Syracuse assistant coach Adrian Autry challenged his best rebounder, Tyler Roberson, to collect 15 on Saturday. The forward had totaled 38 in the past six games, and never more than nine. Against Cornell in the Carrier Dome, the coaching staff asked him to make it a focus.

He used his first — an offensive rebound on a Dajuan Coleman miss — to create a third-chance put-back layup. And by the time he got his 12th and final rebound of the game with 6:39 to play, it too was turned into two points.

“It’s funny,” interim head coach Mike Hopkins said. “When Tyler focuses on rebounding, he seems to score.”

Roberson figuratively rebounded from his worst game — a 3-of-9 shooting, eight-board effort against St. John’s — to literally rebound his way to Syracuse’s most dominant game on the glass this season. He pulled down 12, including eight on the offensive glass, and scored 15 points in the Orange’s (8-3) 67-46 win over Cornell (5-5) in front of 18,295 fans.

In turn, the Orange scored 17 second-chance points, outrebounded Cornell, 48-27, and had more than half its points in the paint as it pulled away from the Big Red after trailing early in the second half.

“Today I think I did a pretty good job,” Roberson said. “I think we did a pretty good job as a team on the glass and we need to do that going forward.”

The Orange didn’t make a 3-pointer for the first 11 minutes and 45 seconds. Its 21 attempts were the third fewest of the season, and reflective of a game plan that guard Trevor Cooney said was focused on trying to exploit the Orange’s size advantage.

After Cornell took the lead on back-to-back 3-pointers from Matt Morgan and Robert Hatter, a fast-break layup from Michael Gbinije and then a Roberson layup on a Malachi Richardson miss gave the Orange the lead again.

The Big Red tried to use its up-tempo, 3-point heavy offense to stick around, but the Orange’s presence on the inside dictated tempo more than Cornell’s frenetic pace.

“We can outrebound teams, and we should have outrebounded some of the teams that we lost to,” Cooney said. “We’ve just got to know when we’re active and rebounding as a team and what we need to do. We’re a good rebounding team.”

And Roberson is the team’s most aggressive on the glass. Of his 15 points, 10 came from his own offensive rebounds. His final offensive board turned into a layup not even a second later to give Syracuse a 20-point lead, its greatest of the night.

When Cornell went on its biggest run, an 8-0 spurt to cut the lead to 12, it was Roberson that calmed the antsy fans with a lay-in on a Gbinije pass from the top of the key.

“When I focus on getting rebounds, everything comes to me. I’ll get passes,” Roberson said. “I’m playing hard. In the flow of the game, I’ll score, good things happen when I’m not trying to focus on scoring on my own.”

Hopkins joked during his postgame press conference that he needed a plug-in for the forward to keep him as energized and active as he was against the Big Red. He can’t control when he’ll be the player that he compared to Jerami Grant and Wesley Johnson, or the one that he saw struggle six days before.

“Just make sure he’s plugged in on every darn day,” Hopkins said, his voice elevating.

Even Roberson admits there are some days he’s on and others he’s not. Gbinije said there’s no way for him to tell how he’ll do from Roberson’s unwavering expression. And so the day-to-day uncertainty left Hopkins joking that he needed high-voltage batteries from the closest Best Buy.

On Saturday, his game was spurred by a pregame challenge from an assistant coach. And as he went against Cornell, so too did Syracuse as a whole.

Published on December 19, 2015 at 2:10 pm

Contact Sam: sblum@syr.edu | @SamBlum3