The University of Maine football team hasn’t played a game in 16 months.
That means the team’s focus is on its March 6 season opener at Delaware.
The Black Bears received good news on Tuesday as they’ll be allowed to play their three Colonial Athletic Association home games in Orono this spring. Those begins with a March 13 game against Albany.
UMaine on Sunday held its only full scrimmage of the preseason as head coach Nick Charlton and his staff tried to get his team acclimated to game conditions.
The 2020 season was postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning the Black Bear players haven’t faced an opponent since dropping a season-ending 28-10 contest at the University of New Hampshire on Nov. 23, 2019.
UMaine posted a 6-6 record (4-4 in the CAA) that season.
Charlton said his team got a lot out of the scrimmage, which included 86 plays from scrimmage.
“There were little things like the play clock, moving the ball, the different situations you’re in. When we have to go into the [Mahaney Dome] due to weather, we’re only able to have half the team in there due to regulations,” Charlton said. “So we needed to tackle, we needed to break tackles. We needed to see guys operate in a live setting.”
“We needed to use substitutions, move defensive packages in and out, move offensive personnel,” he said. “We punted, we kicked field goals, we had kickoffs and kickoff returns. We tried to squeeze in everything we could.”
UMaine also replicated the game conditions under the state’s coronavirus protocols, which include a maximum of four pods of 50 people who are socially distanced.
Among the highlights was the play of the offensive line, which he called encouraging.
“It’s one of the first times since I’ve been here that we have considerable depth there and we’ll have more in the fall,” Charlton said. “We have 16 guys who are all healthy and we’re getting better every day. We ran the ball really well, and it all begins with the offensive line.”
Charlton praised the performances turned in by defensive linemen Josh Lezin, a sophomore, and Austin Chambers, a graduate student who transferred to UMaine after playing three seasons at Brigham Young University.
Lezin was UMaine’s defensive rookie of the year in 2019.
The Black Bears will have 20-22 practices between full- and half-team workouts leading up to the Delaware game, which is the norm for a typical fall season. He also stressed the importance to give the players some days off for their mental health.
“We will take some lumps because some younger guys are going to step into new roles. But every team goes through that, especially now that we’re having a spring season, which is unprecedented. You’ve got to be creative and figure it out,” Charlton said.