George McDonald had some explaining to do.

Standing in the Iocolano-Petty Football Wing on Tuesday evening for almost an hour —an eternity compared to the other interviews — the offensive coordinator took accountability for SU’s offensive flaws. He also pledged his faith in the Orange’s approach to fixing them and in the players who look to carry those solutions out.

“The hardest thing is to keep doing what you are doing,” McDonald said. “It starts with me. There’s a couple calls that I wish I could take back. Every position kind of contributed to us not executing.

“Our defense is doing a wonderful job and we’re not holding our end of the bargain.”

In its season opener, Syracuse got away with poor discipline and execution in the red zone. But in the last two weeks, the Orange has paid the price for an abundance of penalties in and out of the red zone.

As Louisville (4-1, 2-1 Atlantic Coast) and its Top-10 defense venture to the Carrier Dome for a 7 p.m. showdown on Friday, SU (2-2) hopes its snap-count tweaks help the Orange clean up its act on offense as ACC play gets underway.

Since SU’s 40-3 win at Central Michigan on Sept. 13, its offense has scored just three touchdowns — all runs by Terrel Hunt. The Orange has put up plenty of yardage, but untimely penalties and other miscues have not translated well to the scoreboard.

“I understand when you get five turnovers, there has to be points,” McDonald said, referring to SU’s loss to Notre Dame on Saturday. “Like, frick, we got five frickin’ turnovers and we got zero points.

“A lot of those mistakes are self-inflicted and that’s the kind of thing we’re trying to get out of our system.”

Through four games, Syracuse is 13th in the ACC in points per game out of 14 teams, 10th in penalty yards given away per game and third-to-last in third-down conversion percentage.

Even with all those faults, the Orange ranks fourth in total yards per game. For SU, it isn’t a matter of getting drives going — it’s about finishing them off.

“It will all come together when we put everything together,” running back Prince-Tyson Gulley said after the UND loss, “and we are going to be very potent.”

This season, the Orange has only scored nine touchdowns from the red zone, second-worst in the conference. And the five penalties that have cost SU a total of 30 yards from within the opponents’ 25-yard line haven’t helped the cause.

Senior left tackle Sean Hickey said that the red-zone gaffes are sometimes a product of trying too hard.

“Whenever you get there, everything accelerates. The defense accelerates, the fans get louder, the urgency goes up,” Hickey said after the UND loss. “When urgency goes up, people tend to get so locked in on one thing and then they thought they heard the snap count, but it really wasn’t the snap count.

“They want to finish a block extra hard, but it’s a penalty.”

To resolve the Orange’s hastiness at the line, McDonald said Syracuse has made the snap count more uniform and will have more indicators of exactly when the ball will be snapped. The linemen can still be aggressive while the offense keeps the same tempo, McDonald said, but the revised snap count will put the line on the same page as Hunt.

So when Syracuse is nearing the end zone against Louisville, McDonald hopes his offense’s approach will reflect the changes he’s made.

“We all want to score points,” McDonald said, “but we’ve just got to understand that we’ve got to hold our water, take a calm breath and let the play get started so we can actually execute in that situation.”

Published on October 3, 2014 at 12:29 am

Contact Phil: pmdabbra@syr.edu | @PhilDAbb