By MONTE DUTTON

Presbyterian College couldn’t possibly win its first two games. It began the season with upsets of Mercer and Furman.

PC couldn’t possibly lose its next two games. Nope. The Hose throttled Erskine, 42-14, then demolished Bluefield, 76-3, on Saturday at Bailey Memorial Stadium.

Gracious sakes alive. Great Caesar’s ghost. Merciful God. Presbyterian (4-0) hasn’t had a winning season since the COVID spring of 2021. It hasn’t had a successful fall campaign since 2014.

The Blue Hose sat on a halftime lead. It was 57-3. The clock ran 12 minutes in each of the final two quarters, during which PC managed a mere 19 points.

Dating back to last season, PC has won eight straight games, which is merely the country’s longest active FCS streak.

So what is Steve Englehart to say? He was 1-10 his first season. Now it’s his fourth, and he’s 4-0. No PC team has started 4-0 since 1959. Even I was one.

Presbyterian is South Carolina’s only remaining undefeated Division I college football team. There hasn’t been this much reciting to do about the Blue Hose since Cally Gault held the reins.

Englehart thought his team played better against the NAIA school than it did against Division II Erskine.

“It doesn’t matter [whom] you play,” he said. “It matters how you play.

“A football season has four phases. You have your preseason camp and your preseason schedule, and you have your proper schedule. You hope the postseason is the fourth phase.”

The next weeks are all fitting and proper because now arrives the eight-week stretch of Pioneer Football League games, beginning with a visit from Morehead (Ky.) State (2-2) to Bailey Memorial Stadium on Saturday afternoon at 1.

“It’s going to change,” said Englehart. “There’s going to be more parity in the competition. It’s got to be a reset and a refocus.”
Presbyterian piled up nearly four times as many first downs, rushing yards and passing yards. The defense limited Bluefield (1-2) to two third-down conversions in 15 tries.

In the first half, Presbyterian scored eight touchdowns and a field goal, averaging 10.3 yards a play.

Collin Hurst took a well-deserved rest for most of the second half after completing 15/18 passes for 287 yards and four touchdowns. Ty Englehart was 4/7 for 33 yards and two more scores.

Justin Montgomery, a, sophomore who, like Hurst, is from Davie, Fla. rushed for 76 yards in only six carries. One was a 61-yarder for PC’s longest play of the season to date.

Caleb Francis, a senior from Jacksonville, Fla., recorded his seventh career interception, tying Justin Bethel and Ed Britt for the school’s modern (Division I) record..

Bluefield averaged 1.8 yards per rush and three yards per passing attempt. The schools have similar colors, but telling them apart was easy.

“We’ve come too far as a program to go backwards now,” Englehart said.

Take a look at the stats here. The scoring summary is a bit like the old Johnny Cash song, “One Piece at a Time.” To type it up took the whole staff, and when they got through, the title weighed 60 pounds.

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