Spiders creep above Tribe

RICHMOND

--If you ever doubted the old adage that little things mean a lot, just ask the football teams from the University of Richmond and William & Mary.

Throw a blanket over the longtime rivals, and it would be hard to tell the difference. Both teams entered yesterday's 119th meeting with 9-1 records. Each had beaten an Atlantic Coast Conference team in its opener.

The defending national champion Spiders were ranked fourth in the Football Championship Subdivision (what you and I call Division I-AA); the Tribe were fifth.

Their season statistics were, to quote Spiders coach Mike London, "eerily similar." So were their numbers in yesterday's defensive struggle, when the visiting Tribe outgained Richmond 274 yards to 239 but came out on the short end of a 13-10 score when the Spiders' Andrew Howard kicked a 48-yard field goal on the game's final play.

Howard's heroics came after Massaponax High School graduate Brian Pate's try at a career-long 52-yarder for the Tribe came up inches short with 4:13 remaining.

"Those were two very good teams," William & Mary coach Jimmye Laycock said. "I think you'd say, two evenly matched teams."

No argument there. But Richmond's slight edge will look huge today when the FCS announces its 16-team playoff field. (Hey, BCS officials: Does this give you any ideas? No? Too bad.)

Anyway, off the soapbox. When the pairings are announced, Richmond (10-1) almost surely will be one of the top four seeds. That means the Spiders will host a first-round game next Saturday, and if they win that, a quarterfinal contest the next week. So yesterday's game wasn't the last at UR Stadium, after all.

"We were pretty sure that the winner of this game would get one of the four seeds," Colonial Athletic Association commissioner Tom Yeager said.

Besides home-field edge and momentum, the Spiders enter the playoffs with a ton of confidence. Senior quarterback Eric Ward yesterday led his eighth career game-winning fourth-quarter drive by completing two passes in the final 14 seconds to set up Howard's field goal.

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