One off-season removed from a national title, Jim Boeheim figured his team wouldn’t need a warm-up to dispose of the likes of Charlotte and Rhode Island. Most would have agreed.

They, like Boeheim, would have been wrong.

Four days after losing its opening game, the Syracuse men’s basketball team again looked unprepared to defend its national title. Syracuse needed Hakim Warrick’s career-high 30 points to overcome Rhode Island’s 29 offensive rebounds and escape from the Carrier Dome with a 69-65 win Sunday before 16,587.

Syracuse (1-1) picked up its first win but failed to fully erase the sting of its 96-92 loss to Charlotte.

‘I thought we’d be a little bit readier than we are,’ said Boeheim, SU’s head coach. ‘After watching practice, I knew we’d have a problem playing veteran teams like Charlotte and Rhode Island. They know what they’re doing, and we’re trying to figure out what we’re doing. Right now, we’re not doing a very good job of that.’

The Rams (3-2) led at halftime, 34-33, and topped SU by as many as 11 in the first half by dominating the offensive glass. Rhode Island outrebounded SU, 55-41, and the Rams snared 14 more offensive rebounds than Syracuse. URI scored 22 points – more than a third of its total – on second-chance attempts.

Four of five Rhode Island players crashed the boards after every shot. Playing their trademark 2-3 zone, the Orangemen didn’t have assigned men to box out and couldn’t stop the Rams from attacking the glass. After most shots, 7-foot center Craig Forth and 6-foot-5 small forward Josh Pace battled four Rams for the ball. Warrick finished with nine boards to help SU’s rebounding, which Boeheim called ‘just horrendous.’

Though their defense served as a disadvantage, the Orangemen carried a height advantage. URI’s tallest player who played more than 10 minutes was center Jon Clark, who’s listed at 6 feet, 10 inches but grabbed only four rebounds. Terrence Mack, a 6-foot-6 forward, led URI with nine boards – six of which were offensive – and 6-foot-2 point guard Dawan Robinson collected eight.

‘They’re going to get rebounds if they’re going against two people,’ Forth said. ‘(We need) more of a team idea as far as going to the boards. We got one or two guys going. We need four. That’s something Boeheim pushes and that’s what we need to do.’

On Sunday, SU didn’t. In the game’s first seven minutes, Rhode Island outrebounded SU, 19-6. That’s when Forth realized the smaller Rams were controlling the rebounding.

‘It was pretty easy to tell,’ Forth said. ‘They’re getting lay-up after lay-up off offensive rebounds. It’s easy to figure out.’

Cold shooting, though, kept the Rams from putting away Syracuse. Rhode Island shot 31 percent in the second half and made one of 22 3-point tries for the game. As effectively as Rhode Island drove to the hoop, no Ram proved competent shooting a jump shot outside of 10 feet.

Syracuse finally took advantage of the misfiring when its stagnant offense went to Warrick. The Orangemen reeled off an 11-0 run – during which Warrick scored seven points – to take a 56-48 lead with 6:12 remaining.

‘They couldn’t put us away,’ said SU guard Gerry McNamara, who scored seven points on 1-for-9 shooting. ‘They were looking for that knockout punch. They couldn’t find it.’

The irony, of course, is that unheralded Rhode Island, not defending champion Syracuse, was the team looking for the knockout. The Orangemen improved defensively from their opener against Charlotte but have yet to play cohesively on offense. Without a career-best performance from Warrick to bail them out, the Orangemen would have started a season 0-2 for the first time since 1968.

‘To get one win the way we’ve played is good,’ Boeheim said. ‘We’ve got a lot of work to do. I felt after preseason that we were a team that would probably struggle for a while. I think we will.’

Published on December 1, 2003 at 12:00 pm