W2WF: Syracuse

Ah yes, November, the final month of the college football season. It's the one time of year when margins of error grow infinitesimally small. Teams looking to grab brass rings finalize postseason resumes, and those vying for championship glory solidify their positioning. Early-season shockers either proved themselves worthy of the attention or fell back into the larger peloton, and late-season swoons turned hard-charging teams either into potential spoilers or memorably bad seasons.

In the Northeast, the changing weather patterns heighten the drama. The cold's nasty arrival increases the chill on each Saturday and punishes teams already battle-hardened by their seasons, adding an extra layer of toughness for the final stretch of games. It ignores anything acquired in the sweltering heat from summer camp and blows through the beautiful briskness of October, instead allowing the deep freeze to separate the contenders from the imposters.

This week, two cold weather adversaries take their long-standing battle indoors when Boston College visits Syracuse's Carrier Dome for a game with postseason implications. It's unclear how the ACC will handle its bowl allotment this season, but the Eagles, in their first season under Jeff Hafley, find themselves in the thick of a potential Bowl Season position battle.

"November is the best football month," said quarterback Phil Jurkovec. "It's when the best teams play their best, and the crunch time is what determines the season, how well the season goes. I feel it's the best part and an important part of the season. Those cold games are fun, too. I played my state championship in the snow, and I like it."

In normal seasons, the ACC bowl selection order specifies that the ACC champion must either qualify for the College Football Playoff or the Orange Bowl in years when the game is not part of the CFP semifinals. If the ACC champion qualifies for the CFP, as was the case in recent years with Clemson's successful run, the next-highest ranked league team in the CFP poll automatically goes to the Orange Bowl.

The conference would historically slot teams into tiered games based on finishing slots, but that fundamentally changed when the league introduced a new format that originally expected to begin this year. Nine different games all retained equal value based on several factors, including geographic proximity, avoiding repeat matchups or appearances, and matchup win-loss records. That, however, blew apart when COVID-19 threw the entire 2020 season into a chaotic confusion.

The ACC did away with minimums and opened the field as wide as possible to fill its bowl slots. Teams still needed to win football games in order to ensure priority slotting, but the postponement of both the Holiday Bowl and the new Fenway Bowl changed availability for lobbying or slotting anyways.

It's unclear how bowl season will ultimately progress, so it's in a football team's best interest to just keep winning. Army accepted an invitation to the Independence Bowl, but every other game in America is currently up for grabs in some capacity. The ACC has its tie-ins against other leagues, but nothing is guaranteed. There is only the opportunity to focus on right now in one game without worrying about the next step. November games normally feel isolated in their importance, but that intensity is supercharged this year. Every game is precious, and that's never been clearer than in 2020.

"I haven't talked, thought about (or) looked at (those games)," BC head coach Jeff Hafley said. "Each week we seem to have our hands full. The limited time that we've been here with the team, over the last 10 months, (created) some more important things to think about. We want to get to the place on Saturday where we feel great, and that takes every minute and every little energy that I have."

Here's what to watch for when Rivalry Week heads to Syracuse:

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Weekly Storylines (The Matrix Edition)

Neo: What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply the electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

This game falls in a really precarious spot for the Boston College season. It's immediately after a road game to Clemson and the only time the Eagles will play consecutive games away from Alumni Stadium this season. It's only the second time in series history that BC is playing consecutive seasons at Syracuse, and it's sandwiched right before the Notre Dame game at home. Throw in last year's program record 691 yards, and this all adds up to a really volatile situation for a rivalry game.

"Coach (Dino) Babers has done a nice job," Hafley said. "Everyone has to look at this year and take the record. It is what it is, (but) this is hard this year. His quarterback (and) his best defensive player (have) injuries. It's the hardest year anyone has had, (but) he's won 10 games, he's recruited well, and he has really good athletes. I think he's going to continue to get better, and he's going to be there for a while."

Babers is one of the most intense coaches in the ACC, and he can rally his teams to meet the moment. Syracuse is the last team to beat Clemson in a regular season game and nearly did it two years in a row when it lost, 27-23, in 2018. Last year, it cost Wake Forest a shot at the Camping World Bowl with a win in the last week of the regular season in overtime.

He's also never lost consecutive games to Boston College. His Orange beat the Eagles, 28-20, in 2016 but lost in 2017, and its 2018 win was followed by last year's beatdown in the Dome. By pure math, that might tilt the scales back to Syracuse this week.

Boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead, only to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Boy: Then you will see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

It's easy to criticize Syracuse's struggles this year, but the Orange dealt with midseason inconsistencies caused by personnel losses. They lost safety Andre Cisco for the season after a pregame collision prior to Georgia Tech, and they lost Tommy DeVito one week later during the Duke game. This week, they lost top defensive back Trill Williams this week when he opted out of the remainder of the season and declared for the NFL Draft.

That's a tough pill for any team to swallow, but it's especially difficult for a scheme built around razor thin margins of error. Syracuse needs its defense to induce offensive mistakes by an opponent as much as its offense needs to roll speed on the field. That could potentially open the door for BC to layer its own offense and mindset against the Orange.

"We have our system, we have our scheme," Jeff Hafley said. "As you guys can see, we've tried to be more balanced. I think we've run the ball effectively from the Virginia Tech game on. It didn't show on the Virginia Tech game, but I felt it was there for the Georgia Tech game. I thought we did a pretty good job rushing against Clemson."

Last year's game offers a prime example of what happens if a team knocks Syracuse out of its balance. The Orange led, 17-10, after a wild first quarter but fell apart in the second quarter when they only managed a field goal on a 13-play, five-minute drive before going three-and-out on their next drive. Dennis Grosel, meanwhile, threw two bombs downfield to both Kobay White and Zay Flowers to give BC the lead. It drew Syracuse out of sync, and both AJ Dillon and David Bailey knocked the Orange out by bursting touchdown runs.

"(Travis Levy and David Bailey) are both pretty balanced and can run between the tackles," Hafley said. "Both can run zone and both can catch the ball out of the backfield. Travis did a good job against Clemson, he lowered his pads and got through it, and he had some big short yardage runs. Bailey's huge. Sometimes in a game, a guy taps because he's tired, and the other guy gets in and gets the ball. We use both of them, and we're going to continue to use both of them."

Neo: What is the Matrix?
Trinity: The answer is out there, Neo, and it's looking for you, and it will find you if you want it to.

Those three-and-outs were the turning points of last year's game. BC had all kinds of momentum because it kept getting the ball back, and the Eagles didn't even need to sustain drives because they just kept hitting explosive plays. That indicated how badly the Syracuse defense struggled and how badly the offense hung it out to dry by not giving it an opportunity to reboot.

The performance was an anomaly, and it's unlikely to strike lightning two years in a row. DeVito is out injured, but quarterback Rex Culpepper is not a drop-off from the incumbent starter. He's tough and fearless, and he proved he could hit deep balls against defenses if it gives him opportunities. He's a warrior, a cancer survivor, the kind of quarterback who can rally his team at the biggest levels.

"Fundamentals and technique is all we talk about," Jeff Hafley said. "What do we look like pre-snap or post-snap? What do they look like? It's leverage, we've gotten better at it...so can we do that again this week? Can we cover a little bit tighter this week, and are we going to be in the right place and not bust? Those are the little things that we have to fix."

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Countdown to Kickoff

10…Syracuse is 10-for-13 on fourth down conversions in 2020.
9…BC is outscoring opponents this year by a plus-9 margin (193-184).
8…completions for 195 yards by Dennis Grosel against the Orange in last year's victory.
7…prior meetings as ACC opponents resulted in a 4-3 BC advantage.
6…Saturday is the sixth game played this season in a stadium without fans.
5…total receptions combined by active BC pass receivers against Syracuse.
4…Syracuse ranks fourth in the nation in interceptions with nine picks.
3…seasons over the past decade for Boston College with more than 200 yards passing per game (2012, 2018, 2020).
2...Boston College beat Syracuse two years in a row on three separate occasions and none since 1999-2000.
1…Last year's 691-yard output against Syracuse ranks No. 1 all-time by a BC offensive team.

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BC-Syracuse X Factor

Tony White

The sync between a fast-paced offense and its defense is a razor-thin, delicate balance that isn't guaranteed to work out. The offense can pile up points in a hurry, but the shortened drives can tax the team's own defense if it fails to advance plays or score points. It can build a lead or erase a deficit, but it can also cause problems and create blowouts if a defense gets too tired, too quickly.

That's why Syracuse defensive coordinator Tony White has arguably the most important and most difficult job on the Orange's coaching staff. His defense has to stay on the field more frequently than if the offense chose to sustain long, clock-killing drives, but it has to be effective on a larger number of drives.

"This is the first year in (White's) defensive system," Jeff Hafley said. "Tony's done an unbelievable job. He didn't have a spring, and it's his first year in a new scheme. He mixes it up with three-down and four-down (linemen), he pressures, he moves, he plays middle-open and middle-closed. He is a (defensive backfield) guy, and we've had conversations and shared great ideas. I wish all the best, he's a great coach."

