sutomcat
No recent Cali or Iggy awards; Mr Irrelevant
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Welcome to The Start of Hanukkah!
Hanukkah, which is the Hebrew word for "dedication," is a Jewish celebration that lasts eight days and eight nights. It commemorates the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, where, according to Jewish belief, a miracle occurred that allowed oil to light a menorah for eight days, when there only was enough oil for one day. The holiday begins on a different day each year, as it follows the lunisolar Jewish calendar, not the Gregorian calendar. It starts on the 25th day of the Jewish month of Kislev, which usually falls between late November and late December.
Around 200 BCE, Judea—or the land of Israel—came under the control of Antiochus III, the Seleucid King of Syria. When his son Antiochus IV Epiphanes took over, he outlawed the Jewish religion—making its adherence punishable by death—and ordered followers of the religion to worship Greek gods. In 168 BCE, his soldiers came to Jerusalem and massacred thousands of people, put an altar to Zeus in the Second Temple, and allowed pigs to be sacrificed in it. A rebellion was led by the Jewish priest Mattathias and his five sons. When Mattathias died shortly thereafter, his son Judah Maccabee became the leader, and helped drive the Syrians out of Jerusalem in two years—the rebels were victorious in 165 BCE.
SU News
How does SU get better in 2022? Start with not finishing last in the ACC in passing for 3rd year in a row (PS; Carlson)
Syracuse head coach Dino Babers ticked through the areas where he thought the SU football team showed promise this season.
Running the ball. Defense.
Then came the long pause. Followed by the obvious.
Syracuse’s ceiling next season, seemingly a make-or-break one for Babers, will be determined by how well it’s able to replace its starting defensive line, improve its special teams and, most obviously, whether it can develop a passing offense that doesn’t finish last in the ACC for a third consecutive season.
“I think we’ve got a defense that can play,” Babers said following SU’s 31-14 season-ending loss to Pittsburgh. “We have to be more consistent. I think we’ve found a rushing attack.
“I think we need to have an opportunity to be able to throw the ball to match that so we can become more balanced and unpredictable. ... I think we need to go back and rebuild. This football team that we played is a good run-stop defense. What they were giving us were massive throws all over the football field that we need to be able to take advantage of.”
That task, as Syracuse has proven over the final four weeks of the season and over the course of the past two years, might not have a simple solution. It probably won’t be fixed by focusing on a single area or personnel group. The Orange can only hope it can be rectified by a new offensive coordinator after cutting ties with Sterlin Gibert on Sunday.
The span of passing futility has included multiple quarterbacks, multiple offensive philosophies, multiple offensive line coaches and a carousel of wide receivers and blockers.
It’s a far cry from Babers’ first few years at Syracuse when even backup quarterback Zack Mahoney had multiple games throwing for more than 300 yards.
The game, Babers said, has changed since those days.
Defenses have adjusted and Syracuse’s up-tempo approach has been shelved by the program’s struggles with injuries and roster depletion. More plays mean more injuries and require more depth, none of which has been a good thing for Syracuse over the past two years.
Perhaps that’s part of the reason for the move away from Gilbert, who made his reputation running Babers’ uptempo, veer-and-shoot system alongside him at Eastern Illinois and Bowling Green.
It’s unclear how much Syracuse will utilize tempo moving forward, but the number of trusted scholarship players has been an issue in consecutive years. Given the team’s lackluster track record in recruiting and retention, those headwinds seem likely to continue.
“The game has changed,” Babers said. “I’m not saying that we can’t go fast. We can. I’m not saying we can’t be a no-huddle team. We can be a no-huddle team. But when you start talking about the surest way to win a game based on what was going on this year, it was different. The numbers were getting less and less.”
Sill, Syracuse seemed to show some hope against Pittsburgh, at least compared to the paltry efforts of the previous three games.
After throwing for just 174 yards combined in its previous three games, Syracuse quarterback Garrett Shrader completed 17-of-24 passes for 217 yards and two touchdowns against Pittsburgh, a relatively efficient performance.
Statistically it was an improvement, but it also came against an opponent selling out to stop the run, and the dose of small stings through the air didn’t create enough pain to force the Panthers out of their run-first approach to defense.
In Syracuse’s last four games, opponents showed little fear of the pass, crowding the box and forcing Syracuse’s offensive line to block one-on-one, an approach that slowed SU’s run game and led to 14 sacks over the final three games of the season.
“(Opponents) went from playing some coverages to basically just playing cover zero,” Babers said. “There are no double-teams anywhere. Everything is a single block. That’s when you need those freshmen, those young offensive linemen, to bull a guy. Some of those guys just need another year.”
