Nevada-Reno Breaks Down CSUN, 56-12

In trying to describe last season’s 2-8 disaster by the Cal State Northridge football team, the media guide just says, “The wheels fell off the cart.”

Well, not only are the wheels still off, but Saturday the University of Nevada-Reno Wolfpack killed the horses, overturned the cart and set fire to it. When the attack was over, Reno had piled up 600 yards and left the victims talking to themselves.

The 56-12 thrashing represented the most points given up by the Matadors since 1973, when Cal State Los Angeles handed them a 63-52 loss in a game defense might have been outlawed.

Following the Reno stampede, Coach Tom Keele and his CSUN players sought solace in anything they could latch onto.

“I just want to chalk it up as a bad memory,” said three-time All-Western Football Conference cornerback Steve Benjamin, who was burned for two of the three touchdown passes thrown by Reno’s Eric Beavers. “We’ve got to get this one out of our minds as fast as we can.”

Keele chose not to lament the pounding his defense received, but instead look at the few bright moments turned in by his newly installed run-and-shoot, pass-oriented offense, which did little running and shooting but a whole lot of dropping the football.

“Our run-and-shoot was fine,” he said. “We moved the ball pretty doggone well against a Division I-AA football team.

“We dropped a lot of passes, no wide receiver or quarterback had ever played for us before, and they were nervous and dropped a lot of balls,” Keele said. “But they’ll get better.”

In keeping with CSUN’s silver-lining attitude, it should be noted that Chris Parker, the starting quarterback, alone accounted for 601 yards. The bad news, however, is that an incredible 345 of those yards came not on the strength of his arm but on the strength of his leg.

Parker also is the team’s punter and was forced to boot the ball away eight times, just three shy of the school record, after the Matadors’ offense sputtered to a stop.

Keele knew heading into the game that his Division II team might well be in over its head.

“Reno has an awfully good offense,” he said, as he watched his players warm up. “They’re a pretty darn good football team, and we know that. It’s up to me to handle this game right with the kids. If we win, great. If we get beat, I won’t tell the guys, ‘That’s it, the season’s over.’ ”

And after the pummeling, he was true to his word.

“I knew Reno was capable of this,” he said. “It was a case of they’re having awfully good receivers and a guy named Beavers. They just outgunned us.

“I talked to the kids and told them I saw a lot of good things. They were just too good for us. This was our preseason game. Now we go into the regular season (in two weeks against WFC foe St. Marys) and play teams of our own caliber.”

The beating began early, when Marty Zendejas, the youngest member of the Kicking Zendejas family of Chino, launched a 41-yard field goal. He would later add field goals of 48 and 45 yards.

By halftime the Wolfpack had rolled up a 29-0 lead with four touchdowns, two on passes by Beavers and another on a 6-yard run by the quarterback.

Beavers, who piled up 2,370 passing yards last season as a sophomore, came out of the game early in the fourth quarter after completing 24 of 35 passes for 319 yards and three TDs.

Nine of his passes went to Bryan Calder for 139 yards and one touchdown, while Scott Threde caught two touchdown passes.

All of which left the Matadors gasping.

“I was very impressed,” said Benjamin. “They ran the ball well (97 yards in 24 carries) and passed it even better. They had a real good quarterback, real good wide receivers, real good passing routes and just real good everything.”

And then Benjamin, the leader of a defense that was walloped to the tune of 56 points, gave perhaps the best indication of just how overmatched the Matadors were.

“I didn’t think the defense played that bad,” he said. “We did a lot of things right.”

But Reno, the runner-up in the strong Big Sky Conference last year and a solid favorite to win their conference this year, did everything right.

“I knew we could move the ball,” said Coach Chris Ault, “but I didn’t think we could move it like that, that often. We knew we’d march on them once in a while, but I sure didn’t expect this kind of output.”

The Matadors cracked the tough Reno defense twice in the third quarter, scoring on a 17-yard pass from Parker to fullback Mike Kane to cap an 80-yard drive, and again on a 10-yard pass from Parker to Kane to cap a 76-yard drive.

But that was it.

With 9,481 fans watching--and yawning--in Nevada-Reno’s MacKay Stadium, the Wolfpack seemed to ease up a bit in the third quarter as Northridge rattled off its two touchdowns. But Ault rallied his players on the sideline and the beating continued.

Beavers hit Threde with a 10-yard TD pass to make it 42-12, Jason Seybold ran 11 yards for another TD to make it 49-12, and Lucius Floyd capped the rout with a 6-yard touchdown burst.

The Wolfpack threatened to score again in the closing seconds, marching to the Northridge 15, but the clock prevented further punishment.

“Heck, we just got beat by a better football team,” Keele said. “I’m not discouraged with my team. That’s a Division I-AA team, a good Division I-AA team, with all their scholarships, and we did the best we could.”

Keele, reminded of the line in the media guide about the wheels falling off the cart last season, said he’d bring his squad home today and start putting the wheels back on.

If he succeeds, he’d best be advised to keep the cart out of Reno for a while.