Sorry this is late. Had an early tee time today and had to get to sleep ASAP after getting home last night.
The SyracuseCruz@ Tailgate was well attended. A great deal of food and drink was consumed. Special guests included future SU AA PF Olivia Owens, who got us all excited about the women’s basketball team, and Enrique Cruz’ family, who all had a turn at the microphone. They were very grateful for us sponsoring Enrique. Great family. Good times, lots of football talk, kudos to Nell and Jeremy and Cliff and everyone else involved (there were a lot more than that).
Consigliere ran the 50-50, and I think he did a lot of media relations work. We had a lot of media types and journos attend. I think Swag Daddy popped in briefly on his way to the Dome. And SU Deputy AD Andrew Goodrich was there too. Guessing we had about 180-200 people there. Nice way to start the season. Good to see so many friends again.
Headed up to the JMA about an hour before the game. The AC was nice. It was a hot day and this was one of the first times you really felt that nice cool air upon arriving inside. Yay.
One of my friends could not load his tickets into his Apple Wallet. The icon to download into the wallet just didn’t show. Do not know why. He was at the latest version of the OS. He had to transfer them to me, I had to download them, then put them in my wallet and we had to walk up and enter the dome together in order for he and his wife to be able to get in. That stinks. I hate how hard it is to get a ticket to someone else. This needs to be improved. It should be possible to do this using blue tooth. Very happy nothing has been done yet to address the crappy solutions currently in place. This needs to change.
For the record, I also hate how hard it is to get 4 tickets into the wallet. It should be possible to send all the tickets you have for a given event into the wallet all at the same time.
Didn’t notice much different in the concourses. Maybe more coolers. We just went straight to our seats. Noticed a new sign on top of the center hung scoreboard for JMA. There were a couple of LED signs in the corners at field level that also displayed a JMA logo most of the time. I didn’t notice any new signage outside the dome. Not sure if that is in place. Assume they would have wanted it there for the first game. Anyway, JMA is already getting their money’s worth. Nothing wrong with that.
They were playing music on the sound system. To my ear, it sounds like someone had messed around with the sound a lot. The bass was way up, very loud and it felt like it might vibrate my fillings out of my molars at times. That has to be brought down. It buzzes and sounds awful.
Speaking of awful sounds, we have a new emcee for games this year. It is a young woman. I am sure she introduced herself but nothing she said at any time during the 4 plus hours I was there was intelligible. Even Mr Excitement was unintelligible. I think whoever is attempting to configure the sound system made a bunch of changes and has made it the worst it has ever been. By a huge margin. That aspiring sound engineer needs to be banned from entering the dome every again. We need to bring a professional sound engineer in and have the set things up correctly. But assuming that is going to take a while, let’s just set things the way they were from last spring. I trust someone had the brains to record how things were set up.
This disaster was made worse by the closed captioning, usually pretty reliable, also going into the garbage can over the summer. This might be because whoever it was trying to type in the closed captioning was also not able to understand pretty much anything that was said.
So a lot of promising looking videos were largely wasted because we could not understand what was being said. And the refs, who appeared to be getting paid on piece rate, made a ton of announcements, none of which we could understand. It is a shame we have total amateurs trying to do things they are completely incapable of doing.
So the emcee was a disaster. She might be fine if the sound issues can be addressed. Though every attempt to introduce an emcee has been a major fail. I am not optimistic on this one.
There was apparently a DJ brought in too for this season. If so, I didn’t notice their presence.
They tried to have a little girl lead a cheer during a timeout from midfield, her hand held by a female cheerleader, who I think was also holding the microphone. I think the girl was supposed to be cheering ‘Let’s Go Orange’ but it didn’t sound anything like that. Good try. I bet it gave that little girl a thrill.
At halftime or maybe a bit after halftime). there was a animated feature showing three pickup trucks racing each other. They were orange, blue and white. This is something every school in the country seems to do. I think we were the last ones. The others have done it a lot better than we did, where they featured famous alums of the school, and/or drove through a course featuring major local landmarks and campus landmarks. Our was completely generic, other than the trucks being white, blue and orange. I hope we are able to do one personalized for Syracuse the next time. It would be a lot better received if this could be done.
The SUMB was solid. 9 tubas marched but there was a tenth that went straight to his/her seat where the band sits. Bad hammie? When it came time to sing the alma mater and NA, one of the tuba players ran up front, took a mic and led the signing. Fact: tuba players are the most talented and awesome members of any band. Couldn’t really hear the SUMB playing at halftime but their performance was well received and I think they killed it.
I got there almost an hour early. Almost no one in the stands except for the students. Gotta take a minute to note how awesome they were last night. They got there early. They (largely) stayed there late. They made a ton of noise. And there were a ton of them there. Huge props to them and Otto’s Army. They were given glow in the dark bracelets that looked cool when the lights were brought down (which happened a lot; someone is having fun with the new LED system and likes to play with it, a lot).
