Lembo’s Cardinals ready for road trip – Fort Wayne Journal Gazette
MUNCIE – And now comes the road, for the Ball State football team.
The Cardinals hit it this week – if you look out your bus window, that’s Kalamazoo, Mich., and Western Michigan University directly ahead – and they don’t come home again for a month. By which time the road no doubt will have hit back more than once.
The good news for Ball State coach Pete Lembo: His guys have proved they can take a hit or two.
They took their fair share in the first half last week against Central Michigan but shook it off like a duck shedding water. Trailing 17-3 at the half, the Cardinals scored 21 points in the third quarter and rallied for a 31-27 win.
That sends the Cardinals off toward three straight road games with a 5-3 record and a 3-1 MAC ticket. And it proves to Lembo what he’s known all along, but, given the learning curve every team faces in the first season of a new regime, has only intermittently seen.
His team’s got gumption. And it’s starting to get a lot of other stuff, as well.
“It was good to see our kids overcome adversity to that degree,” he said Wednesday at his weekly teleconference. “You look at four of our five wins this year, they’ve been close games. That says something about the kids, too.
“The big change I saw on Saturday was getting down but not being out, and that’s something I hope we can really build on. We’re heading into the last third of the season still in the hunt, and we’re a little bit of a pesky football team right now.”
Pesky enough to handle Western remains to be seen, of course. The Broncos are unbeaten at home this year, whipped Connecticut out of conference and have a quarterback, Alex Carder, who’s thrown for more than 2,000 yards, and a wide receiver, Jordan White, who already has 86 catches.
But Ball State comes into this one as healthy as it’s been since before the Oklahoma game, and Lembo senses that the aforementioned learning curve is beginning to track steadily upward.
“We really have good solid kids here,” Lembo says. “They trust us putting them in position to be successful. They’ve really bought into the system. And they just sort of go about their business.
“I feel pretty good that the foundation is starting to shape itself pretty well. That being said, we know there’s an awful lot of areas to address going forward.”
Part of that no doubt involves not getting behind by three scores, and part of it involves continuing to strive for more “explosive” plays. It’s been a point of emphasis for Lembo all season, and it’s likely going to continue to be.
Much more so than the challenge of being away from Muncie until Nov. 25.
“We won’t make a big deal out of travel,” Lembo said Wednesday. “We’ll really use it as a positive to spend that little bit of extra time together, making sure everybody’s on the same page. Again, the consistency, the stability, the routine – I think all of those things, if you believe in them and you talk about it and then you see it work, you just need to keep building on those things every week.”