SU football dominated in home finale by Florida State
FSU dominates SU in home football finale
In their last game in the JMA Wireless Dome for senior captains Mikel Jones, Garrett Williams, and Matthew Bergeron, they must have left feeling a sense of embarrassment after being completed dominated by Florida State 31-3.
After a miserable performance in the Dome on Saturday, head coach Dino Babers took complete ownership of the performance from his team.
“The performance out there today, you have to put that on me,” Coach Babers said. “I take responsibility for that, full responsibility, and it was not good enough.”
After sitting out the Notre Dame game, Garrett Shrader returned as the Orange’s starting quarterback but struggled to find any rhythm and finished 6-for-16 for 65 yards and -2 yards rushing factoring in losses from three sacks.
“I didn’t play particularly well and I mean, it happens, but just moving forward we’ve got to figure out a way to get connected, make sure everybody’s on the same page, and make sure we’re working as a unit is the biggest thing,” Shrader said.
The few SU fans of the announced 45,000 in attendance left for Syracuse’s final drive got to see backup quarterback Carlos Del Rio-Wilson drive the team down to the Seminole’s 1-yard line only for time to elapse before getting into the endzone.
Shrader’s offensive line did him no favors with at least three false starts and holding penalties that wiped away running back Sean Tucker‘s first-down runs. Tucker ran for only 52 yards for the night; however, he climbed past legendary running back Larry Csonka to fourth on SU’s all-time rushing list.
Tucker said the penalties were a big an issue for the offense, a big deal for the usually soft-spoken junior running back from Maryland.
“The penalties hurt us a lot, so we’ve got to get that cleaned up and fixed going into next week,” Tucker said.
A lot of fans and analysts wondered aloud if Coach Babers needed to pull Shrader in favor of Del Rio-Wilson as the game got out of hand with the Seminoles building a 31-3 lead early in the second half.
“Based on the things he’s [Shrader’s] done for us, he deserved the right to stay in there until that time we decided to take out him and Tucker at the same time,” Coach Babers said.
The run defense for SU’s unit known as The Mob, the biggest Achilles heel for this unit the past couple of weeks, reared its ugly head again, with Florida State’s Trey Benson shredding the defense en route to a 163-yard game and his third consecutive game setting a new career-high for rushing yards.
Syracuse fans rained down boos at times during the 2nd half as the Orange sputtered on both sides of the field.
After a fourth straight loss and a troubling trend of falling off a clip in November, this SU program has to figure out how they can maintain playing with a high level of consistency and discipline for an entire season.
With a game against Wake Forest next week and Boston College to round out the regular season, this SU team needs to find a way to snag at least one of these last two games to avoid a disappointing slide after a 6-0 start.
is a sports reporter The NewsHouse from Memphis, Tenn. He played defensive tackle at Prairie View A&M University from 2018-2022, and is a broadcast and digital journalist graduate student at SU.
