Syracuse football keeps landing in the same frustrating place: close enough to make you think, far enough away to leave the Orange empty-handed again.
Saturday night’s 34-26 loss to Louisville was another one-score defeat, the latest in a string of games that have looked competitive on the scoreboard but painful in the standings. Syracuse also dropped games to California, 21-18, and Virginia, 28-25, by three points each.
“I mean, if you look at every game we’ve been in the games,” Syracuse head coach Fran Brown said. “It’s not as if we’re getting blown out. These are [one-score games].”
That part is true. So is the uglier side of the story.
With the loss to the Cardinals, Syracuse is now stuck in an 11-game ACC losing streak and has dropped 12 straight against Power-Four opponents. If the Orange lose to Bill Belichick’s North Carolina Tar Heels next Saturday night, they will match the school’s all-time conference losing streak at 12 games.
That skid traces back to the Fran Brown era, yes, but it also brings back bad memories of the Greg Robinson years, still the standard for Syracuse football misery.
And yet the raw numbers inside ACC play don’t look like a team getting run out of the building. Syracuse has outgained opponents 1,676-1,324 and owns a 101-72 edge in first downs this season in conference games.
The problem is everything that happens around those numbers. The Orange are 2-4 overall and 0-4 in the ACC because they keep tripping over themselves - undisciplined penalties, questionable coaching decisions, shaky special teams, and the sort of back-breaking mistakes that show up exactly when they can least afford them. Louisville got a dose of that too.
Brown, now 15-16 at Syracuse, is below .500 as the program’s head coach. He understands the frustration, but he keeps pointing to how thin the margin has been.
“If I’m a fan I want to win. I want wins, right?
I understand and I know that you want wins,” Brown said. “If you look at the game and you look at the team, the age of the team and where we are right now, we lost three games.
We lost four games. I think Pitt might have beat us by two touchdowns.
Every other one was by one score. We got to make another play.
It’s like one or two plays away from it.”
Syracuse’s quarterback situation has only made the offense harder to sort out. The latest round of changes at the position has left the Orange searching for an identity, and the results show it: they’ve been outscored 78-35 in the second half over their last five games.
Still, there were individual bright spots against Louisville. Umari Hatcher delivered one of the best receiving performances in program history, finishing with 224 yards on 13 catches. Freshman Calvin Russell III also flashed, catching six passes for 53 yards and a 24-yard touchdown.
Even with third-string quarterback Malachi Nelson far from full strength, Syracuse still put up more than 400 yards of offense.
The defense, meanwhile, finally settled in after halftime. Louisville converted 6 of 7 third downs in the first half, but the Cardinals went 0 for 6 after the break and finished 6 of 13 overall. Syracuse also forced two turnovers, both Davien Kerr interceptions.
“All the pieces are there,” Brown said. “Now it’s just got to get rolling. We played with, I hate to call him this, but we played with the third-string quarterback today.
“You know, two weeks in a row we’ve been able to play with him and we’ve been able to function. I feel like that’s growth from last year. Last year when we played with those guys, we were getting blown out by a bunch of points and different guys and like that.”
The quarterback shuffle didn’t stop there. Fourth-stringer Danny Lauter had to come in for Nelson late in the fourth quarter for the second straight week, and Syracuse clearly didn’t trust him to run the two-minute offense. That led to a series of conservative run calls from offensive coordinator Jeff Nixon, even with the Orange out of timeouts and needing 70 yards for a tying touchdown.
That raises an obvious question heading into Chapel Hill: if Nelson can’t play, can Lauter handle the whole operation?
That’s where Syracuse fans are now - back at the same fork in the road so many times before. Brown asks for patience and belief. The results ask for something else.
“I’ll continue to get better and I think our players will continue to get better and the coaching staff,” Brown said.
“You’ll have a good football program, right? You’ll have the program that you want that will last and sustain for years to come.
Not just every three years, two years there’s a good team. It’ll be ‘Oh snap.
We’ve been good the last six years straight.’ Then you’ll understand it.”
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