In front of a decent crowd, the Miners debuted their new team to conclude their spring season, as the Orange beat Blue 20-13 in the Sun Bowl on Friday night.
Kai Locksley led the way on offense, completing 11-of-17 passes for 119 yards, and Walter Dawn was the top receiver with five catches for 75 yards.
Mark Torrez, Alex Fernandes and Calvin Brownholtz all threw for TD’s, and Ryan Metz scored on a 15-yard run.
“The guys have got a lot to work on, obviously, but I thought we had a really good scrimmage,” head coach Dana Dimel said. “When I say a lot to work on, it doesn’t stop here. It just keeps progressing. But overall I was very, very pleased with the scrimmage and very pleased with what they did. I love the attitude and the effort was fantastic. The things they’ve got to work on now, are getting in the weight room and finishing up the academics very hard these next couple of weeks going into finals.”
The quarterbacks finished with good managing numbers for the offense. Brownholtz completed 8-for-14 passes for 67 yards, Metz 4-for-9 for 66 yards, Fernandes 5-for-11 for 66 yards and Torrez 8-for-12 for 62 yards.
Another big weapon for the offense was receiver Warren Redix, who finished with 56 yards on seven catches, Lucero caught five for 55 yards and Eddie Sinegal had two receptions for 48 yards.
“I wanted to see good tackling and I saw really good tackling tonight,” Dimel said. “That’s what I was really, really pleased about. The defense didn’t miss many tackles at all. They had restrictions on them about tackling high. Normally when you have those types of restrictions, you’re going to see some missed tackles. But I didn’t see that today. And I saw all five quarterbacks get a chance to do some good things and all of them showed some nice things today. So that’s encouraging for the future to build some depth. Obviously, we split the reps up so everybody could play in the game tonight and that was cool too, for the parents and the fans to get to see everybody play.”
Now UTEP football will prepare for its season opener at the top of September.
