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Tallahassee, Fla. — Another end-of-week surprise brought Dino Babers back to a familiar saying from one of his oft-cited movie references.
His leading receiver did not make the trip down here.
Neither did his starting punter, thrusting into action a freshman walk-on who only joined the team at the start of the fall semester.
Babers, in what seems like a weekly occurrence, was left with some last-minute improv before a 33-30 last-second loss against a Florida State outfit that is better than the 0-4 record it lugged into Saturday afternoon’s contest.
Such are the breaks of the game in an environment where players are empowered to hit the transfer portal if they are unhappy with their role or must be extra cautious if the typical seasonal flu-like symptoms suddenly appear.
To be clear, no reason was given for why Taj Harris and James Williams did not travel with the team this weekend.
Babers declined comment on Harris’s status after the game.
But this season has already sprung on us a surprise absence by one of the team leaders before the season-opener at Ohio and a stunning quarterback benching two hours before last week’s victory against Liberty.
At least Babers can fallback on this: It’s still better than last year.
" ‘Heartbreak Ridge’ is a great movie,” Babers said. “Adjust and improvise. Everybody’s going through it. There’s no sense in crying or whining about it. You take your medicine and you go to work. That’s what we did, and we came up three points short.”
Babers took his best available down here to a place Syracuse has never won and found himself relying on some guys who wouldn’t have ordinarily even made the cut for the travel roster.
Still, it found itself staring down the field at a potential game-winning drive with less than four minutes remaining in regulation after erasing a 10-point deficit in the final quarter.
In doing so, Syracuse showed a type of chutzpah that bodes well for a coach that needs his team to look and respond a heck of a lot different from the one that took the field the previous two years.
Two such change agents since last year provided a prism of just that through two of the most electric plays of the season.
Garrett Shrader’s 55-yard touchdown run put to rest any doubt how lethal he can be in the open field. These weren’t a bunch of Mid-American Conference mutts Shrader glided past. He slipped Georgia-transfer defensive lineman Jermaine Johnson to clear the initial threat before cutting back across the field and out-running the kind of athletes Shrader was accustomed to facing in the Southeastern Conference.
Then in the fourth quarter, freshman cornerback Duce Chestnut read a receiver screen and jumped the play, fully laying out for an interception that set up a short field goal that knotted the score at 30 with about five minutes left in regulation after SU trailed by 10 about eight minutes of game time earlier.
“We’re just showing everybody that we’re some dogs,” Chestnut said. “We work hard. We’re not the same team from last year. We’re coming out to put it on for the ACC.”
Syracuse nears the midway point of the season, still halfway to bowl eligibility but needing to knock down three conference pins to get there.
A win would’ve set up another surprise next week on the second Saturday in October: Syracuse and Wake Forest, a battle of two unbeaten ACC teams.
Instead, it heads into that contest at 3-2 (0-1 ACC) but with the makeup that belies the notion this season will go haywire the way it did during the 2017 season, when Syracuse looked like a team that performed much better than its record might indicate.
This was the second time in three trips here Babers’ team came up on the wrong end of a last-second field goal. Derwin James’ block preserved the three-point win in 2017 in a game best remembered for Eric Dungey nearly willing SU to victory on a broken foot.
As most remember, the bottom fell out after that, with SU closing out a 4-8 season with three-straight losses by at least 21 points defensive injuries mounted.
This loss, likely just as bitter as the one four years ago, portends to much more promise in Babers’ eyes after it went toe-to-toe here without a handful of key contributors.
“We’re going to be able to compete. We’re going to be able to battle some teams who are going to be better,” Babers said.
“There’s nothing you can do about that, but we’re going to be able to put an effort forward. This team has got some stuff to it.”
Can it hang on over the course of seven more conference games when its limited roster size is being further crunched, sometimes unexpectedly?
It got Steve Linton back on the field after offseason knee surgery but saw offensive lineman Darius Tisdale carted off the field in the second half.
Syracuse put forth its highest scoring output of the season against an FBS opponent without its top receiver.
Sean Tucker, with Rob Konrad, the most recent player to don the No. 44 jersey watching from the AD’s suite, was kept relatively contained but still cracked the 100-yard barrier.
Shrader found success in the pass game off the play-action and designed rollouts and also showed his value when plays break down or he needs to buy a little more time with his legs.
“We’re a lot more explosive, but we need to keep getting better,” Shrader said.
“We hate losing.”
Even in bitter defeat, it’s better than last year.
Contact Nate Mink anytime: Email | Twitter | 315-430-8253
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