"Goliath has been slain". On September 27, 1977, the UB Men's Soccer Team pulled off one of the biggest upsets in UB sports history, defeating the #7 ranked team in the country, Cleveland State, by a score of 2–1, at Rotary Field on the Main Street campus.
The UB Soccer team opened the 1977 season with a 1–1 record, losing to Niagara 4–3 and then shutting out Syracuse 4–0. The Bulls were next scheduled to face #7 Cleveland State, who were 4–0 on the season so far. Earlier in that season, Cleveland State had upset St. Louis, the #2 ranked team in the country, by a score of 1–0. And one year earlier, Cleveland State had defeated the Bulls 13–0, a loss which stands to this day as the worst loss ever by a UB Men's Soccer team.
The Bulls opened the scoring against Cleveland State early on, as attacker Mark Karrer, an All-New York State player, scored off a rebound off of the Cleveland State goalie. The play had been set up on a long pass from fullback Mike Allan to winger Steve Feeney, who got off the original shot on the play.
About six minutes later, at 11:21 of the first half, the Bulls took a 2–0 lead. Feeney made a perfect pass to attacker Luis Azcue, who was able to break away from the defense and score high over the goalie's arms. Cleveland State was unable to score in the first half, as two of their best attempts went wide.
In the second half, the game plan was to protect the lead. One of the keys to the Bulls successful defense was that they switched to playing four men on defense, instead of their usual three. The Vikings came out on fire in the second half, and peppered UB goalie Mark Celeste with shot after shot, but Celeste was up to the task and made a number of brilliant saves. Cleveland State would score off of a rebound at 59:21 to cut the Bulls lead to 2–1. With the Vikings attacking relentlessly, it was up to Celeste to bar the door, which he did for the remainder of the game. On one play, Celeste had to stop a Cleveland State attack after a shot ricocheted off the goal post directly to a Vikings player. Shortly thereafter, Celeste had to stop a breakaway, and the Bulls hung on for an electrifying upset.
"I'm very ecstatic", Buffalo coach Sal Esposito said after the game. "We had everything to gain and nothing to lose ... We kept our cool and didn't get rattled. This was very important in that it helped us protect the one-goal lead".
The Bulls would go on to finish an unremarkable 6–6–1 that season. After the season ended, a newsletter clipping could be seen on one of the doors of Clark Hall (the athletic department building) at UB that showed Cleveland State had finished the season ranked second in the nation with a 14–1 record. Someone at UB had circled the number 1 in Cleveland State's record and wrote "UB" next to that 1.
During the regular season, only twice did the Vikings allow two goals in a single game. In the NCAA tournament Sweet 16, the Vikings defeated St. Louis again, but in the Elite 8, they lost 3–2 to SIU Edwardsville, in triple overtime.
Esposito, who was in his fifth year as the Bulls soccer coach in 1977, would coach the Bulls for 16 years, compiling a 108–105–21 record.
The Spectrum covered the game on the front page of the September 30, 2025 edition. It was extremely rare for a sports event to make the front page of The Spectrum, but this game was given a huge amount of space. The story, written by Michael Rudny, began with two memorable sentences:
Goliath has been slain.
The soccer Bulls picked up their slingshot on Tuesday, fired it at the seventh best soccer team in the nation, and then hung on for dear life.
Unfortunately, the headline on the story was unbelievably weak. In those days, the headline was written by the production staff, and not the author of the story. The headline writer's primary task was to fill up the allotted space, without going over, and on this occasion, it didn't seem like the headline writers really read the story (not an unusual occurrence). The headline read "Soccer Bulls kick their way to victory".
The entire story in The Spectrum can be read here.