White interned with the San Francisco 49ers when Hafley was their defensive backfield coach, so there's a familiarity that runs through the new era of the BC-Syracuse rivalry. The duo likely understand each other's defensive mindset and line of thinking. It's an underlying storyline to BC's return to Syracuse after it rolled to almost 700 yards against the Orange last season.

"When you watch a football game, you look in the middle of the field," Hafley said. "If you see two safeties deep, the middle of the field is open. There will be some kind of Cover-2 if the safeties expand or (there will be) a quarters coverage, (and) in those two coverages, you'll see a lot of balls thrown to the middle of the field because it's open. If there's only safety (high), the middle of the field is closed, and there won't be a lot of posts. There will be go balls to the outside or you'll attack underneath."

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Dan's Homegrown Tailgate Tip of the Week

I love deep fried everything. I believe the person who discovered hot oil is a genius, and I think you can make anything delicious if you drop it into a pool of bubbling hot grease. My brother and I used to fry whatever we could put our hands on - chicken wings, Oreos, Twinkies, butter, shrimp/seafood, dough - and it always came out great.

No wonder my doctor yelled at me over my weight a few years ago.

Fried food is great, but my world changed forever when my wife and I visited Nashville last winter. It was our last vacation from last year, a final hurrah of sorts, and we heard great things about the live music and food on Broadway. We separately visited Vanderbilt and wandered through Midtown (side note: that's where I was when I found out Kobe Bryant died), and we stayed in the Gulch about a mile or so from the honkytonks.

One of my friends told me to dive into a place called Biscuit Love, and it forever changed my world when I bit into an East Nasty. In short, the East Nasty is a buttermilk biscuit with a fried chicken thigh and topped with sausage gravy. I got it with an egg because, you know, it was breakfast, and that somehow made it healthy?

I can never replicate the East Nasty, but I am going to try to recreate something on a biscuit on Saturday. I'm going to break out my deep fryer and throw a little cayenne pepper in the oil in an attempt to make my own hot chicken. We're going to make some biscuits and throw an old fashioned, Southern barbeque at home.

I have no idea when I'm going to get back to Nashville, but that can't stop me from dreaming of the thousands of calories I packed away in four days or the lead singer dancing on the bar at the Second Fiddle after watching a Predators game.

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Scoreboard Watching

Welcome back to a full college football schedule.

The Mid-American Conference was the first FBS league to shut down its season, but it returned on Wednesday with mid-week weirdness fit for a full year. Akron attempted an onside kick on the opening kickoff against Western Michigan, and a power outage forced Central Michigan and Ohio to play the last three minutes of the second quarter after a modified halftime. Ball State scored twice in the fourth to tie Miami in the last minute of the game, but the Redhawks won by scoring a touchdown with ten seconds left on the clock.

So began the first full week of college football. The MAC's arrival, coupled with the Pac-12, put every conference back in play for the first time in 2020 and introduced a full week of games for the first time in a full year. More than a dozen games will kick off by noon, including a 9 a.m. local time kickoff between No. 20 USC and Arizona State. That actually isn't even the first game of the day; Air Force and Army start their leg of the Commander-in-Chief's Trophy at 11:30 a.m. in West Point.

It's a wild day in college football. No. 23 Michigan heads to No. 13 Indiana, and No. 18 SMU is at Temple in conference games. Michigan State is at Iowa, and Memphis is hosting South Florida while Nebraska heads to Northwestern - all at noon.

The mid-afternoon doesn't let that up. No. 8 Florida is at No. 5 Georgia this week in a huge game with playoff implications, and No. 6 Cincinnati hosts Houston on national television. A little bit later, Utah hosts Arizona and No. 14 Oklahoma State, fresh off its loss last week, heads to Kansas State.

The king's ransom, though, is under the lights when No. 12 Oregon hosts Stanford and No. 3 Ohio State hosts a vastly-improved Rutgers squad. All of that occurs opposite the Clemson-Notre Dame game in South Bend between the No. 1 and No. 3 team in the nation.

Even the night owl games offer tantalizing watching when Oregon State hosts Washington State in the Cougars' first game since Mike Leach left for Mississippi State, and California hosts Washington on ESPN. Hawaii holds the 11 p.m. start time against New Mexico for people like me who don't care if they ever sleep.

All of this happens after No. 9 BYU - a sleeper pick of mine for the CFP - plays on the Smurf Turf at No. 21 Boise State on Friday night at 9:45 p.m.

In the ACC, Clemson-Notre Dame is the highlight of the weekend, hands down, but a number of rivalries run deep into the college football schedule. A struggling North Carolina team lost two of its last three and now has to head up the road to Duke, and Virginia Tech will grapple with No. 25 Liberty, a mid-major team that already beat Syracuse, 38-21, this season. No. 11 Miami, meanwhile, is on Friday night against NC State, and Pittsburgh heads to Florida State in another game of note.

