Southeast’s football team returned home for the season as they faced Southern Illinois University in front of 7,025 fans at Houck Field on Sept. 16 during the blackout game.

Southeast came out strong for the first three minutes of the game as the defense forced Southern Illinois to fumble on the first play of the game which resulted in a Southeast field goal by junior kicker Nicholas Litang. After the field goal, it was all Southern Illinois in the first half as they rushed for 26 yards and passed for 193 yards on only 10 complete passes.

Even though Southern Illinois pulled away in the first half, senior cornerback Mike Ford said that the game never really got away from them.

“I felt like it was more of us shooting ourselves in the foot,” Ford said. “We had a roughing the snapper, and if you take that away, except the momentum going to them with it being 7-3, it’s 3-3.”

After the first half, Southern Illinois was leading Southeast 28-10. Southeast only had 93 passing yards and 69 rushing yards.

In the second half, Southeast’s defense locked down and only allowed Southern Illinois to score one touchdown. Ford said that with the defense making big plays in the second half, it shows that they won’t give up.

“Every game that we have had, we’ve finished, and that’s our biggest key. It’s always about finishing strong,” Ford said. “Now we just have to get the key component back to starting off strong.”

Southeast ended up scoring one more time before the end of that game on freshman wide receiver Zack Smith’s first career touchdown on a 12-yard pass from senior quarterback Jesse Hosket.

Southeast lost 35-17 to Southern Illinois, rushed for a total of 112 yards and passed for 166 yards on 20 pass completions.

Southeast’s head coach Tom Matukewicz said the most frustrating part of the game were the 13 penalties, which lead to losing 143 yards.

“No player walks out there and tries to make a mistake or tries to make a penalty,” Matukewicz said. “It comes down to just building skill. If you’re young, one of the worst things that can happen is your mind. Just all of a sudden you panic and you make a poor decision whether you hold a guy or [pass interference]. We just need to get their skill built so they feel better about where they’re at on the play.”

Matukewicz thinks that the offense did better but they just need to fix the mistakes.

“I think if you try to find a silver lining, you can see we are playing better offense,” Matukewicz said. “Turnovers definitely hurt us and we played better in the red zone. We’ve been harping on points and if we can get that cleaned up I feel like we can eventually get our point totals in the high 20’s.”

Southeast’s offense has only scored a total of 24 points in the first half of the first three games. Senior offensive tackle Alex Snyder said that they have to do their job and not set themselves back in order to win games.

“We had some really key penalties in the first half that stopped drives. We had some breakdowns in protection that stopped drives,” Snyder said. “We just have to do our job completely and just play our ball, play SEMO’s game.”

Ford said that Southeast just has to better themselves if they want to be able to compete in close games.

“We can’t beat ourselves and that’s what we mainly focus on,” Ford said. “We have to beat SEMO and we have to be a better team and everyone has to get better as an individual.”

Southeast’s next game will be Sept. 23 at Eastern Illinois to open up Ohio Valley Conference play.