 "Photo: Stephen Knoche / The South End")
The best way to get over a loss is with a win. Before the seventh-largest crowd in Adams Field history, Wayne State (5-2, 4-2 GLIAC) did just that by beating Northern Michigan 24-10, remaining undefeated at home in 2008.
“I think our guys play well at home,” coach Paul Winters said. “We’ve tried to establish a tradition here of winning at home.
“We talk about it all the time — it’s our house, no one comes in here and beats us and we have to make it so no one even wants to come here and play us.”
WSU got off to a strong start when quarterback Kevin Smith threw a 67-yard touchdown pass to running back Joique Bell on Wayne State’s third offensive play of the game. A couple of drives later, Smith followed that up with a 4-yard pass to wide receiver Don Brown for a score. David Chudzinski added a 23-yard field goal that would extend WSU’s lead to 17-0.
Just before halftime, Northern Michigan’s Jon Laue put his team on the scoreboard with a 24-yard field goal.
Northern Michigan would turn up the heat in the second half, specifically after defensive end John Blessing recovered a fumble midway through the third quarter. Quarterback Carter Kopach then hooked up with wide receiver Fred Wells on a 9-yard pass, tightening the score to 17-10.
“I said it two weeks ago, we go into halftime with the lead and we get complacent,” Smith said. “We went in with the lead and we came back out and we weren’t playing so hard.
“We had a couple dropped passes, a couple of missed assignments, bad throws and then we had the turnovers.”
Bell then put the game out of reach in the fourth quarter with a 5-yard run for a touchdown that made it 24-10.
“It’s important to win every game,” Bell said. “It wasn’t like we need to win this game or our season is going to go down the drain. It wasn’t anything like that. We had a bad week last week; we have to redeem ourselves now.”
This week we came back in, had harder practices, more effort, had more effort in the game and our conditioning just took over in the fourth quarter.”
Bell passed the 4,000-yard mark and is fourth all time in total offense GLIAC school history. He is now third in GLIAC career points.
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