CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Blinded by the good it had just accomplished, the Syracuse football team radiated with delight. After all, the Orangemen had just won their first game of the season, 49-47, in triple overtime. Joy pervaded the locker room.

That was the wrong emotion. It should have been relief.

Beating North Carolina in overtime shouldn’t be cause for celebration, especially when the Tar Heels have you on the ropes for three quarters. It should be cause for concern. And as the glow from Saturday’s classic dims, Syracuse needs to realize if it wants to recapture those blissful feelings, it had better improve. Fast.

North Carolina is a bad team that Syracuse made look very good for the better part of three quarters. The Tar Heels went 3-9 last season – if ever there was an indictment of how bad Syracuse was a year ago, it’s that it lost to UNC.

This year’s Carolina team isn’t much better. It wilted against Florida State, 37-0. Still, the Tar Heels ran 505 yards of total offense on Syracuse on Saturday. Darian Durant is a nice player, but just imagine the numbers a reputable, Big East quarterback like Pittsburgh’s Rod Rutherford or Miami’s Brock Berlin could hang on the Orangemen. The official statistician would break his abacus.

Now, should the Orangemen hang their heads after getting off to a 1-0 start? Of course not. But instead of patting themselves on the back, they need to take a lesson from their close call at Kenan Stadium.

‘The front seven,’ defensive tackle Louis Gachelin said, ‘played like it should.’

Interesting. Does that mean Syracuse coaches are teaching the defensive line and the linebackers to play poorly?

Syracuse had no sacks and gave UNC quarterback Darian Durant more than enough time to pick through an inexperienced secondary still feeling their way. The front seven also allowed 4.4 yards per carry. For the first half, it looked like somebody had forgotten to tell the Orangemen it was game No. 1 of this season, not game No. 13 from a year ago.

The simple fact is Syracuse beat a North Carolina team it should have beat, and it beat the Tar Heels by only two points. There were impressive parts to the victory – namely, R.J. Anderson and Walter Reyes – but it was not an impressive victory. If Syracuse plays defense like it did Saturday the rest of the season, 4-8 would be a shocking success.

Luckily for Syracuse, there are signs of hope. The young secondary looked more and more comfortable as the game wore on. The Orangemen started figuring out UNC’s multiple-formation offense, and allowed no points in the fourth quarter.

‘The positive you can take out of this is every series, we got a little bit better,’ SU defensive coordinator Chris Rippon said. ‘With the people that we have, that’s a very positive sign. We are so far away from where we want and we have to be, but there was that glimmer.’

Still, even when Syracuse did buckle down in the fourth, it lived dangerously. After Syracuse pulled to within 34-24 late in the third quarter, North Carolina could have squashed SU’s comeback aspirations. UNC’s tight end John Dunn held the game-clinching touchdown in his hands in the end zone before Diamond Ferri recovered and knocked the ball loose.

Two plays later, the Tar Heels should have had a first and goal inside the 10-yard line, but Willie Parker fumbled away Carolina’s chance to seal the game.

After that point, SU held on for dear life until Kelvin Smith drove his shoulder into Jacque Lewis’s rib cage on the final play of the game.

‘It was a great sigh of relief,’ Rippon said.

That’s how the rest of the Orangemen should feel.

Published on September 7, 2003 at 12:00 pm