Rugby is a team game, but the presence or absence of one player can have an impact.

That seems to be the case for Davenport. While the Panthers are a strong collegiate team overall, and have enjoyed some solid play from a number of quarters, it is also evident that the presence of JP Eloff can help them at flyhalf. Eloff wasn’t perfect Saturday against Life University, but has pretty good - kicking for goal, making line breaks, setting up line breaks, and scoring tries. 

His presence helped spur Davenport to almost beating Life University, GRR’s #1-ranked team in the nation.

But they didn’t win the game, losing 28-25 on a penalty at the end of regulation. What could have created a victory? Well, it didn’t help that Angus MacLellan, the team’s captain and prop, who is right in the USA mix. A player of that level, especially at prop, can make a difference.

“It’s hard to say,” said Davenport Head Coach James Wood when asked if MacLellan’s presence would have meant a victory for his team. “Obviously he gives us a bit of an extra punch in the scrum. He’s a smart player. One of their drive-over players might have turned out differently had he been in there because he has a sense of how those drives go and reads things well.”

But at the same time, Wood said that prop Brandon Bokhart “played his butt off. He’s not a close of Angus, but he did his job and for a guy who primarily comes off the bench, he played all 80 minutes and played well.”

So was that enough difference? Eloff played well but perhaps tried to get tries out of everything early on. Bokhart played well, but MacLellan is a potential national team player. Eloff and MacLellan are two of the best players at their position in collegiate rugby. Certainly the presence of one helped put Davenport in a position to win; the absence of the other could easily have been the difference in the game.

Wood didn’t worry about it, and maybe since his squad just rode their defense to a road defeat of Arkansas State, he knows his team can now compete with anyone.

“It was a fun game to coach,” said Wood. “The first 20 minutes or so we didn’t play our best rugby. We were too revved up and we made some errors in ball-handling and decision-making. But we settled in and started to run our structures and we had some success. We knew our game fitness would be a bit of an Achilles heel for us, and it was.”

Wood said he was proud of his team’s defensive effort, and while they didn’t quite click offensively late in the game, that was prtly a fitness issue.

“Overall, we’re not happy we lost, but it was a pretty positive result for us.”