Off the Bench Babb Rallies Team to Victory ( 2003 )
LOUISIANA La. — Two different quarterbacks sustained injuries Thursday night during Louisiana's Sun Belt Conference battle with New Mexico State, and Aggie head coach Tony Samuel said that both hurt his squad.
NMSU’s Paul Dombrowski suffered a twisted knee with three minutes left in the first half on a Cajun interception. Even though Dombrowski played the rest of the game, and the Aggies were unable to utilize their bread-and-butter option to its maximum effectiveness from that point on.
The other injury was to UL starter Eric Rekieta, who suffered a broken collarbone less than two minutes into the second quarter. Sophomore Jerry Babb came on, and created a lot more problems for the Aggie defense.
"When the backup came in, he was a lot more mobile," said Samuel after the host Cajuns had rallied for a 24-23 victory over his squad. “He’s pretty athletic. They even threw some option in there.”
Babb finished the night 17-of-29 for 177 yards and a touchdown through the air, but he also rushed for a team-leading 63 yards and scored twice.
His biggest rushes, though, were scrambles of 13 and nine yards and a seven-yard quarterback sneak in the final 90 seconds, helping set up Sean Comiskey’s winning 21-yard field goal with eight ticks left.
“We don’t like to do a lot of things differently with Jerry in there, and it’s probably not even a conscious thing,” said offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Rob Christophel. “But he’s a little more mobile, and we try to get him out of the pocket more. A young quarterback will gets antsy in the pocket, and he’s better out on the edge.”
“He makes the offensive line look good because he can get away from a lot of pressure,” said offensive line coach Mike Gibson. “Those guys love Eric, but they also knew that Jerry’s been in there and he’s a soldier. He knew he’d be called on at some point and he was ready.”
Babb was ready, but he also wasn’t aware he was about to enter the game with 13:13 left before halftime after Rekieta hit the Cajun Field turf hard on a 12-yard scramble to the Aggie 27. The impact snapped his right collarbone, likely sidelining him for the remainder of his final season.
“I didn’t see the play at all,” Babb said. “I didn’t even know until the coaches started yelling at me to get loose and get ready.”
Babb came on and completed eight of his first nine passes, scored on a four-yard run and hit Fred Stamps with a 12-yard pass in the second quarter to give the Cajuns their first halftime lead in over a year.
“Eric told me at halftime to keep it going,” Babb said. “You’ve got to give him a lot of credit for getting us in an early rhythm.”
It looked like that rhythm was over in the fourth quarter when Babb was intercepted twice to halt drives, but three different times the UL Lafayette defense came up with stops near midfield.
The last was the most important, when Terryl Fenton stepped in front of Dombrowski’s option pass and returned it 21 yards to the NMSU 44 with 2:21 left. That play came on a third-and-14 with the Cajuns out of time outs.
“Other than just run it and punt, that was our best option,” Samuel said of that play. “It’s the safest thing we have. We’d faked the option to get them maybe to bite up, but their defensive back covered a lot of ground to get there.”
Fenton’s first interception of the season halted the final drive of an Aggie squad that tallied 438 offensive yards and now has rung up 1,551 yards in its last three games.
“We were playing base coverage,” said secondary coach Gary Bartel. “That allows the rover to get underneath the throw and lets the corners break on the ball. Terryl got a great break and made a play, and I don’t think they expected him to make that kind of a break.
“That was the same play they (NMSU) had scored on earlier on an inside cut, and it’s the cliche, they went to the well one too many times.”
The Aggies only had 68 total yards in the final quarter in trying to hold onto a 24-17 lead.
“We just knew we had to stop them,” said linebacker Stanley Smith. “We had to get the ball back for the offense. The only thing we were thinking about was three-and-out.”
Even that was up in the air when NMSU’s Eric Carrie picked off Babb with 4:51 left and gave the Aggies possession at their own 38, only needing a couple of first downs to continue the Cajuns’ seven-game loss streak.
“I was pretty much screaming to everybody that it was do-or-die,” said senior linebacker Ross Brupbacher, who led the front six with eight tackles. “We had to get the ball back some way, and we had guys that were ready to step up and make a play.”
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Dan McDonald
dmcdonald@lafayette.gannett.com
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