After watching his team get outscored 35-0 in the opening quarter of its first three games, one wouldn’t blame Georgetown Head Coach Kevin Kelly if he lined his Hoyas up in the Fitton Field parking lot an hour early for a full-contact scrimmage before Saturday’s crusade against Holy Cross.

But in hopes of seeing his team get a better start out of the blocks, Kelly has switched gears from his usual full-throttle approach.

“What I will do this week is talk about relaxing, playing the game like it’s already the second quarter, just go out there and let it all hang out,” Kelly said Thursday morning. “The theme this week is `start fast, finish strong.’ We can’t get down 14-0 and expect to win a football game.”

So how does the uber-intense Kelly – whose practices begin promptly at 6 a.m. each morning – define “relaxed?”

“Uhhhh.you can tell the difference a little bit,” senior quarterback Matt Bassuener said with a laugh, apparently unaware of this week’s casual atmosphere. “He jokes around a little bit.”

In preparing for his team’s second Patriot League contest, Kelly and his staff have cut down on the X’s and O’s and told the team to play fast and let their instincts carry them to victory.

Keeping it simple will be the key on both sides of the ball this week. For a defense faced with stopping an air-it-out Crusader passing attack ranked second in Division I-AA, it means not giving up the big one.

“Our main concern is to not let anything get behind us,” senior defensive back Michael Shotwell said. “If they want to pick up two to three yards every pass play, that’s fine with us. We just don’t want them getting a long one on us.”

For an offense ranked first in league passing efficiency but dead last in scoring, it means finding a steady consistency.

“Getting in a hole early, that’s just as much offense as it is defense,” senior quarterback Matt Bassuener said. “When you don’t get your defense a break, that’s not good.”

Last week against Yale, the Hoya offense stalled on each of its first four drives, resulting in two Mike McLeod touchdown runs. But Bassuener calmed his wild horses later in the game, tossing two touchdowns and controlling the ball for the rest of the game.

Bassuener’s 25-yard pitch to senior wideout Brent Craft in the second quarter showed the offenses’ quick-strike potential. But the Hoyas proceeded to bog themselves down in a red zone quagmire, and emerged with no points to show for their trouble.

“We have to work on finishing drives,” Craft, who snagged six balls in the 28-14 loss, said. “Last week, we had some opportunities we let go to waste. We have to start fast and finish.”

Bassuener, the Patriot League’s most efficient passer, will have to be on target from the get-go against an experienced Holy Cross secondary that boasts senior captains Obi Green and Casey Gough.

“They have a pretty good defense; that whole secondary is made up of veterans,” Bassuener said. “So that’s a challenge for me, personally.”

Shotwell, who had three tackles including a tackle for a loss last Saturday, knows that the Hoyas’ defense has to stop the Patriot League’s top passer Dominic Randolph from the start, or risk getting strafed all day long. Randolph, who leads the league with 317.5 yards per game, blasted Harvard for 339 yards and four touchdowns in a 31-28 win last week in Worcester, and the Crusader pass catchers may be the conference’s most seasoned corps of wide outs. Six different receivers have been a recipient of one of Randolph’s tight spirals, and senior Ryan Maher is the league’s leading returning receiver. Try as they might, Shotwell and the secondary can’t do the job without some help from their friends along the front line.

“They put the ball up what? Sixty times a game?” senior defensive end Nnamdi Obiako said. “Getting pressure on the quarterback will be very important. We really need to help out the secondary.”

Georgetown weathered the two-game gauntlet of Lafayette and Yale better than expected. Obiako believes that if their tortoise start had been more like their hare finish, the Hoyas might have pulled off an upset or two.

“We played a good game [against Yale],” Obiako said, adding that the team’s up-tempo practices will benefit them come Saturday afternoon. “But if we play like that from the start, we would have been a lot better off.”

While proud of his young team, Kelly knows they aren’t out of the woods quite yet.

“Holy cross just beat Harvard, which is one of the top teams in the Ivy League,” Kelly said. “When I saw that, I said, `Oh boy, we got our hands full again.'”

Kick-off comes at 1 p.m. Saturday at Fitton Field in Worcester, ass.