The crowd in general was very loud and supportive. No help from the 40 UL fans that showed. They really travel poorly. And that was when they thought they had a good team this year. Not sure that the attendance was. Felt like 34 or 34K. The people that came are the true fans and made noise.
I think SUAD is trying something new this year. The idea is to show the fans the number of times they make enough noise to cause the opposing team to make an illegal procedure penalty. I think they tried to do it a couple of times. Unfortunately, they used the ribbon scoreboard to do it, used a graphic to represent the # of penalties called and it was not clear at all what was going on.
VT does this. They track the number of penalties the crowd caused for the current day and current year. And they do it on the main scoreboard. We need to do it the same way. ideally, we would also show the decibel level of sound the crowd is making live for all big defensive plays as well. Rome wasn’t built in a day. There is a lot of potential to make a difference here. Hope we get it right soon.
Let’s talk football now.
Before the game, the UL defensive players to a man said there game plan was to take away the run and force Syracuse to beat them with the pass. And I think this was indeed their game plan. Thought Coach Anae did a nice job using Sean as a decoy a lot in the first half, faking the ball to him and going misdirection in the other direction with a Shrader run or a pass play.
We heard about how we were throwing to Tucker a lot more with Coach Anae have and in the first half, we saw it. Mostly short passes in the flat. Sean is really dangerous when he gets the ball in space and we saw what he is capable of on the long TD.
We heard about how much better Shrader was throwing it and it turned out this was true. He made good throw after good throw. Showed good arm strength and excellent touch. Did not come close to throwing a pick. Not sure what his stats were but if not for a spat of drops by his receivers in the second half, I feel sure he would have completed over 75%of his throws.
Of course, Garrett can still run it as well and he looked as good as always in this area. When we really needed to get a first down, more often than not, Garrett made it happen. The plays were often broken. His ability to save a play that did not work as designed is a huge differentiator, and the big reason he is a far better QB than someone like Tommy Devito would ever be. This was a great start to the season by Garrett. Really impressed with his development. Coach Beck, you are the man.
Gadsden looks like he is going to be a key player this season. He gets open a lot and makes things happen. Cooper and Jackson made a bunch of plays. Coop looks like a classic possession receiver. I think Jackson played inside and outside and his ability to get YAC makes him special. Who made the drops? Cooper had one. Alford had one. And Isaiah Jones had one (I think). Jones also had a nice reception for a big gain. Gotta clean that up.
And of course, we have to clean up all the procedure penalties. I don’t think we even tried to play fast, the game was at home, with almost no noise, and we had, by my count, at least 8 procedure penalties. What the hell? Could not tell who was making them. I think I saw on the closed captioning screen that Ellis made 2. And based on who made the call, Vet was up to his old tricks moving the ball before snapping it a couple of times. That should be pretty easy to clean up and I will be interested to see if we do better here in a near empty UConn stadium next week. We know any noise will come from the Syracuse fans.
On defense, I think the game plan was to contain Malik, take away the run and mix up coverages, making Malik beat us with quality medium and long throws. He has never had a strong or accurate arm and last night, he showed he remains a poor thrower. We did a great job keeping him in the pocket, and in the pocket, he becomes a below average QB. In the past, when we tried this, UL had one or two really fast WRs they sent long who burned us for home run TDs. But their talent level is way down these days and the only decent WR they have left is a possession WR from a lower division school. So we were able to take away their WRs, take away their QB as a running threat and take away their RB running game.
I think our DBs were better athletes than their WRs. They had a big and experienced OL but we did a lot of stunting and moving around on defense and they looked badly confused as to their blocking assignments most of the game. Tony White really out coached Lane Taylor, the embattled UL OC, who had no clue how to attack the SU defense.
Our our offense controlled the ball most of the game, and kept the defense off the field. That was a huge key. UL had the ball 4 times in the first half. That was it. Pretty impressive stuff.
On special teams, our coverage teams were terrific all game long. We didn’t get many chances to return KOs due to the incompetent UL offense. Trevor was the return guy for KOs and punts. The best player for UL was their punter and he didn’t give Trevor much in the way of changes to break one.
Sad to lose Rhino so early his final senior season. He is a good dude and deserved to play a full season going out. Hope Thompson is okay. Hope Tucker, who appeared fine, really is fine. McDonald has a lot of talent and might end up being terrific but you hate to lose an experienced and talent player like Stefon so early.
This was a big win and it was sweet to beat a team that crushed out souls the last 3 seasons. Hope we can play a lot of players next week and it will be nice to have 2 weeks to focus on how to beat Purdue. That game is going to be a huge one if we want to make some noise in 2022.
@=trademark 2022
