With last season’s dis­mal 1–10 cam­paign in the past, the Bulldog foot­ball team comes into the 2010 sea­son with renewed hope and a chip on its shoulder.

Coming into this sea­son ranked 11^th out of 14 teams in the 2010 GLIAC Preseason Coaches Poll, you would not expect a one-win team to come into a new sea­son with such opti­mism. Head coach Jeff Pierce believes that the sting of last year has moti­vated his team to come out and prove the crit­ics wrong.

“When you get knocked on your butt like we did last year, stay­ing down is not an option,” said Pierce. “We had some guys in the pro­gram last year that may have not been com­mit­ted to this team, so we’ve trimmed that dead weight and I really feel like the guys we have here are ready to get back on track and turn this around.”

Though the mem­ory of last sea­son serves as a moti­vat­ing fac­tor for the team, much of the opti­mism for this sea­son comes from the addi­tion of new offen­sive coor­di­na­tor Chris Boden. His wide-open scheme has been com­pared to the sys­tem that for­mer Texas Tech coach Mike Leech made famous.

“I think it’s a really good offense that gets every­body involved and I think that we’ll be putting up some big plays,” said senior receiver Chris Wilson. “We’re going to be pretty wide open this year and I think we’ve been mesh­ing dur­ing this offseason.”

With Wilson lead­ing a receiv­ing core that also returns junior receivers Aaron Olman and Mike Ryan, the Bulldogs will look to junior quar­ter­back Tom Schneider to get the ball to his play­mak­ers and to run coach Boden’s new offense.

“The sys­tem is pretty user-friendly and it seems like Tom is really com­fort­able in the sys­tem right now,” said Pierce. “He’s going into his third year and I think that just hav­ing that expe­ri­ence is help­ing him pick up the sys­tem and he’s really start­ing to make progress.”

While much of the off­sea­son atten­tion has been on the offen­sive changes, the defense hopes to be an improved unit that looks to take advan­tage of hav­ing some key play­ers return­ing while also pro­vid­ing lead­er­ship for the team.

“The most lead­er­ship is com­ing from the defense right now and I think that will help out the entire team,” said Wilson.

Among the return­ing lead­ers for the defense, senior line­backer Matt Ryan will look to build off of his break­through sea­son last year, as he reg­is­tered a team-leading 124 tack­les along with 2.5 sacks and two fum­ble recov­er­ies. Joining Ryan will be senior safety Chad Wilson, who missed the 2009 sea­son because of an injury, and senior defen­sive tackle Jacob Moreno, who tal­lied 49 tack­les and 6.5 tack­les for loss in 2009 on his way to being named an ALL-GLIAC hon­or­able men­tion honoree.

With some key lead­ers return­ing to the defense, Pierce feels that the defense will help lead the turn­around for the team.

“We’ve got a lot of team speed and we’ve got some good vet­er­ans here that have really stepped up and are lead­ing not only our defense, but the entire team,” said Pierce.

Although there is a sense of opti­mism sur­round­ing the 2010 Bulldog foot­ball team, the team will get tested early in the sea­son as it opens the sea­son on the road at Hillsdale for a non-conference bat­tle on Sept. 3. Ferris will then face off against Saginaw Valley State in the home opener on Sept. 11. Hillsdale and Saginaw Valley State enter the 2010 sea­son tied for sec­ond in the GLIAC Preseason Coaches Poll.

With a poten­tially chal­leng­ing start to the sea­son, the team knows that a turn­around will have to come one game at a time.

“It’s crit­i­cal that we get our bugs worked out early, but we can only take it one game at a time,” said Pierce. “I think that if we play to our poten­tial out of the blocks against Hillsdale, we’ll be able to get our con­fi­dence going off the bat. But you never know until you go toe-to-toe with some­one else.” n