This has to be short.
Missed the tailgate. Played a couple rounds at Thendara yesterday. Did not get home until just before 11 pm. Had to sleep in because I was tired.
But it looked great, even with a pouring rain coming down. Props to everyone involved for making these happen in wind, rain, sleet or snow. Awesome.
Headed up to the dome early. Got a Freeney towel. Cool. Watched the team go through warmups. They looked very focused.
8 tubas. Grateful for one more but improvement is needed.
I don’t miss the train whistle. Just wasn’t my thing. Hated it at Purdue too. Some of the stuff they do during commercials is lame but it seemed like there weren’t quite as many appearances by the in game host and it wasn’t as intrusive. They did get the kid a mallet to use when hitting the base drum but you still couldn't;t hit it. One would think someone would test these ideas before hand to see if they have a chance of working. I think this one needs to end.
They did show out of town scores on the center hung at least once. Progress. Need to have a corner scoreboard dedicated for this. Maybe they have and I missed it?
SUMB sounded great. They did a nice tribute to all the armed services at half time on Military Appreciation Day. The ceremony to honor Dwight Freeney was nicely done and it looked like it touched Dwight. Overall, not a bad job.
But let’s talk about the game.
SU won the toss. Took the ball. Marched down the field and scored pretty easily. GT looked confused and pretty slow. GT fans on their board say they saw McCord talked to his teammates on the sideline early after a scoring drive telling them that the GT defenders were ‘slow as fxxx’. Not sure if that is true (if McCord said it) but I think it is fair to say SU had open receivers just about every time they tried to pass it. Props to the OL for giving Kyle plenty of time to throw. Props to the receivers for running good routes and getting open (and making the catches). Props to McCord for his many accurate throws, where a bunch were thrown well down the field. Adn special props to OC Jeff /Nixon, who called another great game. SU had players open on playing plays all game and when they ran, there were openings there too. When GT tried to blitz, McCord usually made them pay for it with a long gain on a passing play. They had no response to stop the SU offense. SU had over 500 yards of total offense and could have added a lot more had they wanted to.
It looked to me as though GT tried to double OG a lot, and this helped Pena (another big game), Hatcher and others to get open. But when they really needed a play, it usually went to OG and OG usually came though. He was the best player on the field again in week 2.
Lots of imaginative calls from Nixon. When the players said the new offense was more complex, they weren’t lying.
They opened things with 3 TEs in a super heavy look but most of the game, I think SU went with 3 or even 4 WRs, spreading out the GT defenders and making space for McCord to get the ball to SU receivers.
On defense, we really changed things up. It looked to me as though Diggs played all of the game, or almost all the game at LB. McDonald, Sparrow and Omopariola (I think) also played at LB, but I did not see ZMG. I wonder if he is banged up some?
I expected GT was going to either hurt us badly with running plays or hurt us badly with long passing plays, but really, neither of these things were the case. The GT OL struggled to open holes against a Syracuse DL that was embarrassed by Ohio last week. To be fair, it looked like SU often ran run blitzes on running downs and these hurt GT as well. This was often how we had players in the backfield tackling GT RBs almost as they were getting the ball.
It looked like GT tried to throw deep a lot. Thought I saw King looked downfield on a number of passing plays but over and over he was forced to settle for a short passs to the flat for a short gain. I think SU played some zone and the safeties helped the corners out. Already seeing the benefits of having the best DB coach in college football on the staff. As it happens, he is also a pretty good head coach.
We didn’t get a ton of pressure on King, but I don’t know that this was a huge priority. I think we were happy to give them short dings over the middle or to the sidelines. GT tried to make first downs with YAC but SU tackled much better this game and they struggled to find any daylight. Really, the only guy who hurt SU much was King on QB draws. It is tough to be competitive in the ACC with undersized RBs and WRs. That is what GT has to work with.
Gotta talk about the special teams disaster a bit. So many problems. A punt was blocked. I thought watching real time part of it was on Stonehouse, who seemed to take a long time to get the punt off. But there was also a blocking backdown. There was also a blocking breakdown on the blocked FG attempt. At least it looked like it in real time.
But wait, there is more!
Denaberg generally hit his KOs deep into the end zone and they were downed. But he kicked one low and sideways, like he was trying to bounce it into the end zone just inside the end line. It went OB and GT was gifted with a start at the 35. Not good. he hit another weakly down the middle that ended up getting returned. Is he banged up? What the heck happened to Mr Money?
But the most special of the special teams plays was the on sides kick GT attempted. It looked like a bad kick that was destined to go OB without traveling for 10 yards. But it appeared to me that an SU played decided to touch it at a point where it was maybe 6 yards downfield. And didn’t hold on to the ball. Just an awful awful play
And speaking of awful, how about those referees (and also the ACC replay center officials in Charlotte)?
Maybe the replays shown on the scoreboard were wrong or I was crazy or something. But how was the ‘late hit’ called? This was a play on the sideline where an SU DB (I believe it was Lewis) visibly slowed down as he neared the GT player who was stepping OB. They gently met. And a flag was thrown. What the heck?
And the play when King Haynes was trying to pass it and got pulled on by an SU defender, who got his knee to touch the ground (on the dome scoreboard, you could clearly see the black rubber bits fly up as his knee hit the turf. What happened there? I get the refs missing the call in real time. They missed a ton of stuff. Clearly not a good crew. But how does the replay also get messed up? Again. Is this going to happen to Syracuse all season?
We got called for a chop block (I think they called that one on LeQuint). A bunch of other stuff I never saw. What was the backdown on penalty yards? It didnt seem even remotely close. I saw Fran almost lose it a couple times. I hope the refs can do a better job the rest of the season.
Syracuse won. It wasn’t a fluke. The SU OL dominated the GT DL. The SU DL dominated the GT OL. SU hit the crap out of the smaller, slower, less athletic GT players and a lot of them got hurt. Sorry for that but when you play a game and get 10 players hurt and no one on the other team gets hurt, that tells you your team just got its butt kicked. I hope all the GT injured players are able to return to game action soon.
For all the physical dominance SU had, some spectularly bad special teams play and a number of questionable ref calls kept it close. But in the end, the better team won. I thought GT made a lot of really good tackles in the open field all game long where a GT player just got his hand on a heel of an SU player to get them down where SU was an inch from breaking a big play. But GT kept doing it and it kept them in the game. Was impressed they never gave up and played hard to the final whistle.
Thought the GT coaches were badly out coached though. The GT OC looked pretty clueless and the GT DC, who was highly touted, was made to look like a fool by SU OC Jeff Nixon. That is really good to see. If we can get our special teams issued straighted out during the bye, maybe we can be something pretty good.
This was a big win. We are now going to be taken seriously. I expect we will go from being ranked 13-16 in many ‘expert’ rankings of ACC programs up to the 5-8 range. The talk of SU being real and the hype for what Fran is doing at Syracuse is going to get louder. And yes, our chances to host a Game Day just got a big boost. Still need a lot of things to happen but if it was gonna happen this year, we needed to win this game.
I think having a bye now is good. The team just went through two tough games against good opponents and can use some time to heal up. But so far, so good..
