Syracuse (4-7, 2-5 Atlantic Coast) head coach Dino Babers said that it seems unlikely that starting quarterback Eric Dungey will play Saturday against Boston College (6-5, 3-4). Dungey has sat out the last two games with an injury.

“I would like to see if he could or he couldn’t (play),” Babers said during his weekly Monday morning press conference, “but I wouldn’t bet that he would.”

Dungey missed a portion of the Florida State game on Nov. 4, leaving the field for the back end of the first quarter and early part of the second. He came back and finished the game, but was seen with a boot on his right foot postgame and wasn’t brought out to address the media.

Since then, Dungey has been listed as questionable for each of SU’s last two games, against Wake Forest and Louisville, but hasn’t played.

Syracuse’s season effectively ended with Saturday’s loss to the Cardinals. Sitting at 4-7, the Orange will miss out on the six-win plateau needed to make a bowl game with only one game left to play. If there aren’t enough six-win teams, then teams with five wins could qualify, based on the school’s Academic Progress Rate (APR). But there are other teams with five wins that have higher APRs than SU, meaning that unless a five-win team turns down a bowl game, SU is out.

Babers said that he doesn’t think it’s fair to look back and wonder whether Dungey should have been kept out of the Florida State game entirely after leaving initially.

“We can’t look at things that way,” Babers said. “I think that things happen for a reason. We’ll get an opportunity to play one more year with him and that’ll be fantastic.”

If Dungey doesn’t play on Saturday, it’ll mark the third-straight season that he’ll have missed the final three games of the year. Dungey has played 26 career games at SU but has never taken a snap past the first weekend of November.

Published on November 20, 2017 at 2:19 pm

Contact Tomer: tdlanger@syr.edu | @tomer_langer