A preview high in Vitamin C and weird coach beef energy
With two wins under their belt, the Jackets—who were technically the home team in the Dublin opener—will go on what officially counts as their first road trip of the season, traveling north to take on the Syracuse Orange.
What Syracuse’s mascot is named for remains a mystery. Their physical mascot is a fruit, but that could just be their cover story. Are they truly named for the fruit? The color? The county in Southern California? The French telecom company that is the first result if you google the word because SEO is a plague upon humanity? Is it just a setup for an elaborate knock-knock joke? The world may never know.
Hopefully they aren’t named after William of Orange (and his Orangemen troops), because given Tech’s new status as the American Football heroes of Ireland, it would provide Brent Key’s team with some historically-rooted bulletin board material.
Curiously, this year’s Syracuse team seems desperate for bulletin board material. It turns out that the coaches, Brent Key and Fran Brown, briefly overlapped for one season at Western Carolina, where Brown was a sophomore cornerback and Key was the running backs coach. Key didn’t think this was worth dwelling on, considering they were on opposite sides of the ball and overlapped for one season on a team that went 4-7. Brown seemed to decide he was offended at this… slight?… and hinted that his team would be “physical” this weekend.
Regrettably, there is no historical record of how many conversations Key and Brown had during the 2004 football season while being on opposite sides of the ball for those four months, so we cannot decide who is in the right. Perhaps Brown will ask Key for an apology for this… slight?… during the postgame handshake. Or perhaps he’s just scraping the bin for ways to motivate his team, because apparently he’s struggling to motivate his team to face a top-25 opponent.
Whatever the case, Syracuse has been a fun dark-horse pick to contend in the ACC this year thanks in large part to the arrival of Kyle “Honda” McCord, the former Ohio State QB who inherited a good group of receivers at his new destination but must continue to live with being deemed a disappointment at his previous and more high-profile stop. Brown himself was a popular hire on the strength of “idk recruited some guys at UGA” being the largest line on his resume. But the Orange opened the Brown era with a statement win, knocking off McCord’s former team by 16 points and—actually wait, I’m getting some new information—okay never mind, the team they beat was Ohio, not Ohio State, and winning by 16 means they didn’t even cover the spread.
Syracuse does have one advantage: GT has not played in Syracuse’s home stadium—the JMA Wireless Dome, and formerly the Carrier Dome—since its 2020 renovation. A year after Tech’s last visit, the Carrier Dome finally added air conditioning. something that the stadium named for an HVAC company had not had for its first 41 years of existence. And then a year after adding air conditioning, they promptly rebranded, depriving us of the delicious irony.
Honestly, this game is a total wild card. Syracuse is a team still figuring out what it even is this year, and maybe Brown is able to conjure some motivation based on absolutely nothing, giving Syracuse the juice to take advantage of Tech having less film to work with and a veteran QB working against a back seven that has some vulnerabilities in pass coverage. Or maybe Tech simply needs to follow their increasingly proven formula and run. the. bawl. repeatedly to demoralize the Syracuse defense. The spread is close enough that the game is basically a coin flip, but a Tech win would be huge for bolstering morale as the team looks to stay in the Top 25 after cracking it for the first time in nine years. Time will tell if they can deliver it.