Delaware's Danny Rocco Prepares To Face Familiar Opponent

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- The Delaware Blue Hens will look for a third straight Colonial Athletic Association victory on Saturday when they welcome the #11 Richmond Spiders to town.

Delaware improved to 4-2 on the season (2-1 CAA) this past Saturday with a 17-0 home win over William & Mary. The Delaware defense held the Tribe to 196 yards of offense and forced three turnovers.

"We got off to a good start," Delaware head coach Danny Rocco tells KYW Newsradio. "Our players did a great job of just doing what we're coaching them to do. They fit all the schemes, William and Mary has always done an outstanding job of scheming its opponents. They have a number of different blocking patterns that they used against us and against our defense and some pass concepts that we've seen before. Our coaches did a really good of prepping our players and our players did a really good job in responding. But what we really did was brought an awful lot of energy and a lot of passion."

J.P. Caruso made his first start of the season at quarterback for Delaware in the win over the Tribe and finished 7 of 20 throwing the football for 78 yards and a touchdown.

This Richmond team (4-2, 2-1 CAA) that will visit Newark on Saturday will be quite familiar to Rocco and for a pretty good reason. Rocco spent five very successful seasons leading the Spiders before taking the job with the Blue Hens. He talks about preparing to face a team that he used to coach.

"Yeah, it's odd," he says. "It's good, though, because of that familiarity. Usually when you are starting your preparation at the beginning of the week, you know you have to have your flip card out, you're looking at the roster and you're trying to squint to see is that #11 or is that #19. You're just trying to figure all that out. For us, it's been easy to see and kind of easy to figure out. We can almost recognize just by body type, even stance and posture, who they are. It's kind of neat. They're great kids and we had a really good run and they are certainly continuing that run there now as they are off to a really fast start."

Last year the Rocco-led Spiders beat Delaware in Richmond, 31-17.

Saturday's game gets underway at 3:30pm.