-2 heading into this week’s Ivy League opener against Penn. The Big Green hadn’t opened a season with back-to-back losses since 2009, when it finished 2-8.
Against Yale last year, Dartmouth answered a last-minute touchdown with a 37-second hurry-up drive that resulted in a field goal that salvaged a one-point win. This time they needed a field goal to force overtime, but after two first downs and two long passes down the middle fell incomplete, kicker Owen Zalc’s 59-yard attempt didn’t have the distance and Monmouth escaped with the win.
“I thought we gave ourselves chances there and then just came up short,” said Dartmouth coach Sammy McCorkle after the game. “I told the guys just now that I (liked) the effort and the guys battled. They battled.
“You know, we were behind a couple times there and our guys battled right back into the game. Made some key plays at critical times, but we just didn’t make enough.”
Someone who did make a lot of plays was Monmouth quarterback Frankie Weaver. Despite wind early in the game and rain in the second half, the 6-foot-5 redshirt sophomore completed a career-high 33 passes for 313 yards in 42 attempts with two touchdowns and no interceptions.
“He’s got a strong arm and makes good decisions,” said McCorkle. “We didn’t make him uncomfortable enough. … You can’t allow him to go through his progressions.”
While Weaver was having his best game of the year, Dartmouth quarterback Grayson Saunier was struggling in the passing game, going just 11-for-27 for 148 yards. He did throw a touchdown pass of 20 yards to James Elliott to tie the score at 7-7 on the Big Green’s opening possession, and found Taysire Williams with a two-yarder with nine seconds left in the first half to send the teams to the locker room tied at 21.
He followed that up by capping a 15-play, 75-yard drive with a three-yard TD run to give Dartmouth its first lead of the game, 28-21, on the opening possession of the second half.
“That’s how you draw it up,” McCorkle said of the back-to-back touchdowns bookending the break. “We did a great job offensively there to score before the half and then we talked about it at halftime. 'We’ve got to come out and we’ve got to march it down the field and put it in the end zone again,' and we did it. Hats off to our offense for doing a great job.
“But you know, the game’s not over after that. You’ve still got a whole quarter and a half to go and we just did not make enough plays, and we didn’t stop them enough times.”
Someone who did make a lot of plays was the Big Green's Myles Craddock. The sophomore tailback breathed life into a run game that managed just 62 yards in last week’s loss at Lehigh by piling up 109 yards and a touchdown in the first half alone. He finished with a career-high 140 yards on 22 carries. Asked afterward if he ever felt so good and so bad at the same time, he answered how you can be sure McCorkle expected.
“I don’t feel good when I lose,” he said. “It’s a ‘we over me’ mentality. Regardless of how you play, if we don’t win, that’s the result of the game.”
Dartmouth certainly had its chances.
After Monmouth tied the score at 28-28 early in the fourth quarter, Saunier hit Ky’Dric Fisher for a 28-yard gain to the Hawks’ 43. But Saunier lost the ball under pressure on a third-and-eight call, and Monmouth recovered at the Big Green 40.
Stung by the turnover, the Dartmouth defense rose to the challenge. After the Hawks earned a first down at the 20, two incompletions, a Matisse Brosseau run stop for no gain, and Cameron Best-Alston making sure a fourth-and-10 completion was one yard short of a first down gave the ball back to the Big Green at its own 11.
Then it was Monmouth’s defense bowing up after a 13-yard Craddock run and forcing a Dartmouth punt from its own 24 that gave the Hawks the ball at their own 36 with 5:50 remaining.
After a nine-yard completion, Monmouth called 11 consecutive running plays before trotting Sky Sholder out to try a 25-yard field goal with 1:09 left. Coach Jeff Gallo’s decision to keep the ball on the ground and turn the game over to a redshirt sophomore who was 0-for-1 in the game and 1-for-3 in his career was intentional.
“When the two-minute timeout came around, I went up to our head coach,” said Sholder, “and I was like, ‘Coach, I got this.’ He looked at me and said ‘All right,’ and just walked away. Then I saw them hand the ball off. First down. Second down. Third down.
“Our (special teams) quality control coach (Ryan) Legere came over to me, and he was like, ‘Let’s go.’ I just went out there and did what I usually do.”
Sholder, who had missed from 41 yards in the first half, wasn’t ready to celebrate after his kick doinked off the right upright and over the crossbar.
“There was still a minute left and I knew the game wasn’t over,” he said. “Their kicker is really good and I saw him making them from that far in warmups, so I knew we had to get a stop.”
They did, but barely.
Dartmouth had no timeouts left after taking over at its own 25 and with everyone who knows football probably expecting Saunier to work the sidelines to save time. The Big Green instead went deep down the middle on the first two plays, both times throwing toward Nick Lemon. A pass interference penalty cost Monmouth 15 yards on the first throw, but might have prevented a touchdown.
On the second, Lemon had a chance for a catch-and-run score, but a double-team kept him from pulling the ball in.
“We liked the matchup,” McCorkle explained of the decision to go deep. “We knew they were going to probably be a little more under cover stuff to not allow us to dink it. We wanted that one-on-one and we got those opportunities.
“We got the pass interference there and had a chance on the first one. The guy did a good job coming there late and putting his hand in there, knocking it out.”
After the two throws downfield they got a 14-yard completion to Kareem Fisher on third-and-11 to cross the 50. Saunier would add a five-yard run to push the ball to the Monmouth 42 with seven seconds left.
At that point, McCorkle faced a difficult decision.
“You get down there with seven seconds left, fourth-and-five. That’s a tough one. I asked Owen, ‘You think you can do this?’ He looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, I think so.’
“You go back-and-forth. You’ve got seven seconds, you’re rolling (the dice if) you try to throw a quick out. But they know that, too. You’re rolling the dice with seven seconds. You don’t know how long that can take.”
“We went with it and said, ‘Hell, we’re going to kick it.’ We stuck with it and thought we had a good look at it for sure.”
Although Zalc has a career-best 54-yarder and has hit from 60 in practice, on this day his try fell short, leaving Dartmouth winless heading into its Ivy League opener Saturday against Penn.