Getting healthy should help.
The season ended with three of the team’s four worst pass-blocking performances of the season (the other came against Rutgers) according to Pro Football Focus. The late-season dropoff in passing coincided with the absences of fullback Chris Elmore and offensive lineman Carlos Vettorello, as well as limited playing time for offensive guard Chris Bleich.
Growth should help.
Four of the starting offensive linemen can return. The biggest weaknesses in Sean Tucker’s game are his pass blocking and receiving. The Orange opened the season with Taj Harris, Anthony Queeley and Sharod Johnson taking the majority of receiving snaps at receiver and finished the year with Courtney Jackson, DeVaughn Cooper and Damien Alford getting the most snaps in the finale.
It’s here that Shrader thinks Syracuse has the most reason for optimism.
Babers has often said that he believes explosive passing offenses need to allow receivers to adjust to the coverages they see, but that freelancing requires great chemistry with their quarterback.
Given Shrader’s late elevation to the starting role and the youth of the receivers that have displayed the most physical talent, that chemistry is still developing.
Shrader said the Orange shelved those concepts against Pittsburgh, performing better while relying instead on pre-planned patterns.
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Airon Servais thanks the fans for supporting the team. The Syracuse Orange football team take on the Pittsburgh Panthers at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, N.Y. Nov. 27, 2021.Dennis Nett | dnett@syracuse.com
Servais, with 60 starts, walks away as the nation's most durable player and with one last scratch (PS; Mink)
Syracuse finished the 2021 football season at 5-7 following a 31-14 loss to No. 17 Pittsburgh on Saturday night in the Carrier Dome.
This week’s stock watch takes a look at the players and themes rising and falling heading into the offseason.
Stock up: The toll it took to start 60 games in a row
Airon Servais unraveled the tape near a fresh scratch on his hand, one last token of pain after his final game in Syracuse.
The sixth-year offensive lineman started all 60 games he played in — the longest streak in college football — a remarkable run of durability as the unit around him continually got reconfigured because of injuries and attrition.
Servais battled through his own injuries over his career, part of the bargain most players take when suiting up for as long as Servais has here.
He underwent shoulder surgery, fought through a muscular injury that hampered his performance last season and played through a nagging ankle injury throughout the second half of this year.
“I’m still battling it,” Servais told syracuse.com in a quiet moment after the game, “but I’m doing everything I can in the training room to help manage the pain, and some days are better than others. Some days I don’t really tweak it, but then other days I tweak it pretty good and it hurts like a SOB.”
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Five takeaways from Panthers’ 31-14 victory at Syracuse (meadvilletribune.com; Filipcic-Godsey)
Pitt took care of business in the Carrier Dome on Saturday night as the Panthers defeated Syracuse 31-14. The win moved the Panthers to 10-2, the first time they’ve won 10 regular-season games since 1981. Pitt also finished with a perfect road record for the first time since 1987.
Quarterback Kenny Pickett threw four touchdowns against the Orange to tie Dan Marino for the most career touchdown passes in Pitt history with 79 and gives Pickett 40 scores through the air for a new single-season record. Wide receiver Jordan Addison caught two of those touchdowns on Saturday night to give the sophomore 17 touchdown receptions this season.
Pitt’s opponent for next week’s ACC championship game was set before the Panthers took the field on Saturday night, as Wake Forest crushed Boston College 41-10 earlier in the day. The matchup will pit the ACC’s two most-prolific offenses against one another on Dec. 4 in Charlotte, North Carolina.
• It was a historic season for Pitt that few saw coming: The Panthers hadn’t won 10 games since 2009 and hadn’t won 10 in the regular season since Marino was the quarterback and Jackie Sherrill was the coach 40 years ago.
After losing five defensive starters from last season on a team that’s been known more for its defense than its offense in recent years, few thought Pitt would do much of anything this season as the Panthers were picked to finish fourth in their own division.
But it was the offense that led the way for Pitt this season, as everything seemed to click this year for Mark Whipple’s unit. The return of Pickett for his fifth season, the emergence of Addison and the wide receiving corps, productive tight ends, the offensive line taking a step forward and a running game that allowed for a balanced attack for the first time in Pickett’s four years as a starter all combined for an explosive offense that led Pitt to a special season.
Now the Panthers have a chance to win the ACC and possibly earn a spot in a New Year’s Six bowl.
• Pickett deserves an invite to the Heisman Trophy ceremony: Pickett threw four touchdown passes against Syracuse in a game plan coach Pat Narduzzi called “vanilla” as he was interviewed while walking off the field.
While the talent around him has grown, the step forward by Pickett this season cannot be overstated. His decision-making has improved, he goes through his progressions quicker and his confidence on the field is evident in the way he leads the offense.
