Sep 28, 2024 By Joe Tuscano 4 min read

The football team at Carnegie Mellon had a stinging going-away present for Washington & Jefferson Saturday: A heart-breaking, confidence sapping, 30-27 overtime victory for the Tartans in their final season in the Presidents’ Athletic Conference.

The loss was the first of the season for W&J, which fell to 3-1 overall and in the conference. CMU moved to 4-0 in conference and overall play.

What made this loss so hard to take was the Presidents blew a 19-point lead at halftime, failed to score in the second half and allowed three long touchdowns passes to Reece Kolke, whose 20-yard TD reception won the game in the first overtime.

“They’re a better program than we are,” said a dejected W&J head coach Mike Sirianni. “It all falls on me because I’m the head coach. “We lost the game because we didn’t pay attention to details. We don’t block right on extra points. We should have had two guys back for the punts. You don’t catch punts, and that led to two of their scores.”

Carnegie Mellon scored four points on a pair of safeties, one on a bad snap in the end zone on a punt and the second on a holding call in the end zone.

“One bounce doesn’t go our way and we lose that game,” said Carnegie Mellon head coach Ryan Larsen. “That was a heck of a college football game between two good football teams.”

W&J’s offense, which scored 24 points in the first half, was shut out in the second until Deven Wyandt kicked a 29-yard field goal at the end of W&J’s overtime possession. On the second play of Carnegie Mellon’s first overtime possession, Tartan quarterback Ben Mills found Kolke for the final one of his three touchdowns.

“They schemed us up. We knew that they could come back.” Sirianni said. “We moved the ball but couldn’t score. We had a field goal blocked. It falls on my shoulder.”

Mills completed 13 of 24 passes for 218 yards and the three touchdowns. He also punted six times for a 45.2-yard average. Two of his punts penned W&J inside the 10-yard line.

“There’s no magic words that bring you back from 19 points down,” said Larsen. “There were really no new plays (in the second half). We needed to refocus, and the guys did a good job of that.”

The fans who came to Cameron Stadium saw a little bit of everything when it came to scoring.

W&J built a 17-5 lead at halftime with a running touchdown, a passing touchdown and a field goal.

Carnegie Mellon got a field goal and safety when Wyandt, who also did the punting, stepped out of bounds after fielding a high snap from center.

Carnegie Mellon got on the board first when Justin Caputo, a South Fayette High School graduate, booted a 31-yard field goal. He would later hit a 24-yarder that sent the game to overtime.

“We’ve been in that situation before,” said Caputo. “We knew if we stuck together, we could get the job done. There’s nothing like the feeling of (beating W&J).”

W&J answered Caputo’s first field goal when John Peduzzi pulled in a 14-yard scoring pass to make it 7-3.

Wyandt made CMU pay for its second fumble of the half with a 39-yard field goal that put the Presidents up 10-3.

Bentworth graduate Owen Petrisek scored on a burst up the middle from the 11 that extended the Presidents’ lead to 17-3. It went to 17-5 on the safety call on Wyandt.

Jacob Macosko gave the Presidents a 24-5 halftime lead with a 7-yard touchdown pass from Jacob Pugh.

Game Notes: Pugh completed 23 of 41 passes for 246 yards and two touchdowns. .. Brendan McCullough, a Peters Township graduate, caught five passes for 12 yards for the Tartans. … Petrisek rushed for 107 yards. … Keaton Hall had 12 tackles and Avery Keith 11 for W&J.