Three plays. A portrait of Syracuse football in three plays: A turnover, a turnover and a touchdown, all in a row, all in the first quarter against Penn State Saturday.

There were plenty other plays during the Nittany Lions’ 55-13 annihilation of the Orange, but those three, in a way, say a lot about this Syracuse team. They are symbols of its suffering.

Now, some might say these three plays altered the outcome of the game, but that’s overblown. This final score was expected. This beating was expected. Penn State should challenge for the Big Ten title, and Syracuse, well, the Orange won’t challenge for much.

Syracuse head coach Greg Robinson seemed to understand that. He started to talk about this metaphorical early-game series in the press conference afterwards, but ended up just talking about the Nittany Lions.

‘The way it started was kind of the way it unfolded,’ Robinson said. ‘We get a turnover, we make a turnover, then all of a sudden, it just – we played a very good football team. I was very impressed.’

Robinson has a point. But for symbolism about the Orange, you can’t do much better than the turnover-turnover-touchdown exchange in the first quarter.

It starts early: Penn State ball at its own 43, 2nd-and-1, with two metaphor-free plays already in the books. PSU quarterback Daryll Clark dropped back to pass. Nick Santiago – a senior who’s seen each of the seven wins and 31 losses in the Greg Robinson era – clipped Clark’s arm, causing a fumble right by the Orange sideline.

Arthur Jones recovered the ball, and his teammates exploded. ‘That was a great feeling right there,’ said middle linebacker Jake Flaherty.

That’s the hard part. This team is trying. They really are. And that sounds stupid and cliché, but it’s still true. They do all the things football teams do: workouts and weight training and practice and skull sessions throughout the week. They come in on their own time to watch film. They play hurt.

The effort is there. The talent just isn’t. But we’ll get to that. Just wait a play.

Because the Orange had the ball in between the first play and the third play. It took over at the Penn State 36, crowd roaring, momentum shifting, movie stars like Dennis Quaid in the building, legendary former Orangemen like Floyd Little watching.

Which meant time to bust out something new. And that’s another thing about this team. Nothing stays the same. Players switch positions. Players even switch sides of the ball. Last year, Ben Maljovec started at linebacker. Now he plays tight end. Last year, Da’Mon Merkerson caught passes as a wideout. Now he plays cornerback.

And while this is going on, coaches come and go: three offensive coordinators in four years, for example. Little continuity, just new systems, new wrinkles, all the time. Brian Pariani brought some hybrid of the West Coast offense in 2005. Brian White switched things up the next season. A season after that, he left the program.

So the latest wrinkle-maker, new offensive coordinator Mitch Browning, trotted out his latest wrinkle, three wide receivers split out and stacked in a row, much like these three plays.

Curtis Brinkley stood at the back of the pack. Cameron Dantley took the snap and threw a quick screen out to the senior tailback, something new for the team that always tries something new.

Except the pass was a backwards lateral. Except the ball hit Brinkley in the hands and squirted out. Except the Nittany Lions pounced and regained possession.

All that momentum? Gone. So was any hope of jumping out to a fast start. Quaid and Little were still around, but that was about it. After Syracuse earned possession, they gave it up.

OK. One last play.

Clark rolled left and threw to a wide-open Jordan Norwood, who beat cornerback Nico Scott on a corner route by the Orange sideline. The Syracuse bench stood and watched it unfold, mist spraying at their backs in the swelter of the crowded Carrier Dome.

Then Scott – playing hurt and soon to depart the game – missed a tackle in the open field. Norwood scooted back inside and ran untouched into the end zone: 7-0.

Wide-open receivers. Missed tackles. No speed. You see this every week, this steady diet of problems caused by basic flaws, basic things like tackling. Tackling. The Orange just does not have the athletes to compete with good teams, not right now.

‘This is not about me,’ Greg Robinson said at the start of this season and, in a way, he is right. In a way, it is sad that a man will soon lose his job because boys can’t tackle. But Greg Robinson recruited these boys. He built this team. He is responsible for this mess.

And those three plays show how it’s gotten this way.

Andy McCullough is the enterprise editor of The Daily Orange, where his columns appear occasionally. You can email him at ramccull@syr.edu.

Published on September 14, 2008 at 12:00 pm