Getty Southeastern Louisiana Lions head coach Frank Scelfo.
The Southeastern Louisiana Lions football team will host the Sam Houston State Bearkats on Saturday at Bowers Stadium in Huntsville in each team’s first game of the Southland Conference’s spring schedule, which was prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
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The game (7 p.m. ET start time) won’t be on TV, but anyone in the US can watch Southeastern Louisiana vs Sam Houston State football live on ESPN+ right here:
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Southeastern Louisiana vs Sam Houston State Preview
The Bearkats were slated to open their season on the road against the Incarnate Word Cardinals a week ago, but Texas’s rare winter storm had other plans, causing a postponement to April 17.
Fortunately for the Bearkats, head coach K.C. Keeler, a native of Pennsylvania, went out and bought what he described as the last six shovels in Huntsville so he and his staff could clear the team’s field of snow before it turned to ice. The snow’s freezing, he said, would have wiped out even more days of practice.
“If we wouldn’t have touched that field, the sheet of ice that would’ve been on top of it, we probably couldn’t have gotten on that field until Tuesday or Wednesday,” Keeler said, according to the Houston Chronicle. “That’s how bad the field would’ve been.”
In 2019, Sam Houston State contended with injuries to the team’s top three quarterbacks en route to a 7-5 overall mark and a 6-3 record in in Southland Conference play. The Bearkats haven’t played since Nov. 23 of that year, closing their campaign with a 37-14 victory over the Houston Baptist Huskies.
“It was just like the icing on the cake of this long wait to see when we’re going to play,” cornerback Zyon McCollum said, per the Houston Chronicle. “But we’ve been having adversity. This whole thing started with COVID, and the winter storm, it was no different. By that time, we were used to the feeling. We know that we’ve just got to attack it day in and day out and then play the cards as they fall.”
The Lions have played only slightly more recently. Their 2019 season ended on Dec. 7, when they fell to the Montana Grizzlies 73-28 in the second round of the FCS playoffs. Southeastern Louisiana finished the year 8-5 overall and went 6-3 in the conference.
“We’re excited to have the opportunity to get back on the field and compete,” Lions head coach Scelfo said, according to the school’s athletics website. “We don’t practice just to practice; we practice to compete. We’re looking forward to seeing how we measure up against an opponent.”
He added: “We’ll definitely have a good indication of how we measure up after this opening game. Sam Houston has the second most wins in all of FCS over the last decade and we have a ton of respect for its program. They return one of the top defenses in the nation and an offense led by a veteran quarterback (Eric Shmid) with plenty of talent at the skill positions. We’re facing a great team on Saturday.”