"It will get worse before it gets better"
But I am here to say - it will eventually get much better.
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There are a couple of rules that should be applied every pre-season:
(1) If you have freshman playing on the offensive line, you will not have a good team. Add 3 losses for each freshman and 2 losses for each sophomore starting on the O-Line.
(2) Lack of talent and depth at DT combined with poor linebacker play will lead to historic rushing yardage no matter how good the secondary and DE's are and no matter how much the box is stacked with run-blitzing defenders. Scheme does not matter.
(3) Any time you say "if we can get good offensive line play" in the preseason, it is going to be a long year. It struck me that when a friend ran into Dino during the summer - he said he really hoped that this team could get to 6 wins. Seems that he saw this coming - though not to this extent.
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This is a good case study in football at any level. Without good offensive line play - nothing else matters - even one bad offensive lineman can sink an entire group (e.g., Erik Flowers with the NY Giants). You can have Aaron Rogers, throwing to Randy Moss and handing the ball to Jim Brown and it will not matter.
In 1999 we rolled into the Orange Bowl with McNabb, Konrad, Kevin Johnson, Spotwood, Mo Jackson, Dee Brown, McIntosh, Mungro, Bullock, Greenwood, Will Allen. That team averaged 40 ppg during the season but could not move the ball against a Gator defense that featured Jevon Kearse due to an inability to block the front 4. With 5 NFL skill position players on the roster, we only had 260 yards of offense prior to garbage time in the last few minutes of the 4Q.
I view our problems as five-fold:
(1) The offensive line issues are catastrophic and unfixable this year. Losing Conway, Martin and Roberts devastated the line and it was clear in spring practice and the fall. This is a case of being physically overmatched at 3 spots on the line which is leading to compounding mental mistakes. It will only get worse from here on out.
(2) Dino's offense is easy to defend without the power run game and without Dungey as a multi-faceted power and speed run threat. Lots of 3 person lines and a flood of defenders 7 yards off the line are making it really hard for Devito to identify the conflict defender on the RPO while also taking away the WR screens. You have to churn out 6-7 ypc all day against this type of front. We have become a pre-snap RPO offensive as opposed to a post-snap RPO offense, the later of which is what the Baylor model was based on.
(3) McKinley Williams is the only true interior every-down DT on the roster. Black is a tweener and the others are playing out of position and are not every down ACC players. I have never seen an interior defensive line be dominated quite as badly as I did today
(4) Mikel Jones is the only ACC caliber linebacker on the field for Syracuse - and on a normal team he should not be seeing the field on a consistent basis until he is a redshirt sophomore.
(5) Given that we will typically be overmatched on the lines against the upper echelon of the ACC, we will eventually need to recruit a running quarterback on the roster.
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Now for the positives:
There is talent on this football team.
- I do believe that DeVito is the right quarterback to lead this team and still believe that we could be looking at a 10+ win season during his senior year. I am a huge believer in his arm talent - he cannot be judged playing behind this offensive line
- Benson and Jordan will be stars during their careers at Syracuse
- Jones and Kponga have all-ACC talent
- Courtney Jackson and Cam Jordan will be impact players next year and upgrades over Riley and Johnson
- The young players in the secondary are talented notwithstanding the issues this year and will continue to develop
- We have good depth at DE to replace Robinson and Coleman
Now none of this will matter unless the massive deficiencies at the offensive line and defensive lines are fixed immediately and the coaching staff does a major internal reassessment. I believe the following steps must happen - and if they do - the team can get back on track quickly in the days of transfer portals and effective free agency.
(1) Dino needs to bring in at least 3 upper-class transfers on the offensive line. He needs a true center and two offensive tackles. I have high hopes for Vetorello and Bergeron but believe that their natural positions will be at guard where they can compete with Davis next year for PT. Red will be a good player too - but each of Red, Vetorello and Bergeron are still two years away from being ACC-ready starting caliber lineman.
(2) Dino needs to hit the transfer portal and JC ranks hard for nose tackles. We need size, depth and space eaters that can simply hold their position. McKinley can play the one-gap and Black can play in the rotation. It does not matter if these lineman are incapabale of rushing the pass rusher - if they are hard to move - they will improve our D-line tremendously.
(3) Dino needs to bring in an external offensive mind to bring new ideas to his program. While the line play has really made it hard to judge the scheme, we need more sophistication in our run blocking and read-option game as we are a country mile away from where we were in the final year of the Doug Marrone era.
(4) We need a deep threat WR to replace the threat that Custis brought to the team last year would really open up the offense. I like Jackson but he does not possess the same dominating threat as Custis. The Babers offense does not work well without the over the top threat.
(5) QB depth. We need a bona fide transfer QB to provide competition for Devito and likely need to mine the JuCo ranks as well.
While this season is over - it will be quite interesting to see how Dino reacts with his back against the wall during the offseason. Clearly he needs to improve his recruiting talent on the coaching staff and potentially needs to consider one or more other changes as well as well as conducting a mass quality control audit of the offense and defense (possibly by a third party firm). However, I do not think the problems in this program require a complete overhaul. I believe that nearly all of our problems can be confined to complete failure at 3 offensive line positions and general defensive tackle play - which unfortunately are the equivalent of saying my body feels 100% except for the fact that I tore my achilles tendon.
I will say it now - I still believe that we will be heading back to a 10 win season during DeVito's senior year.
