Finlandia drops season opener to Alma College

HANCOCK — It was a historic day for the Finlandia football program this past weekend. A crowd of over 1000 showed up at McAfee Field to watch the Lions in their first football game in school history. However, the final score was not remotely close to what anyone expected.

Finlandia gets shutout at home by Alma College, 43–0. The Scots jumped out to a 22–0 lead less than six minutes into the game, which included a 70 yard touchdown run on the first play from scrimmage. The Lions struggled mightily on offense, registering only 179 yards on 62 plays. Despite the issues though, the team did feel like they were getting better at the game moved on.

“I’m really proud of our players…just how they kept on competing. We got down 22–0 right away and we competed that second quarter. We were playing hard. We were getting stops on defense. We were moving the football on offense. We weren’t able to punch it in to the endzone or get points out of it, but there were a ton of positives with that first half,” head coach Tim Driscoll said.

“We were doing our assignments a lot better compared to the beginning of the game. We were wondering what we were doing. But then we started getting our blocks down and putting together drives. It’s just a learning experience for the team right. We’re all freshman. That was our first college game so we’re going to learn from it, Definitely a hard loss but we’ll get through this,” said wide receiver Trevor Burke.

The Lions will be on the road for their next game this Saturday against the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh.