ULL bowl eligible after win over Middle Tennessee

• By DAN MCDONALD
• Special to The Advocate
• Published: Dec 4, 2008 - Page: 1C - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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LAFAYETTE — All Louisiana-Lafayette needed was its backs to the wall.

And it didn’t hurt that Michael Desormeaux was as healthy as he’s been since the mid-point of the Ragin’ Cajuns’ roller-coaster season.

The Cajun football squad, needing a regular season-ending win to snap a three-game losing streak and reach bowl eligibility, loosened the reins on the injury-plagued senior quarterback here Wednesday night. The result was a 42-28 victory over Middle Tennessee that may extend ULL’s season by one bowl game.

Desormeaux, hobbling since a knee injury suffered in mid-October, completed 18-of-25 passes for 243 yards and four touchdowns in leading the Cajuns to their important sixth win of the season in the regionally televised affair.

“I hope that wasn’t his last game,” said Cajuns coach Rickey Bustle, whose team is hoping for an at-large bowl selection when those invitations are extended this weekend. “He has the heart of a lion … a champion. And it helped that he was in better shape than a lot of the games we played previously.”

Ironically, on a night when the New Iberia product became the eighth quarterback in NCAA history to record back-to-back 1,000-yard rushing seasons, it was his left arm that bedeviled the Blue Raiders. He found four different receivers with his touchdown passes, the last three coming in the game’s final 21 minutes and two of them in the last 11:06 when ULL broke loose from a 28-all tie.

He also hit on eight of his last 10 passes, including a game-capping 37-yard strike to Louis Lee with 6:43 left when Desormeaux lined up at a wide receiver slot and took a reverse lateral from Jason Chery before lofting the clincher.

“I’ve never had to do anything like this, play hurt for an extended period of time,” Desormeaux said. “Fortunately, my teammates picked me up. For some reason we hadn’t found a way to play well the last few Saturdays … tonight we were able to turn it on and get it done.”

The win averted a late-season meltdown for the Cajun squad, which lost its previous three games by a total of 69 points after winning four in a row at mid-season. The win also kept alive ULL’s hopes of a share of the Sun Belt Conference title, which they can claim if Arkansas State wins at Troy on Saturday.

At worst, the Cajuns (6-6) will wind up in sole possession of second place in the league, and are in contention for their first bowl appearance since the 1970 Grantland Rice Bowl in Baton Rouge. Bowl invitations will be officially announced following this weekend’s final release of the BCS standings.

“I’m going to stick with what I said earlier in the week,” Bustle said. “I thought that the winner of this game would get to a bowl game. I hope that I’m correct.”

Middle Tennessee (5-7), which entered the game on a three-game win streak after a 2-6 start, had hoped to secure one of the Sun Belt’s contingency bowl slots, possibly the Dec. 29 Papajohns.com Bowl in Birmingham, Ala.

“I thought we were able to move the ball pretty consistently the whole game,” said MTSU coach Rick Stockstill. “When it got to a two-score game late, we couldn’t be as consistent running the ball like we had been.”