The James I. O’Neill Raiders are a young football team and have made plenty of mistakes.

They added up to a 26-0 loss to the John S. Burke Catholic Eagles on Saturday in a non-league football game at John S. Burke Catholic High School in Goshen.

“We’re a young and inexperienced team,” O’Neill coach David Moskowitz said. “We competed with them. We had our chances. We made mistakes. It’s what’s going to happen. This team is just going to get better as we go along. They show. They compete. We’re going to be all right if we keep working at it in practice.”

Most of the trouble came on the offensive side of the football and started on the first drive.

On a fourth-and-one, the ball was snapped over the head of quarterback Mathias Williams’ head.

Williams also threw an interception.
“We’ll be all right,” Moskowitz said.

“We’re in a different system. We were in a spread system. We don’t have experience at quarterback. We’re in a brand-new system. We’re learning what to do.”

That gave the Eagles a short field with the ball on the Raiders’ 36-yard line. Three players later, Burke’s Joshua Fiorello scored on a 5-yard run, set up by a 29-yard run by Justin Mazzie.

The Eagles converted a two-point pass to take an 8-0 lead.

A low punt in the third quarter led to a touchdown run and conversion by Mazzie in the third quarter and a safety in the fourth.

Liam Gralton ran for a 60-yard touchdown in the second quarter.
Outside of that, the defense also stopped the Raiders inside the 10-yard line twice.

“The defense played fantastic,” Moskowitz said. “We gave up a couple of big plays, but they had two goal-line stands, which was great.”

It was a shaky first game of the season for the Raiders, but they went back to the drawing board this week as they prepared for their home opener on Friday night against the Spackenkill Spartans.

“I hope they take that number one, every little mistake comes back and hurts you,” Moskowitz said. “We don’t have the game breaker talent that we’ve had in the past, where it’s going to change things. Everything has to be done right. So, it’s always one mistake here and one mistake there. That happened to us in the scrimmage. It’s like death by 1,000 different cuts.”