Palmar: The Orange were undisciplined all year, it’s no shock it cost them
All season long, Syracuse was undisciplined on defense, making mistakes and untimely penalties. It doomed SU in the Final Four, our columnist argues. Eli Schwartz | Asst. Photo Editor
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CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — It was poetic, really. Francis Ford Coppola couldn’t have scripted a more fitting end to Syracuse’s season.
There was just the right amount of foreshadowing. Not too on the nose, of course, but enough to where you could see the end just over the horizon. There was the spat at the end of SU’s loss to Princeton, where Riley Figueiras’ check led to a shoving match soundtracked by Carl Douglas’ 1974 hit, “Kung Fu Fighting.” There was Chuck Kuczynski’s ejection against Georgetown, where he laid out Joe Cesare with an elbow to the neck.
It all built up to this. Championship Weekend, Notre Dame on the other sideline. Thirty seconds remain until the fourth quarter. The Orange were down big, 9-4 at one point, but now sit within striking distance down 9-7. They just have to hold on for a few more seconds.
Matt Jeffery, ND’s two-sport standout, dodges on Dante Bowen. He gets off a shot, but it’s heading far above the net, too far for Jimmy McCool to even bother to put a stick up. It’s nowhere close to being a threat.
But Louis D’Agostino, SU’s freshman defenseman, doesn’t know that. If he did, he probably wouldn’t have thrown a vicious trail check into Jeffery’s jaw, right after the Fighting Irish midfielder let the ball go. The Orange had picked up some bad habits. They’d been aggressive and undisciplined on defense all year, accumulating penalties and defying death by killing man-up possession after man-up possession against worse opponents.
Those same habits were the ones that killed its season against Notre Dame. So, Saturday’s game was a deserved ending for Syracuse.
“We did a pretty good job during these playoffs of playing tough, playing physical, but playing smart,” Syracuse head coach Gary Gait said postgame.
Except for the split second in which D’Agostino’s synapses went haywire, and he decided to lay out Jeffery. Anyone who watched the game knows the outcome of his check, but I’ll repeat it again for those who missed it. D’Agostino got called for a two-minute unreleasable penalty, putting the Orange down a man entering the fourth quarter.
Brady Pokorny opened the fourth with a behind-the-back score, Josh Yago rifled a low shot 30 seconds later and Luke Miller closed out the man-up possession for Notre Dame with a third straight goal. With ND up 12-7, the game was over by then.
“I think it’s a fine line,” Gait said when asked about SU’s penalties. “We’ve talked about it a lot.”
Not enough, evidently. If they had, perhaps this wouldn’t be a repeat occurrence. Perhaps you wouldn’t be able to point to multiple instances where the Orange let their tempers loose and crossed that aforementioned fine line between aggression and penalization.
This reputation didn’t come out of thin air. SU has done it to itself. On X, there are a smattering of posts lambasting the Orange for failing to clean up their act when it matters.
I know @danarestia has mentioned it a ton. Syracuse being undisciplined all year long has finally caught up with them. Had momentum up until that 2 minute penalty. Crazy that Gary could never figure it out.
— The Crease Dive Podcast (@thecreasedive) May 23, 2026
It’s not hard to see what disciplined lacrosse looks like. Look at Notre Dame’s Kevin Corrigan, coaching circles around Gait on the other end of the field. The Fighting Irish could’ve gone down after Thomas Porell picked up a — somewhat questionable, to be fair — two-minute unreleasable of his own in the second quarter.
But they didn’t. Instead, Notre Dame stonewalled Syracuse and forced a Finn Thomson turnover, dominating special teams the same way they did all game.
That right there, that’s disciplined lacrosse. The opposite of SU’s display on Saturday.
“We played with a little more poise and a little more discipline in the second half,” Corrigan said postgame. “But I don’t think any less aggressiveness, which is good.”
Maybe Gait can ask Corrigan for pointers. He’s still trying to figure out how to toe that line.
This is a Syracuse team that, above all else, was led by its senior class. Obviously, the headlines were grabbed by Michael Leo and Joey Spallina at attack, but Figueiras and Billy Dwan III were also shepherding SU’s defense as well all year. This wasn’t a young team, the kind of squad that prompts pundits and fans to say, “They’ll be back.” This was a group of grizzled veterans, players who have been there and done that.
And so, it begs the question, why is a team full of players with no shortage of experience making the same mistakes over and over again?
Only Gait knows the answer to that question. He could praise the seniors all he wanted postgame, going on about how incredible of a group they are and how they reshaped the program’s culture. But they didn’t reshape it enough.
“Back-to-back Final Fours,” Thomson said postgame. “It’s definitely a pretty special thing, but at the end of the day, that wasn’t the goal.”
A national championship was. And it’s impossible to escape the feeling that, if Syracuse was just a little more disciplined, it could’ve been competing for one Monday.
Mauricio Palmar is a Development Editor at The Daily Orange, where his column appears occasionally. He can be reached at mjpalmar@syr.edu or on X @mpalmarDO.
