Bob CollinsSomething’s got to give on Saturday when the St. Scholastica football team takes on Greenville of Illinois, which lost last weekend 76-to-3. St. Scholastica lost to St. John’s University 98-doughnut.
— Charlie Carr (@threatlevelMN) September 2, 2017
Gary Fasching, the Johnnies head coach, says he got hate mail after the game, but you’ve got to feel for the guy. He had the unenviable job of figuring out how not to embarrass another team without embarrassing them further.
It wasn’t easy because Kurt Ramler, the St. Scholastica coach and former SJU quarterback, rested all the upperclassmen and played his freshmen.
There doesn’t appear to be any hard feelings between the two at all, according to their interview with the Pioneer Press’ Bob Sansevere.
Fasching told Sansevere he didn’t like what was happening.
We could play them 10 more times and there is no way the score ends up like it did. With four minutes left in the third quarter, the score was like 70-0. I asked the official, “Is there anything we can do? Can we do running time?” The official said, “There is no running time in college football.”
He said the coaches can shorten the game. It is up to the two coaches. I said, “How much can we shorten it?” He said we could play a one-minute fourth quarter. I said, “I would be in favor of that.” I thought I’d know the answer when he asked Kurt. Kurt is a competitor. He was a great player at St. John’s. He said, “No, we’ll play the fourth quarter.” We ran three plays.
We ran a quarterback sneak, a dive and an off-tackle run by our running back. We didn’t pitch the ball. Our last pass was at the 10-minute mark in the third quarter. A running play was called. Our third-string quarterback called an audible. It was the hardest game I’ve ever had to coach in.
SJU could’ve taken a knee on every play, but that would just embarrass St. Scholastica more.
“I said to our coaches, ‘Let’s find plays that aren’t going to work,’” he said. But every play that wasn’t supposed to work … worked.
“There’s a really good life lesson in here about controlling what you can control,” Ramler told Sansevere. “You’ve got to respond, and you choose how you respond. How are we going to respond to this?”
Related: No One Wanted a Mismatch Like the Johnnies’ Drubbing of St. Scholastica (KSTP)
