Syracuse, N.Y. -- Dino Babers had framed this season in a simple manner.

Would Syracuse football be a one-hit wonder?

Or could it recreate oodles of good vibes and sustain the winning ways of 2018′s breakthrough?

The answer didn’t just become apparent after Saturday’s 58-27 loss to Boston College.

A warning flare went up in early September in a 43-point loss at Maryland, to a group that is now, like Syracuse, a 3-6 football team. Confirmation came by Halloween.

Now, a new question must be asked to tell the story of this season, and it is one that will likely have a ripple effect into this coming offseason.

How did Syracuse go from preseason darling to afterthought?

Babers deflected a variation of that question after the game, saying he wanted to take time to think about his answer. Any injury misfortune or bad breaks are part of the game, he said. He seemed to want to contemplate on a deeper level.

There was no such reluctance by senior defensive tackle KJ Ruff. He held court with a few reporters and tried to encapsulate how a team ranked in the preseason top 25 crashed so hard, so sudden.

“I’m not going to point any fingers at any particular group,” Ruff said.

“We all have to come along and be productive. We have to play together as a team, and for the first few weeks, we didn’t do that. Everyone wanted to have their name in the lights. It’s not really about that.”

Few know this better than Ruff.

“I’m a D-tackle. I fight double teams all day,” he said. “As long as you stop the run, I don’t really care who gets the recognition. It doesn’t matter to me. Everyone has to have a mindset it’s not about me. It’s about the name across our chest, not the one behind our backs.

“I feel like we didn’t really do that a lot this season. Everyone wanted to be the guy.”

If this all has a postmortem feel to it, so be it. Syracuse’s fourth-straight loss now puts the Orange in this precarious position: Win out or miss a bowl game.

Novembers such as this one have been far too commonplace for this program in recent years.

Syracuse, long thirsty for the taste of a season like last year’s 10-3 record, entered the fall having that thirst quenched. Guys were excited. It felt good being respected for the first time in their college careers.

A pitfall of success, though, is complacency, and on a team of more than 100 players, the challenge in keeping all of them from becoming complacent is not easy.

Too many players stepping into larger roles this year for the first time, Ruff said, took the wrong mental route to achieving success. Players train all offseason to physically handle the intensity and weekly pounding of the fall season.

The right mental training, Ruff said, is often forged by the kind of adversity being felt in a season like this one, the kind of losing seasons Ruff and the other upperclassmen navigated in back-to-back 4-8 seasons in 2016 and 2017.

“When you have those tough times, that trains you for the brighter days,” Ruff said. "Those 4-8 seasons, a lot of guys on the team hadn’t gone through that.

“We really felt it. We were on the field, and we knew how that felt. That (Boston College game), we went through that eight times that season, so we understood just how bad that was and we didn’t want to go through that again.”

Many of the players on this team were around then, too, just not in contributing roles.

That’s an important distinction, Ruff said.

“Winning does two things,” Ruff said. "It can make you want more, but you can also get complacent.

“I’ve seen both. In the last nine, 10 weeks, I’ve seen both.”

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