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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 3543791, member: 289"] - That game gave me the sort of sick-to-my-stomach feeling that the Maryland and BC games did last year. I had the illusion that we had a strong defense, good kicking game and that the offense now had a running game so we were rounding into a pretty good football team. We found out today that we aren’t a very good football team. - We weren’t mentally ready to play this game and were no match for a very determined Duke team. The reason why we had all those injuries was that Duke was initiated contact and we were on the receiving end. We had 2 tackles for a loss. They had 9, including 6 sacks. Then there were all the drops. There was also a lot of confusion on the Syracuse side with players pointing to where other players were supposed to be before the play and then doing it again after the play. This with two weeks to get ready for a team that played last week. - Looking at all the injured players, I wonder how many other games we lost today: Tommy DeVito, Sean Tucker, Geoff Cantin-Arku, Mikel Jones, Ja’Had Carter, Trill Williams and Rob Hanna were all helped off the field at various times. DeVito was on crutches at games end. We already had lost Andre Cisco, Jawhar Jordan, Eric Coley and Tyrel Richards. Our depth is improving but we can’t afford to lose all these people. Their young replacements got exposed today. - I thought we had a good defense and we wanted the offense to get going not match it. Instead, the defense has declined to the level of the offense. Actually, we came into this game giving up 419 yards per contest. With this game, that’s up to 476. Is that good defense? - Duke out-rushed us 28-363. That’s why being +4 in turnovers didn’t help us. They had 36 first downs to our 11. They ran 102 plays to our 52. They used our own plan of keeping the tempo going to wear out the defense against us. For the season we had had 50 first downs. The opposition has 105. That’s how you control the tempo – and the game. - Our problem is that we are occasionally great, (long passes and takeovers), but it’s the opposition that is consistently good, (all those yards and first downs). Our offense doesn’t even seem geared to consistency. We throw long down the sidelines. That gives us the occasional big play and opens up the shorter pass but we didn’t take advent age of that until the fourth quarter. We never throw over the middle. We beat Georgia Tech by establishing the running game but made no attempt to do so here. Dino said in his presser that you can win games by coming out firing, as Mike Leach’s teams do, “but you’ve got to be very efficient”. We aren’t. We need to focus more on making first downs. - So the ball rolls back down the hill again. I’m getting tired of looking at the clock and waiting for it to go to 00:00. - Duke was 0-4 but it didn’t matter. Liberty beat Louisiana 40-7 to go to 4-0. Will that matter? [/QUOTE]

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