The Streak didn’t snap, as it turned out. It popped.
It popped on the eighth play of the big showdown Saturday in sun-splashed Bishop John M. D’Arcy Stadium, as record-setting Saint Francis back Daniel Carter made a jailbreak for the goal line against unbeaten No. 6 Saint Xavier.
As he turned the corner inside the 10, all but in the clear, he suddenly began hopping madly on one leg; forced out at the 3, he flung down the football, ripped off his helmet and bounced it angrily off the turf beneath the scoreboard.
His day was done and he knew it.
An injured hamstring sent him to the sidelines for the rest of the day, where he periodically paced back and forth or sat in a blue folding chair at midfield. The Cougars, meanwhile, soldiered on without him, but rushed for just 103 yards and lost 36-24 to a poised, surgical Saint Xavier team that rang up 571 yards.
It was Saint Francis’ first loss in D’Arcy since Nov. 3, 2001, when Tri-State beat the Cougars 27-20. That’s 56 games if you’re keeping score at home.
“They’re a great team,” Saint Francis coach Kevin Donley said. “They were the better team today. We just fell short.”
Losing Carter was a big reason why.
Saint Francis’ all-time leading rusher, he’d rushed for six touchdowns and 504 yards in three previous games against Saint Xavier, including a school-record 239 last year. He had 36 yards in four carries Saturday when the hamstring went.
“You saw the first series that he was in there, we ran the ball right down there their throat,” Donley said. “So it did change the plan a little bit, and we adjusted the best we possibly could.”
Saint Francis quarterback Shaine Tierney agreed.
“He’s such an impact player, for him to go down like that took a lot of the wind out of our sails,” he said. “We found ourselves in some second-and-long, third-and-long situations that we usually wouldn’t with Daniel in there. It forced us to look at some parts of our pass game we haven’t really used a lot this year.”
It worked, for a while. With Tierney throwing for 231 yards and two scores and distributing the ball to eight different receivers, the lead changed hands six times in less than three quarters. The Cougars took their last lead, at 24-22, on Rhys Barnhart’s 27-yard field goal with 6:01 to play in the third. The Cougars blocked one field goal attempt by Saint Xavier and forced the visiting Cougars to settle for another when they stopped Saint Xavier three times inside the 5 in the second quarter.
Eventually, though, Saint Xavier’s high-octane offense wore down the home team.
Running at warp speed out of a no-huddle offense, Saint Xavier crammed 100 plays into just 30:15 of possession time, a pace that left the Saint Francis defense gasping. Quarterback Anthony Kropp threw for 375 yards and three scores and directed an offense that converted a staggering 13 third downs in 21 tries.
After Saint Francis took its last lead, Kropp hit Bill McKeon from 40 yards out to regain the lead for Saint Xavier, then plunged 2 yards for the dagger score after a 13-play, 80-yard early in the fourth quarter.
“First time we’ve seen a team this year that’s been that up-tempo,” Saint Francis linebacker Carl Thomas said. “I think we handled the tempo part of it pretty well. They just kept getting some big plays on us.
“And, yeah, (the third-down conversions) were the killer for us. In a situation like that when you’ve got a team in third-and-long, you’ve got to get off the field. Give them credit, they made the plays they had to make. And we didn’t.”
For the first time in eight years.