Pickett finishes the regular season with 40 touchdown passes, tied with Alabama’s Bryce Young for the most among Power Five quarterbacks. Pickett finishes the regular season with 4,066 yards to Young’s 3,901. While it still seems unlikely Pickett will win because Pitt is not a College Football Playoff contender, his play and his stats make him deserving of an invite to the ceremony in New York on Dec. 11.
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The 2021 College Football All-ACC Team | College Football | PFF (pff.com; Treash)
The 2021 college football regular season has officially come to a close, and now it’s time to recognize the top players across the country with PFF’s all-conference teams and conference players of the year.
With the help of PFF grades and advanced statistics — which are now available to PFF’s CFB Premium Stats+ Subscribers — we present to you the 2021 ACC Offensive and Defensive Player of the Year and All-ACC teams.
ACC OFFENSIVE PLAYER OF THE YEAR
QB Kenny Pickett, Pitt Panthers
Pickett is one of, if not the most improved players in all of college football this season. He went from producing more turnover-worthy plays than big-time throws in 2018, 2019 and 2020 while earning PFF grades of 60.6, 75.0 and 69.8. This year, Pickett produced nearly double the amount of big-time throws than turnover-worthy plays (29 to 15) en route to a 92.4 PFF grade in regular-season action.ACC DEFENSIVE PLAYER OF THE YEAR
Edge Jermaine Johnson II, Florida State Seminoles
Johnson transferred from Georgia to Florida State so that he could be the leader of a defense, and he has been just that down in Tallahassee.The 6-foot-5, 262-pound edge defender produced at least one sack in nine of his 12 outings and racked up 14 in total for the season. Against the run, Johnson is the only edge defender in the Power Five who ranks top-15 in both run stops and negatively graded play rate.
The Seminoles edge defender earned a grade north of 75.0 in run defense and as a pass-rusher, something no other ACC edge defender accomplished in 2021.
FIRST-TEAM ALL-ACC
QB Kenny Pickett, PittRB Sean Tucker, Syracuse
RB Jahmyr Gibbs, Georgia Tech
WR Jordan Addison, Pitt
WR Jaquarii Roberson, Wake Forest
WR Josh Downs, North Carolina
TE Marshon Ford, Louisville
LT Ikem Ekwonu, NC State
LG Caleb Chandler, Louisville
C Alec Lindstrom, Boston College
RG Christian Mahogany, Boston College
RT Jarrid Williams, Miami (FL)
DI Calijah Kancey, Pitt
DI Robert Cooper, Florida State
ED Jermaine Johnson II, Florida State
ED Myles Murphy, Clemson
LB Drake Thomas, NC State
LB Mikel Jones, Syracuse
CB Mario Goodrich, Clemson
CB Andrew Booth Jr., Clemson
S Traveon Redd, Wake Forest
S Joey Blount, Virginia
FLEX D Josh DeBerry, Boston College
K Nick Sciba, Wake Forest
P Ivan Mora, Wake Forest
KR Zonovan Knight, NC State
PR Tayvion Robinson, Virginia Tech
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ACC Panic Room: Pack and Heels deliver wild instant classic :: WRALSportsFan.com (wralsportsfan.com; video; Brownlow & Ovies)
Lauren Brownlow and Joe Ovies discuss an instant classic between NC State and North Carolina, where the result might just change how the programs are discussed going forward.
College Football Playoff picture and scores: Alabama survives overtime Iron Bowl scare, Oklahoma State edges Oklahoma in wild Bedlam game (theathletic.com; $.; Staff)
One day, it will come time to explain college football to your child, or grandchild, or perhaps great grandchild. When you do, please refer back to Nov. 27, 2021.
Tell him or her about the day you watched, back-to-back-to-back, Michigan unleashing 10 years of frustration against rival Ohio State, putting the Wolverines on the cusp of their first College Football Playoff berth; Alabama, having gone nearly 59 minutes without a touchdown, inexplicably driving 97 yards on Auburn in a little over a minute and going on to win the first overtime Iron Bowl; and Oklahoma State getting a last-second stop to fend off rival Oklahoma, knocking the Sooners out of the Big 12 title game and getting sweet revenge for that whole SEC thing.
You can throw in Minnesota ruining Wisconsin’s season, then playing “Jump Around” in its own stadium. You can add LSU sending off its fired coach with a win over the coach his boss wanted to replace him with.
GO FURTHER
Mandel’s Final Thoughts: If you ever have to explain college football, refer to Rivalry Week of the 2021 season
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David Cutcliffe out as Duke head football coach after 0-8 ACC season cbs17.com;; Overton)
Just as Duke University basketball is losing its longtime coach, so too is the football team as officials announced Sunday that head football coach David Cutcliffe is leaving the program.
