Syracuse talked a big game coming off its bye week about how the team was healthier than it had been all season and that the final five games would be a clean slate after what had happened against Clemson, North Carolina, and Florida State. Alas, that did not happen, and Thursday’s performance against Virginia Tech was an embarrassment, and it has many SU fans and national experts saying the quiet part out loud about the Syracuse program.
All four of these tweets signify the level of concern in Central New York right now, where fans blew up the Orange Fizz Twitter page all night with their anger and frustration over the play on the field they’ve seen over the past month. It does not help that SU has not played at home since September, but they make their schedule in conjunction with the ACC, so it is not an absolute excuse.
The loudest noise has come from former Syracuse quarterback Eric Dungey, who on ESPN Syracuse after the game had some very interesting things to say about the state of the Orange program and head coach Dino Babers.
“I think the worst thing Syracuse did was get rid of Scott Shafer to start with,” said Dungey via syracuse.com. “He was 4-8 (his final year). But if you go back and look at the numbers, we had 70 percent of our production from true freshmen. Offensively and defensively. If you look at the games, we got blown out a couple of games, but we were in mostly every game. … One thing that always rubbed me wrong was that we weren’t Babers guys. He said, ‘I’ll bring in my guys and once I get my guys in, it’ll be different.’ Nothing has gotten different. Nothing has gotten better.”
After the game, Syracuse’s leaders, Marlowe Wax on defense and Garrett Shrader on offense, continued to preach they had good game plans coming into the week and didn’t execute, but it’s getting harder to believe them when the same thing is happening week in and week out to this team.
“The preparation seems like it’s not there,” Dungey said. “Not only the preparation but the heart. When you don’t have either of them, you get what we’ve got the past four weeks, which is just sort of an embarrassing display.”
