After opening its Mid-American Conference season with a home loss, the BG men’s soccer team has had an entire week off to prepare for its second conference game.

The Falcons had won three straight games, all shutouts, before losing to Akron on an early penalty kick goal 1-0.

Now the Falcons are looking to get refocused and take care of business for the rest of MAC play, beginning with Buffalo on Saturday.

“MAC play is the most important part of the season, so it’s the only thing we really care about,” senior Danny Baraldi said. “We’re just worried about Buffalo, so if we take care of business during the week it will help set us up real good for Saturday night.”

Buffalo has 12 goals over 12 games for the season, with eight coming after the first half.

This will force the Falcons to continue strong play for a complete 90 minutes, something that they aren’t worried about doing.

“I think we get better as the game goes on too, so that’s not really something that scares us,” Baraldi said. “We haven’t given up very many goals in general this year, so we’re not too worried about them. If we play our game and stick to our game plan then we’ll be alright.”

While the Falcons are focused on playing their style of soccer, Buffalo seems to have a knack for doing the impossible.

Whether it’s goals from distance, or converting chances late in the game, the Bulls have found ways to stick around.

“I think they sort of have a flare for the dramatic,” head coach Eric Nichols said. “They’ve scored some funky goals including one from half-field in overtime.”

The Falcons are aware that Buffalo presents challenges that are different from any other team this season, Nichols said.

This isn’t too concerning for the defense because they are a confident defense that likes to defend, knowing that either Ryan [Heuton] or Nick [Landsberger] are capable of getting shutouts, redshirt sophomore Ryan Heuton said.

However, the team understands that no matter how good their defense plays against the Buffalo attack, they must be able to convert their own chances to give themselves a chance to win.

With just three goals over the past five games, the offense has been a cause for concern for the Falcons.

They have been creating multiple chances in the final third, but have been unable to match their early-season success, failing to consistently put them into the back of the net.

While discouraging for the Falcons, they understand that their competition has been much stronger as of late.

“We scored a whole bunch early on and we haven’t scored as much here lately, but we’ve been playing some pretty good opponents,” Nichols said. “I’d like to score more goals for sure, but I’m not going to change anything. We just need to score them.”

The players recognize that the chances are coming for them as well, but they need to be more refined technically in order to finish them.

“We’ve been getting chances, we just haven’t been putting them away,” Baraldi said. “We’re just trying to do what we’ve been doing all year because it’s been working for us, we just can’t mess up the little things. We have to stay composed and just work on the technical aspect of putting the ball in the net.”

As the Falcons sit at 9-3 on the season, there hasn’t been too much to gripe about.

However, they understand that MAC play will continue to offer a much different style of soccer than they saw during the early-season schedule.

“It doesn’t matter what a record is when you get into the MAC. Anything that’s happened before, you can just throw out the window,” Nichols said. “Teams will play different than they did during the non-conference schedule, so we’re just trying to win our next game.”

The Falcons will take on the Bulls on Saturday again in the friendly confines of Cochrane Field without much change.

The team remains focused and confident that if they play their best soccer, they will get the results they want.

The team will take their game against Buffalo as the first step in proving that they can win any game when they’re playing their best.

“We know we can play with any team in the country,” Heuton said. “We’re just going to keep trying to get better so we can start winning those big games.”