With Saturday’s loss to Miami, Duke finished with its first winless ACC record since 2007 and its eighth straight loss.
Cutcliffe took the Duke job in December 2007, began as the program had won just eight total games in the previous five years.
Cutcliffe has been with Duke football for 14 years.
Trooper Taylor, Duke’s associate head coach and a member of the staff since 2019, will serve as the interim head coach, the university said in a news release.
Cutcliffe and athletic director Nina King announced a “mutual agreement for separation” Sunday, one day after the Blue Devils capped their third straight losing season with their eighth consecutive conference loss — the last six by at least three touchdowns apiece.
Cutcliffe said in a statement issued by the school that “we’ve mutually decided that it is the right time for change in the leadership of Duke football.”
Cutcliffe turned one of the worst programs in college football into a division champion in 2013, and even produced consecutive bowl-winning teams in 2017 and ’18 before things quickly unraveled.
The Blue Devils (3-9, 0-8 Atlantic Coast Conference) went winless in league play for the first time since 2007 — the season before he was hired.
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2021 Conference Championship Game Schedule (RX; HM)
2021 Conference Championship Game Schedule
Here's the schedule for the FBS* conference championship games, next week (teams TBD).
| Friday, Dec. 3, 2021 | |
| Big Game | Alternative(s) |
| Evening/Prime Time Games | |
Pac-12, ABC Oregon vs Utah | C-USA, CBSSN |
As has been the case in recent years, the Pac-12 Football Conference Championship will be held on Friday night, on ABC. CBSSN offers the C-USA Championship as an alternative.
Now for the Saturday schedule:
| Saturday, Dec. 4, 2021 | |
| Big Game | Alternative(s) |
| Early Afternoon Games | |
Big XII, ABC Baylor vs. Ok. St. | MAC, ESPN |
| Mid-Afternoon Games | |
| SEC, CBS Georgia vs Alabama | Mountain West, Fox |
| Sun Belt, ESPN | |
| American, ABC | |
| SWAC, ESPN2 | |
| Evening/Prime Time Games | |
| ACC , ABC Pitt vs. Wake | Big Ten , Fox Iowa vs. Michigan |
The noon slot is owned by the Big XII, with the MAC FCG as alternative programming.
The mid-day slot has the big dog, the SEC, on CBS. There are 4 alternatives: MWC on Fox, AAC on ABC, SBC on ESPN and SWAC (the only non-FBS FCG) on ESPN2.
Prime time features ACC versus Big Ten (as usual) on ABC and Fox, respectively.
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Coaching Carousel Update 2021-11-29 (RX; HM)
Coaching Carousel Update 2021-11-29
Here are the riders on this year's carousel (so far)......
Bowl Tracker 2021-11-29 (RX; HM)
Bowl Tracker 2021-11-29
Here's the list of who's bowl-eligible, who's not, and which bowls they are currently projected to play in (assuming championship weeks goes the way that predictor thinks it will)...Bowl-eligible ACC teams (10):
Wake Forest 10-2
Pittsburgh 10-2
NC State 9-3
Clemson 9-3
Miami 7-5
Va. Tech 6-6
Virginia 6-6
Louisville 6-6
N. Carolina 6-6
Boston College 6-6
Notre Dame is also bowl-eligible at 11-1, but likely will not participate in the ACC bowl tie-ins this year due to being in a New Year's Six Bowl.
ACC bowl-ineligible teams (4):
Florida State 5-7Syracuse 5-7
Georgia Tech 3-9
Duke 3-9
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Former Pitt fan will lead Wake Forest against Panthers in ACC championship game (triblive.com; DiPaola)
Dave Clawson rattled off the names of some of the greatest players in Pitt football history as if he grew up rooting for them.
Which he did.
“I grew up being a huge Pitt Panther fan,” Wake Forest’s coach said. “I would listen to games on the radio. That was the team that engaged me in college football. Matt Cavanaugh, Tony Dorsett, Dan Marino, Rickey Jackson, Hugh Green. I was a die-hard Pitt fan.”
Funny how the world turns.
This week, with Pitt on the threshold of its first outright conference championship, Wake Forest is the only team left providing resistance. And it is coached by Clawson, the son of a Pitt graduate who is a Johnstown native.
Wake Forest and Pitt will tangle Saturday night in the ACC championship game at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte N.C. Both schools rose three slots in the Associated Press Top 25 rankings Sunday — Pitt to No. 17, Wake Forest to No. 18.
