The last thing I expected to see after Oswego senior running back Tim Riley ran for a 68-yard touchdown on his team's first offensive play on Friday night against Benet was the Oswego offense stay on the field and attempt a two-point conversion.
Check that. The last thing I expected to see on Friday night was Oswego go for two after each of their five touchdowns in a 32-7 win at Benedictine Stadium.
That's the kind of thing I would do as the coach of a video game team. When I'm piloting my Purdue Boilermakers to an undefeated dynasty, I take no prisoners. But that's just how I roll in a simulated world. No class. No mercy.
So why did Oswego coach Dave Keely decide to employ the same tactic in an actual game in the real world?
Since I had never seen an Oswego team play before, I was curious, is this some sort of Panthers tradition? Or was there a reasonable answer for not trotting out the kicking team?
"Last year, our placekicker is going to Princeton to kick for them," Keely said. "No, not normally, but right now the way our situation is we're waiting for a placekicker, (who) long story short was out for another sport, but he didn't have enough football days in. But I think he's going to come through for us. And our other young man is a soccer player that did our other kicking chores. So we're really lucky that we share athletes. We're not that big that we can pull some special kids in. The kids we have doing it are doing a nice job for us. But yeah, right now, that was our goal, to go for two and take our chances."
I'm not really buying that as a sound reasoning. No. 1, I don't care who kicked last year. Secondly, I have a hard time believing that Oswego's team is devoid of players capable of kicking an extra point.
Take Ryan Miller for example. He did the punting last night for the Panthers and is listed as a kicker on the roster. If he did the kicking off last night (forgive me but I didn't see who kicked off), then I'm pretty sure he could kick an extra point seeing as one of those kicks was a touchback.
Miller might not have made every extra point, but then again, the Panthers only converted one of their five two-point conversions. So it really wasn't a great strategy from that point of view either.
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