Fordham Gets First Win in Blowout

By PATRICK MOQUIN

Going into the game against the 1-4 Lehigh Mountain Hawks, many college football teams would feel prepared, if not extremely confident. And while confidence is sparse for the Rams and their fans, one would not believe this was was their first win after watching their performance Saturday.

After a 73-yard touchdown catch from quarterback Tim DeMorat, Fordham College at Rose Hill (FCRH) ’22, to receiver Jonathan Lumley, GSB ’19, gave the Rams an 8-0 lead in the second quarter; they never looked back, cruising to a 43-14 blowout victory.

DeMorat finished the day with an impressive performance, passing for 299 yards and 2 touchdowns. After being benched last week against Georgetown, DeMorat certainly had something to prove, and with an impressive stat line like that one, it will be much harder to bench him down the line.

The running back tandem of Tyriek Hopkins, FCRH ’20, and Naim Mayfield, FCRH ’22, revitalized the Rams’ ground game as well, running for a combined 206 yards and 3 touchdowns. For an offense that has played from behind so often this season, the running back duo have not had the opportunity to establish themselves in the offense, and after taking the lead on Saturday, they dominated the lowly Lehigh defense.

After failing to record a single interception in his first four games, defensive back Jesse Bramble, FCRH ’20, has had three in the month of October, two of which came in this game.

If a fan were to watch only this one game, they would consider Fordham football a finely tuned program preparing for bigger and better things.

When put into perspective, this game is somewhat shocking. A football game is 60 minutes long, so in 5five games, this football program played for a combined 300 minutes. They led their opponent in roughly four of those minutes, which means they led against their opponents 1.3 percent of the time, and always lost that lead by the end of each game. Against Lehigh, they held the lead for the last 43 minutes of the hour long game, and held the lead by an increasingly wide margin.

The question going through every Fordham fan’s mind is most likely, “What does a win like this mean for the team?” The win came against Lehigh, a team that has somehow disappointed more than Fordham over the course of the season, but the opponent does not matter nearly as much as the win.