The University of Mary Hardin-Baylor football team will hit the road for the team’s second-longest road trip of the season this Saturday. The Cru will travel to Jackson, Mississippi to take on Belhaven University in a noon kickoff.
UMHB will go into the game with a 6-0 overall record and a 5-0 mark in American Southwest Conference play. The Cru is coming off a 55-0 victory over Howard Payne last Friday in a game that was moved up a day to avoid potential weather issues. UMHB’s defense has recorded back-to-back shutouts and has not allowed a point in more than 11 quarters of play. Next up will be the challenge of facing a Belhaven team that features several different looks, but all of them are significantly different that the pass-happy “Air Raid” attack of previous seasons.
“We have seen so many different things from Belhaven that it is hard to know what to prepare for,” Cru Head Coach Pete Fredenburg said. “We will really have to look hard at the video to see what shakes out. You have to go out and play and execute, no matter who we are playing. We ask our guys each week to focus on themselves and how to improve. Our guys have to get the point where they have confidence in each other, no matter who is out there on the field.”
Belhaven is 1-5 overall and 1-4 on the season going into Saturday’s game. The Blazers are coming off a 21-10 loss at Southwestern University last Saturday. While the offense is not producing the gaudy passing numbers of previous seasons, Belhaven still features an experienced quarterback in Hunter McEachern, a deep receiving corps and talented running back Brad Foley. The Blazers defense is also putting up much better numbers than previous years. The two teams first met in 1998 when both UMHB and Belhaven were in their first season of football. The Blazers won the first two meetings before the Cru has answered with a five-game winning streak for a 5-2 series lead.
“I really want our guys to know the history and how hard we had to work to build this program,” Fredenburg said. “Those two losses to Belhaven were a part of that building process. Now our former players come back and are so proud of our current players for continuing the legacy of what they built here.”
In addition to winning five straight over the Blazers, UMHB has won 28 consecutive regular season games and 22 ASC contests in a row. The Cru goes into Saturday’s game ranked second in the country by both the American Football Coaches Association and D3football.com.
The game kicks off at 12 pm and will be broadcast on KRock 101.7 FM with the pre-game show starting at 11:30 am.
