Albany State to host Miles on Saturday

ALBANY — The Albany State football team will play on its home field Saturday for the second time this season and head coach Gabe Giardina is hoping the home crowd will help it build upon recent success. Kickoff will be at 7 p.m.

ASU traveled about eight hours to Lane College last week and returned with a 14-7 win, the first of the season for the Rams. Giardina said he was proud of his squad for being able to overcome adversity and win a close game.

This week, the Rams will try and use that momentum to take on Miles College. At 0-4, the Bears are in the same position ASU was last week, and Giardina said his team must be on their toes as Miles is hungry to get its first win.

Here are a few keys to this week’s matchup:

Don’t let the record fool you

While Miles is winless on the season, it poses a larger threat than its record indicates. Last week, it was engaged in a dogfight with undefeated Morehouse and lost 23-21. Giardina said the Bears are without their starting running back and use gritty defense to keep games close.

“They’ve got a good quarterback. They haven’t had their best player on offense, (Blank) Hardy, their running back. He got hurt against Alabama A&M and hasn’t played all season, so they’re missing a weapon there,” he said. “But defensively, they’ve scored on defense a couple times and that’s kind of kept them in games. They really run to the ball and they’re sound with their attack.”

ASU shows improvement against Lane

The Rams were able to come up with two big stops late in the game to seal the deal against Lane. In addition to that, Giardina said special teams had one of its best performances of the season and that coupled with defensive progress made a huge difference in the outcome of the game.

“It was just nice to see our players believe this could stop people during critical downs and I think that was the difference. We were able to stop them when we needed to stop them,” he said.

“Our special teams really played well last Saturday up at Lane, which was a big step because we really challenged those guys after West Georgia after we gave up the big kickoff return,”. We kicked the ball better, we snapped it better, we recovered it better.”

The Bears aren’t a very high powered offense, averaging 173 yards in the air and 75.5 on the ground, but they did enough to come within a field goal of Morehouse last week and Fort Valley the week before.

Giardina said the key once again will be to win the battle at the line of scrimmage and slowing down quarterback Daniel Smith.

Offense still a question mark

When asked on Thursday who would start under center this weekend, Giardina said he would make a final decision Friday. He said neither Stephon Masha nor Kelias Williams have separated themselves enough to win the starting job over.

He said neither have been able to string together and sustain consistent drives.

“We’ve just got to get consistent quarterback play,” he said. “There were some big plays out there to misread. It goes for no gain when it should’ve went for 15, 20 yards.”

The issue is having a trickle-down effect as the offense continues to struggle getting into a rhythm.

“I think we were just inconsistent,” he said.

“They did a couple of things that confused us up front. There was a third down early in the game, we don’t make it, turns into fourth down. They got after us up front, to be completely truthful.”

Giardina said running backs McKinley Habersham and Kelan Fraise are both dealing with injuries, but will play through them.