MACON, Ga. — Jaylen King threw for a touchdown and Cameron Goggins had an interception return for a touchdown and Mercer held off East Texas A&M 23-15 in a season opener on Saturday night.<\/p>\n
The Bears enter the season ranked 21st in the Stats Perform FCS Top 25 poll.<\/p>\n
Simon Zeidan opened the scoring with a 55-yard field goal to put Mercer up 3-0.<\/p>\n
Before the end of the first, King threw a 12-yard touchdown to Jackson Kostmayer for a 10-0 lead. Zeidan added field goals of 21 and 33 yards to extend the lead to 16-0 with 30 seconds before halftime.<\/p>\n
Fifteen seconds later, Eric Rodriguez threw a 38-yard pick-6 to Goggins for a 23-point lead.<\/p>\n
The Lions got on the scoreboard when Rodriguez threw a 48-yard touchdown to Micah Simpson with 2:01 left in the third. They closed to within 23-15 when Quay Middlebrooks ended an 80-yard drive running into the end zone from the 9. Rodriguez ran it in for the two-point conversion.<\/p>\n
East Texas A&M turned it over on downs with 35 seconds, when on 4th-and-goal at the Mercer 9, Rodriguez threw high over the head of wide open Jake Whitehead and the Bears killed the clock.<\/p>\n
Simpson caught nine passes for 165 yards and a touchdown for the Lions.<\/p>\n
\u2014-<\/p>\n
Sign up for Top 25 poll alerts here<\/a>, visit the Top 25 here<\/a> and see AP\u2019s full college football coverage here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MACON, Ga. — Jaylen King threw for a touchdown and Cameron Goggins had an interception return for a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":420828,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[261,416,300,154,27,29,28],"class_list":["post-420827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-college-football","tag-college-sports","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=420827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420827\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/420828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=420827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=420827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=420827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}