Towson rams Rhode Island 41-10

Towson won its third straight game with a 41-10 victory over Rhode Island, sending its 13 seniors out in good fashion.

The Rams (0-10, 0-7 Colonial Athletic Association) took nine plays and 4:21 to score on their first drive of the game. It only took the Tigers (6-4, 5-2 CAA) three plays and 1:13 to respond and didn’t look back after that.

Towson got its first touchdown after senior quarterback Grant Enders’s pass connected with senior offensive tackle/tight end Cory Kirby. Senior running back Dominique Booker started the drive with a 24-yard carry from the Towson-36.

“The conversation in the locker room was we’ve used the war motif, battle motif and everybody is writing about we should win this game, and just because we should win it doesn’t mean they don’t have guns too. And anything can happen,” Head Coach Rob Ambrose said. “As a head coach, if you only got the chance to win one game a year, this would be the one that you want. This would be the thing that you’d want for your seniors more than anything else.”

The Tigers went into halftime with a 20-10 lead over the Rams, but it wasn’t until the second half of the game that the action picked up.

To start off the third quarter, Booker rushed 83 yards from the Towson-17 to the end zone to record the second-longest run touchdown in program history, making it 27-10 Booker finished the night with 181 rushing yards.

“It’s our normal play that we love to run,” he said. “The hole was there, Randall [Harris] came through and I just followed behind him.”

Late in the third quarter, senior wide receiver Tom Ryan had a highlight reel catch. Enders threw the ball from the Towson-42 38 yards down the field to Ryan who caught it one-handed.

“It’s pretty much a naked play,” Ryan said. “We’ve been doing it all year and usually we say the backside’s dead on it, but we ran it a couple weeks ago and I kind of got on Grant, just joking around, telling him he couldn’t make that throw and he couldn’t out-throw me. But as we saw today, he can definitely out-throw me. But when we did that, and when Grant was rolling out the defense just shifted to the left as we’re rolling to the right and it was just wide open from there.”

The Tigers finished the scoring when redshirt freshman running back Clayton Minott ran the ball one yard for the first touchdown of his career.

Booker said he was happier to see Minott score than he was for his own touchdown.

“He’s a guy that I see a lot of myself in him and for him to get that touchdown tonight, it really made me happy for him,” he said.

At the start of the game, Towson recognized seniors Erron Banks, Frank Beltre, Alex Blake, Booker, Jordan Dangerfield, Enders, Kirby, Matt Morgan, Ryan, Gerrard Sheppard, Romale Tucker, Brian Boateng and Ben Chroniger.

“All of us came together,” Booker said. “There’s only four of us that came with the original class with Gordy and we made it here and we stayed strong together. The guys coming in, like Tom came in that next year, Grant coming in last year, Shepp and all of these guys coming through, it’s just a great feeling, you get rejoicing. It’s just a blessing to get to play with these guys.”

Four of the seniors scored touchdowns for the Tigers.

“To be honest, we were just running the plays and it just ended up working [that the seniors scored],” Enders said. “Those guys got open and I’m happy that those were the seniors who were making those plays, so it definitely made it a little better.”

Towson will close out the regular season when it travels to first-in-the-CAA New Hampshire (9-1, 6-1 CAA) Saturday. Kickoff is set for noon.