When one thing goes wrong on a football team, you fix it and move on. When everything goes wrong at once, that’s not a bad night. That’s an engine light, and right now, every single warning indicator on Syracuse’s dashboard is lit up at the same time.
Three games into the season, and there isn’t one phase of this team that’s holding up. Not the quarterback. Not the offensive line. Not the defense. Not special teams. Not the coaching discipline. Syracuse’s 27-13 loss at Pittsburgh, its 12th straight defeat in that building, wasn’t one bad unit dragging down a good team. It was every part of the car making noise at the same time.
Start under center, because that’s the check-engine light nobody can ignore. Steve Angeli was benched Thursday after throwing his fourth and fifth interceptions in two games, finishing 161 yards passing with zero touchdowns as Syracuse managed just 10 points with him running the offense. Amari Odom came in and looked sharp, but that’s not really the point. You don’t win football games rotating quarterbacks in September. The real question is whether this is actually who Angeli is right now, a guy who’s still not fully himself less than a year removed from a torn Achilles, chasing the version of himself that torched UConn and Clemson last season before he got hurt. Eleven and a half months might simply not be enough time to get all the way back, and Syracuse doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for an answer.
Move to the defense, and the warning light there is even more basic than scheme or talent: tackling. Syracuse missed tackles on every single one of Pittsburgh’s scoring plays. Damon Ferguson averaged 10.2 yards per touch and ran for 102 yards and a touchdown on just 10 carries, plenty of it coming after contact, bouncing off defenders who should have ended the play. The team as a whole allowed 6.6 yards per carry. That’s not a scheme problem. That’s a fundamentals problem, and fundamentals problems in Week 3 are the scariest kind because they don’t fix themselves with a new game plan.
Special teams delivered its own flashing light, and it happened on national television for the entire country to turn into a meme. Tripp Woody, already coming off two missed field goals against Cal, shanked a 29-yard attempt so badly it’s already been immortalized with its own hashtag. He won’t kick again after that. Freshman Shay Barker took over and actually looked solid, which is one of the only genuinely encouraging signs from the entire night, but it came at the cost of public humiliation for a kid who now has to live with that clip forever.
Then there’s discipline, the light that should be the easiest one to fix and somehow isn’t. Syracuse led the nation in penalties coming into this game and followed it up with 10 more for 94 yards, right after getting torched for the exact same issue against Cal. Fran Brown himself drew an unsportsmanlike conduct flag on the sideline for losing his cool, handing Pittsburgh 15 free yards in a game Syracuse couldn’t afford to give anything away in. You can’t preach discipline to your team while getting flagged for the same thing yourself.
Here’s what makes this genuinely alarming instead of just a bad week: Pittsburgh’s own head coach, Pat Narduzzi, admitted afterward that his team didn’t even play its best game on either side of the ball. And Syracuse still lost by two or three scores worth of separation. That’s not a team getting beaten by a great opponent playing great. That’s a team with every single system malfunctioning at once, against a team that wasn’t at its best either.
An engine light doesn’t mean the car is dead. It means something needs real, immediate attention before you drive it much further. Syracuse has a bye week to figure out which light is the priority. The uncomfortable truth after three games is that there isn’t just one.
