For the university football team, Thursday night’s season opener hosting Bryant will likely be the highest draw of the year in student attendance.
You know the drill. The freshmen and their Instagram photo ops. The (ideally) pleasant evening weather. The promise of a clean slate ahead — on the field and in the transcript.
For any student who wants to know just what kind of momentum the Blue Hens will take into the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) next year, the indicators will not be obvious against the Bulldogs on Thursday.
Delaware is favored to handle business in that game, much like it will be (barring injuries) the favorite in contests to follow at North Carolina A&T and versus Penn and Sacred Heart.
October’s tilt at Monmouth and the ensuing welcome of Maine to Delaware Stadium will give the Hens more matchup concerns in facing quarterbacks Derek Robertson and Carter Peevy, respectively. But Delaware will be given the edge on paper in both games.
In all, to project a 6-0 Delaware record at the outset would not be outrageous. In fact, the Blue Hens are 7-1 in August and September under coach Ryan Carty, with the lone loss coming at Penn State last season and wins including the 2022 upset of Navy and the 2023 comeback over New Hampshire.
Taking it a step further, in games from the season opener through the second week of October, Delaware is 10-2 with Carty at the helm. The mark becomes 5-5 in the span of the third week in October to the regular season’s end.
Naturally, part of the discrepancy is the wear and tear of a season setting in and diminishing a team’s depth once it crosses mid-October. As the sheer number of games mounts, the likelihood that something happens to the starting quarterback or that a key defender is playing through injury rises.
Having acknowledged that, Delaware will only finish its Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) era satisfactorily if it performs better against the strongest competition on its Coastal Athletic Association (CAA) schedule.
That means turning around the program’s 0-6 headache in games facing William & Mary, Elon, Richmond and Villanova since Carty began as head coach. This quartet is a group of the CAA’s best-run programs, so it is not a slight at Carty individually, but rather a two-season, six-game sample size from which the Hens aspire to improve for their FBS groundwork to feel fortified.
Four of the six losses were by a one-score margin.
This season, Delaware misses William & Mary and Elon in the conference slate, but gets Richmond on the road as well as arch-rival Villanova. For however many wins that the Blue Hens stack earlier in the year, how they fare against the Spiders and Wildcats in the season’s second half will determine the team’s mojo as it takes shape joining Conference USA in 2025.
Especially with no FCS playoffs in sight due to ineligibility during the FBS transition, Delaware will have to dig deep to come away from Villanova happy on Nov. 23. Doing so would put a bow on the gift of a full transition season.