The UND football team will look to claim its first road success this weekend when it travels to Eastern Washington.

Eastern Washington is touting a 7-2 record, and hopes to rebound after a loss in the final seconds to Northern Arizona last week.

For UND, the week will be gut check time. After a dismal first half last weekend against Southern Utah, where UND could only muster a field goal, it came out in the second half to score 14 points on two drives by backup quarterback Ryan Bartels.

Utah eventually put the game away early in the fourth quarter, and UND coach Bubba Schweigert sees much room for improvement.

“The challenge for us is to score points and to finish drives,” he said. “We get into games in the fourth quarter that we don’t want to be in, we had to throw it a little bit more than we like, because we were down two scores.”

For UND to be successful against a nationally ranked Eastern Washington team, Schweigert said he believes his guys need to stay consistent to the run, a task that may not be out of reach playing a team that so far has relinquished 174.7 rush yards per game this season.

Jer Garmen, who rushed for 102 yard on 25 attempts and two touchdowns is up to the challenge this weekend.

“When we put together the start to a good drive, we can’t have drive enders, things that kill drives,” Garmen said. “It’s an opportunity — a good opportunity for our team to take another step.”

This weekend will also see a different quarterback under center for UND. On Sunday night, Schweigert announced Joe Mollberg will be out for the season after injuring his right Achilles tendon.

Mollberg played through eight games this season, going 78 of 143 passes, posting 919 yards and three touchdowns.

The task of replacing Mollberg falls on the shoulders of Ryan Bartels.

Bartels, a sophomore from Illinois, got four starts last season, leading UND to two wins, having 116 completions out of 190 attempts and 1,396 yards.

“Ryan is going to have a different week this week,” Schweigert said. “He will be getting number one reps and moving forward that way. It’s not an ideal situation for us, with our quarterback numbers and the experience we have at that position, but we have to deal with it.”

The defense hopes to rebound after giving up a number of big plays last weekend. Before this last weekend they had played well, cutting down on a majority of mental mistakes and playing consistent.

The defense looks to have a big outing like it did against Montana earlier in the year, and keep making strides forward.

Kyle Beauchamp is a staff writer for The Dakota Student. He can be reached at [email protected].