Rutgers Lacrosse Breaks Through on Senior Day, takes down #10/11 Ohio State

(Via ScarletKnights.com)

Rutgers Men’s Lacrosse was 0 for the Big Ten going into yesterday.  They nearly pulled off an upset off Maryland a few weeks back and took a beating at the hands of Penn State away last week.  Facing #10/11 Ohio State on Senior day, it seemed like Rutgers was headed to a winless season.

“It was a fairytale ending”, Joe Nardella, a senior who was honored pregame as part of a 9-man Senior class, told Scarletknights.com.

Rutgers had just pulled off a monumental upset of Ohio State, and it wasn’t even close.

After an even first quarter that saw the Knights and Buckeyes score 4 goals apiece, RU dominated the second quarter.

Riding mostly Joe Nardella’s brilliance on the face-off ‘X’, the Knights possessed the ball like a top-flight soccer team and buried their chances like a professional basketball team.

All told,Rutgers scored 7 goals in the quarter, and pitched the shutout winning the quarter 7-0 and taking a commanding 11-4 lead into the half.

Part of the barrage was Scott Bieda’s highlight reel effort as he walked out from behind the net and flung one behind his back into the cage to put Rutgers up 8-4.

Although the rest of the game played out to an even score-line, Rutgers put the game away in the early third.

Up a man, senior Brian Goss fired from long range and got it past OSU’s Tom Carey who allowed 17 goals while stopping only 8 Rutgers shots on target.

The Knights went up 13 – 4 when Christian Tresolini scored from just in front of Carey’s net off a great hard feed from Scott Bieda.

Rutgers started Jake Anderson who was solid in net stopping 10 shots and allowing the 10 OSU tallies on the day.

Rutgers was able to control the action based mostly upon senior Joe Nardella who the Knights will have a tough time replacing.

Nardella won 21-30 faceoffs and turned two of those faceoff wins into goals. He should garner specialist of the week honors in the Big Ten this week.

Rutgers fired 46 shots and outshot OSU 17-3 in the decisive second period.

The win was the first Big Ten conference win of the season and in the history of the Scarlet Knights program and its first top 10 win since defeating #4 Syracuse in 2003.