Backup quarterback saves game in second half
The Utah State football team experienced something unusual Saturday in Honolulu. The Aggies didn’t have a lead heading into halftime.
To complicate the situation further, the Aggies didn’t have freshman quarterback Chuckie Keeton. The freshman phenom left the game in the second quarter after suffering a spinal stinger and a back sprain.
Junior Adam Kennedy stepped in, and the Aggie defense tightened up to help USU mount an improbable comeback and grab its second Western Athletic Conference victory, with a 35-31 win over Hawaii at Aloha Stadium.
USU, which has surrendered five fourth-quarter leads this season, decided during the bye week to come back and turn things around and take charge in the fourth quarter.
“In the fourth quarter, if you look at our games, we always give up, we slack,” USU linebacker Bojay Filimoeatu said. “At the beginning of this week, Coach Andersen said, ‘Enough is enough.’ He lined us up and made us run sprints at the end of practice, and then Mike Smith took charge and huddled us up together, and he spoke from the heart and we threw fours up. I say we were perfect in the fourth quarter.”
USU outscored Hawaii 28-3 in the second half and 14-0 in the fourth quarter alone.
After Keeton went down and emergency personnel carted him off the field, the only play Kennedy ran was taking a knee right before halftime. In the second half, he showed why Andersen recruited him from San Joaquin Delta College.
Kennedy’s first play from the line of scrimmage was a 25-yard bullet-of-a pass to wide receiver Matt Austin. Junior running back Robert Turbin found the end zone from 48 yards out, two plays later, to begin the Aggie comeback.
“I would have been nervous if it hadn’t been for my teammates,” Kennedy said. “They constantly came up to me telling me that they believed in me and that they were behind me. That gave me a lot of confidence. I expected the nerves to come, but they never came.”
Kennedy went 8 of 12 for 163 yards and two touchdowns, connecting with Chuck Jacobs for a 37-yard touchdown pass in the third quarter and with Stanley Morrison on a 71-yard pass in the fourth quarter to narrow the deficit to three points.
Kennedy then orchestrated a 12-play 59-yard drive, capped by a 1-yard touchdown run from Turbin, to take the lead with 14 seconds left in the game.
“We had all the momentum, and I just fed off that and the energy of my teammates,” Kennedy said. “It ended up working out pretty well. It was our program’s night to turn the table and start getting that winning mentality — especially in the fourth quarter.”
Andersen gave all credit to the players for the comeback victory on the road.
“I think they were embarrassed in that first half, and they came out swinging,” he said. “They’ll probably be a lot of surprised people when they open up that paper tomorrow morning. All the credit goes to those young men. They took the adjustments we made at halftime on offense and defense and digested them and then just kept fighting.”
– ty.d.hus@aggiemail.usu.edu