“It’s a neat thrill for me, career-wise, to be able to coach against a team I grew up rooting for as a young kid,” he said.
Clawson said his dad made a point of making several trips to Pittsburgh to expose his son to the teams he adored: the Pirates, Steelers and Pitt.
“In the last eight years, that’s changed a little bit,” Clawson said, referring to his eight-year tenure as Wake Forest’s head coach. “My dad will be wearing Wake Forest gear for this one.”
Clawson’s ties to Pitt go beyond his dad. He has known Pitt coach Pat Narduzzi for almost 25 years. In the late 1990s, they traveled in the same circles with Clawson as offensive coordinator at Villanova and Narduzzi directing the defense at Rhode Island.
Clawson has had several stops in his career, and he said he also has known Pitt coordinators Mark Whipple and Randy Bates for many years. He replaced David Cutcliffe as offensive coordinator at Tennessee in 2008 and was the head coach at Bowling Green, almost intersecting with Pitt’s appearance in the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl in 2013. He coached Bowling Green that year, but left for Wake Forest before the bowl game.
Pitt and Wake Forest have met only once — when Pitt clinched its first ACC Coastal title in 2018 with a 34-13 victory in Winston-Salem, N.C. — but Clawson knows what makes Narduzzi’s defense tick.
“Pat has always been what you call a press-quarters guy,” he said, referring to the defense that relies on cornerbacks pressing the wide receivers off the line of scrimmage and getting little help in pass coverage from the safeties.
“He’s had excellent corners, and he puts those guys on islands and they’re good,” Clawson said. “Because of that, the safeties can get very involved in the run game and you get eight- and nine-man boxes that you can’t block them all.
“In years when he has those really good corners, it’s tough to beat. They don’t concede anything. They make you execute. It’s a lot like Clemson in that they’re always attacking. This is not a bend-but-don’t-break defense.”
Narduzzi said defense wins championships, but there’s a good chance the ACC championship will be decided by the quarterbacks.
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Other
Professors and students from Syracuse University examine a 380-million-year-old coral reef uncovered during the excavation of a house foundation in Pompey in April 2021.- Kneeling is SU earth sciences professor Linda Ivany. Standing, from left, are: and earth sciences professors Cathryn Newton and Christopher Junium; and doctoral student Shiv Das. Nancy Furdock | Special to Syracuse.com Nancy Furdock
Discovered on a CNY hilltop: remarkable evidence of a time this place was a tropical sea (PS; $; Coin)
Nancy Furdock loved fossil hunting as a kid growing up in rural Pompey. So when odd, tubular-shaped rocks began tumbling from the backhoe digging the foundation for her new house atop a hill in Pompey, Furdock was intrigued.
“My excavator happened to mention that there’s these weird-looking finger-like rocks he’d never seen before,” she recalled.
It would turn out to be an unprecedented unveiling of a 380-million-year-old reef, which thrived in a shallow sea that covered Central New York more than 100 million years before the dinosaurs. It was a finding so rare that one geologist called it a once-in-a-lifetime chance to glimpse Central New York’s ancient, tropical past.
After Furdock saw the strange fossils where her basement would soon be, she hopped online, Googled something like “long narrow fossil,” and found the answer: Her property teemed with fossilized rugose coral, a long-extinct, horn-shaped, wrinkled coral that grew in such profusion they created vast patches of reefs.
“I said, I should tell somebody about this, just in case,” Furdock recalled. She sent an email to the Syracuse University earth sciences department in late April.
The email landed in the right inbox.
“I will always remember the sense of complete exhilaration of seeing that email message,” said Cathryn Newton, an SU geology professor of marine paleoecology who studies corals.
Newton, fellow SU professor Linda Ivany, and a group of students rushed out on Saturday morning. They knew they didn’t have much time before the concrete was poured on the foundation of the 2,100-square-foot house.
“This was a paleontological emergency,” Newton said, smiling.
After dusting off a coat of Syracuse’s signature late-April snow, Newton and Ivany discovered on that Pompey hilltop a reef that had thrived 380 million years ago. It was packed with a 3-foot layer of fossilized remains of coral and shells that marked the Devonian period, when what is now snowy New York state was submerged beneath a tropical sea.
“It took us seconds to realize that these are mountains of fossil corals,” Ivany said. “Everything that came out of that hole is almost entirely fossil.”
To the untrained eye, the piles of dug-up reef are just mounds of brittle gray rocks. But look closer and you see tubes and horns, thicker than a thumb and several inches long, with ridged sides. Some look like the pointy teeth of dinosaurs, but they can’t be: Dinosaurs wouldn’t appear until 130 million years after this reef was alive.
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