Following the season-opening loss to FBS opponent UCF, UNH head coach Rick Santos said that the game would start to slow down a bit for his team once jumping into FCS play.

Well, that wasn’t necessarily the case as the Wildcats found themselves in a back-and-forth, high-intensity game against Holy Cross in Worcester. Still, UNH found a way to get a big statement win on the road against a very good Holy Cross team and one of Santos’ close friends, Dan Curran.

Now, after playing the role of road warriors for two straight weeks, the Wildcats finally get to play in front of the home crowd in Durham this Saturday night when they host Stonehill.

During his weekly appearance on the CAA coaches Zoom call, Santos spoke about the gritty win over the Crusaders.

“It’s a great venue (Fitton Field) and we’ve had our issues there,” he said. “Obviously, we had the (playoff) heartbreaker in 2019 and in’22 they put it on us pretty good in the second half and we didn’t finish the game the right way. We don’t play them every year, but I don’t think we’d won at Fitton Field since 2012…happy with the way we finished the game. Certainly, it wasn’t our cleanest effort. Too many turnovers, some things we can clean up.

“But, I think the making of a good team is when you can win without your best stuff. I think defensively, really proud of how they stopped the run. That was a huge emphasis with (HC) All-American running back Jordan Fuller and that big , nasty, physically-imposing offensive line that Holy Cross has…from an offensive standpoint, it was a slow start. We only had nine minutes I think time of possession in the first half…but, I was proud of how they handled the adversity and that we made a lot of winning plays in the second half.”

Stonehill is in its third season as an FCS school and the Skyhawks have made some noise in the NEC, but recently got blown out by a Stony Brook in its opener. Even so, Santos and the Wildcats won’t take them lightly.

“I think Coach (Eli) Gardner just gets his guys flying around,” Santos said. “I think they play extremely hard. Offensively, they do a good job mixing up schematically, their formations. They do a bunch of different things that are unique that we have to make sure that our eye discipline is exactly where it needs to be and we’ve got to read our keys. Obviously, only having one week to game plan on, we go back to last year and I think they were a team that surprised a lot of people in the NEC.

“I think for us, we need to do a really good job in the first quarter of seeing how they’re going to attack us. I think it’s a game where we’re going to have to make some in-game adjustments to be successful because there’s simply not enough stuff on tape this year to know what their identity is yet.”

Stonehill or Division 3 New England College could have been coming to Durham this week and this UNH team would have been fired up to be playing at home. It should be a fantastic environment when the ball is kicked off at 6:00 Saturday night.