MTSU 22 UGA 0

Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
Saturday March 29, 2003, 3pm
Referee: Paul Collie

This was UGA's third straight year playing in the South final 4, the past 2 years we've lost in the semi finals and we were hoping to change that this year. Our game was the second game so we'd already seen UNC pull away from Clemson in the second half to win 53-8.

We came out fired up and did some good things, but MTSU's flyhalf put in some nice tactical kicks and they kicked a penalty to take a 3-0 lead (they also missed a penalty when they couldn't find the tee so he drop kicked it but it went wide left). They scored a try by slipping between the centers and another towards the end of the half up the middle when we missed several tackles. We missed a couple of penalty kicks, one of which bounced off the upright.

Halftime score was 17-0 MTSU.

For at least the last 20 minutes of the first half we looked tired and flat which led to poor support which led to at least 5 penalties for not releasing in the tackle. We also had, oh, probably 10 knock ons in the half. Which is to say, pretty much anytime we did something good we'd give it back.

Ray did some talking at half time and the guys came out looking better in the second half. MTSU had the wind at their backs but we spent a lot of time with the ball, it's just that every time we'd get something going we'd knock the ball on it seems. MTSU scored a try in the right corner but didn't convert to make the final score 22-0.

We did well in the set pieces, looking good in the scrums and lineouts, but what it boiled down to was we made far too many mistakes and MTSU made very few. Combine that with some good tactical kicking and some good hard running by MTSU and you get 22-0.

The next day, in cold, windy, muddy conditions UNC looked to be the better team and beat MTSU 18-12 to advance to the sweet 16.

1 Jamie Bohannon
2 Eric Rogers
3 Josh Tedder
4 Seth Burrow
5 Ethan Beck
6 Daniel Van Dijk
7 Pete Bigham
8 Matt Botwin
9 Michael Francis
10 Marc Petrini
11 Trevor Maliro
12 Scott Hutchison
13 Kellen Montgomery
14 Blake Richter
15 Julian Harris

I was trying to remember all the switching we did, but was missing stuff for sure, so suffice to say that these people also played:

Chris Chitty, Brian Sanders, Josh Price, Kevin Wilson, Josh Feller, Brian Flaherty

And the players in there shuffled all over the place with lots of them playing more than one position.