In the anxious hours before last Thursday’s football season opener at Brigham Young, Adam Terry fired up his cell phone and started dialing.

“I called my parents,” the sophomore offensive tackle said, “and my girlfriend and one of my high school coaches and a couple of my buddies from high school. Just to get my mind off the game.

“I’m a nervous person.”

That night, it showed.

In his first career start, Terry allowed a sack and missed several blocks. Overall, SU’s young offensive line played tentatively and surrendered three sacks.

“We’ve got a long way to go,” offensive line coach George DeLeone said.

DeLeone hatched a clever analogy in the spring, saying this year’s offensive line — which entered this season with only one career start by someone other than junior center Nick Romeo — was learning algebra, while last season’s veteran front five had mastered calculus.

They’d better at least pin down the Pythagorean Theorem to have a shot in Saturday’s home opener against North Carolina.

Yeah, SU put up 21 points against BYU’s defense. Remember, though, that Hawaii last season slapped a 72-spot on the Cougars.

While North Carolina lost defensive demons Julius Peppers and Ryan Sims, its front four features three players who played at least eight games, including 6-foot-4, 272-pound end Will Chapman, a converted tackle.

And if SU’s O-line doesn’t improve significantly before playing Miami on Nov. 30, it stands as good of a chance as a hoagie at fat camp against the Hurricanes’ All-American defensive end William Joseph.

“There’s only one kid (center Nick Romeo) who’s started a game (before this season),” DeLeone said. “Understand, it’s a work in progress there.”

For now, though, progress means mustering enough moxie to bury pregame butterflies.

“Yeah, they were nervous,” senior guard Eric Kaloyanides said of Terry and Matt Tarullo, the line’s sophomores. “I was nervous. I know Nick and (tackle) Kevin (Sampson) were nervous.

“Sometimes, you get so worked up and nervous that you’re thinking so hard about what play you’ve got to run, and all of sudden — Hike! — and you can’t come off the ball as hard as you wanted to.”

Starting Monday, Kaloyanides buried himself in game tape, watching film “whenever we have a spare moment.”

When Kaloyanides wakes every morning in his South Campus apartment and stumbles downstairs, he’s greeted by the countless game tapes that litter his living-room floor.

Though Kaloyanides and Romeo are the vets of the line, it appeared before the season that Terry, the trigger-happy cell-phone user, was the key component to the unit. Terry, who packed on 30 pounds over the summer, inherited the responsibility of protecting quarterback R.J. Anderson’s blind side at left tackle.

“With Adam Terry, we’re gonna have to baptize him,” SU head coach Paul Pasqualoni said before the season. “Pour a couple gallons of water over his head.”

Of his christening against BYU, Terry said: “It’s not gonna be the best performance I’m going to give in the next three years.”

Then again, maybe a couple jugs of ice water to the face last Thursday could’ve helped Terry relax. But he prefers to look toward Saturday, when nearly 20 of his friends and relatives will dot the Carrier Dome stands.

Clearly, the perfect remedy for a nervous kid.

“I think I’ll be better this time,” he said. “Now that I have relatives coming up, I can’t really call them.”

Darryl Slater is an assistant sports editor at The Daily Orange, where his columns appear regularly. E-mail him at dpslater@syr.edu.

Published on September 4, 2002 at 12:00 pm