All of this is incredibly exciting even though it's operating against ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Virginia and Louisville postponed their game due to an outbreak within the Cardinals' program, and the Wisconsin-Purdue game was previously called off due to coronavirus concerns. The Tulsa game at Navy likewise will not be played.

On the local radar, UMass is back in action in its second game of the season when it plays at No. 16 Marshall. The Minutemen currently have three games scheduled, including their loss at Georgia Southern and a future date at Liberty on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

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Around the Sports World

March's shutdown of the American sports landscape left a giant void for all of us who spend hours watching live events every week. It closed stadiums and shuttered games, and the idea of a safe return to play felt both far-fetched and insignificant in the face of a rising, deadly pandemic. Every major sporting league shuttered, and overseas leagues like the Premier League followed shortly thereafter.

I understood why sports needed to stop, but I couldn't quench my passionate thirst. The longer-drawn closure unexpectedly taught me to appreciate games more upon their arrival, but it didn't stop the hurt - or boredom - of watching Netflix every night. I especially missed baseball's soundtrack since spring training's soundtrack of batted balls is the backdrop to my daily grind in the game. The loss of college baseball was even worse.

That all changed in April on a chance visit through social media when I discovered the KBO League in South Korea on YouTube a couple of days after finding the Chinese Professional Baseball League in Taiwan on Twitter. Both leagues offered me bats, balls, strikes, outs and baseball diamonds at a base level, and I watched every morning as intrasquad scrimmages gradually led to actual, competitive games.

I was far from the only person watching, but I felt a measure of personal gratification when ESPN picked up the KBO in time for its season opener. I will never forget waking up with coffee to watch early morning, 4 a.m. baseball, nor will I forget the misty eyes when I first heard the baseball theme on ESPN for the first time - in Seoul.

I gradually immersed myself in this foreign baseball culture and discovered leagues built around pure, clean fun. Korean baseball is built around food and noise with songs and chants individualized for players by their respective fan bases. Crowds returned in July and taught me about the noisemakers, and they celebrated bat flips as an art, which is something I instantly grew to love. And, yes, ties actually do exist in baseball, although it's still really strange to watch.

The KBO's 144-game season sustained me until Major League Baseball returned, but it continued even after the World Series ended. Five of its ten teams qualified for the postseason to play best-of-three series with bracket slotting dependent on finishing spot. It felt a little bit like the ACC basketball tournament; the fourth and fifth place teams played a Wild Card series to advance to play the third place team in the Semi-Playoff, and the Semi-Playoff winner advanced to the Playoff against the second place team. The regular season champion, the NC Dinos, earned a bye all the way to the Korean Series.

The LG Twins, my self-appointed team, lost this week in the Semi-Playoff after sweeping the Kiwoom Heroes in the Wild Card. Former Red Sox first round pick Casey Kelly went 15-7 with a 3.32 ERA and threw a complete game shutout over the Dinos in one of his last appearances of the season.

Somehow, watching the Twins lose to the Doosan Bears felt like full circle closure on this year. I don't know if the KBO can permanently stick in the crowded American landscape, but I loved it. I'll watch again, and, with any luck, I might be able to one day travel to watch the Twins eventually win their first championship in almost 30 years.

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Pregame Quote and Prediction

If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere. -Frank Sinatra

Rivalry games will always make me nervous because records never really seem to matter. I heard people talk about Syracuse this week like the Orange were a nonfactor, a bad team and a walkthrough in between the twin pillars of the Clemson and Notre Dame games. I calmly pointed out to them that Syracuse is a rivalry game, and that's bad news any time it's on the schedule.

I readily admit that there's magic in playing a team like Notre Dame, but the longstanding, clean hate with Syracuse reverberates more through history. Beating the Orange joins a longer list, one that links back to older generations, and it echoes the way it used to feel to beat teams like Holy Cross.

Signature wins and losses dot the years, and winning the pandemic year's game will etch someone into the history books for eternity. It's an old Big East rivalry, and nothing, absolutely nothing, gets better than that.

Boston College and Syracuse will kick off at 2 p.m. on Saturday from the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, New York. The game can be seen on the ACC's Regional Sports Network, locally in Boston on NESN. Radio broadcast will be available on the BC Learfield IMG Sports Network, locally in Boston on WEEI 93.7 FM, with Satellite options on Sirius 113, XM 385 and Online 975.

Boston College Athletics

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David Bailey

AJ Dillon

Zay Flowers

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Travis Levy

Kobay White

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