September 5th, 2009
We promise we won’t do this every week he plays, but we wanted to post about Greg Paulus’ debut as the starting QB at Syracuse today. Considering that he hadn’t played competitive football in five years, his overall performance was pretty astounding (19-31 for 167 yards, 1 TD, 1 INT). Most of his success was in the first half, though, as all twenty Orange points and the majority of its yardage came before the break. Syracuse led 20-14, but in the second half, Paulus’ offense sputtered as the Orange managed only three first downs the rest of the way.
Paulus Had His Ups and Downs Today (AP/Kevin Rivoli)
However, it was what happened in the overtime that will mark Paulus’ first game as disappointing. At third and goal from the Minnesota five, Paulus peeled left and threw into triple coverage in the end zone rather than dumping the ball into the stands. The pass was intercepted by Nate Triplett, setting up Minnesota’s FG to win the game 23-20 on its next possession. This will be written off as a rookie mistake by a player who had an otherwise solid debut game, but to our untrained eyes it was vaguely reminiscent of several end-of-game scenarios involving a young Paulus at Duke (this one especially). Rather than making the smart, simple decision, he choked on it at a critical juncture and ended up hurting his team.
It’ll be interesting to see how Paulus plays the rest of the season and if he learns from this mental error. At minimum, Syracuse appears better than they were last year, which has to give Orange fans something to rally around.
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randomness | Tagged: college football, duke, greg paulus, syracuse | 
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August 20th, 2007
Some random morsels on Michael Vick Day in America:
- And now on to the next great great political debate, Swift Boat style. Did Obama play ball at Occidental or not? There appears to be some dispute on this story, with a blogger at the Fanhouse refuting the original story we linked to from last week, while someone else dug up an old Washington Post quote from his coach talking about his game. This is so much more interesting than whether W showed up for air guard duty!
- Aggiesports.com reports with an in-depth article on Billy G’s first 100 days in Lexington.
- Quick, what Big East team has the most wins in the Big East Tournament during the 2000s? If you said Pittsburgh (15 wins, largely due to five runner-up finishes) give yourself a Dave Gavitt doll.
- Andy Katz exonerated Roy Williams from the accusation that he was still recruiting Wake Forest commit 6′11 PF Ty Walker after the death of Skip Prosser several weeks ago. There was apparently some misunderstanding over a letter of condolences sent by Williams to Walker regarding the incident (from Katz’s blog – subscriber only).
- A small newspaper article in Missouri confirms what we’ve always known as true about the upcoming college football season (which, admittedly, we enjoy very much despite its fundamental flaws):
- But that’s what we’re asked to do year after year during college football season, as the “best regular season” leads way to the “worst postseason” of any sport. Sure, the bowl games are great for TV viewing on New Year’s Day, but most of them are meaningless and the game we’re supposed to care the most about happened during the second week of January last season.
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