Terrence Roberts’s head was bleeding. Darryl Watkins needed gauze in his nose. Eric Devendorf was fouled so hard the ‘thud’ could be heard over the 32,376 fans watching Syracuse’s 73-63 win over Connecticut Saturday.

The physicality could be chalked as a normal, late-season Big East game. The 48 combined fouls might be pure coincidence. Players bleed against Hofstra, too, not just UConn.

But there was a noticeable edge from both teams in Saturday’s rivalry.

‘They push up against our shooters, always in our face,’ said Syracuse senior Demetris Nichols, attributing the fouls more to UConn’s aggressive style. ‘It’s always going to be a rivalry, but it’s the style they play.’

When SU lost to UConn on Feb. 5, Jim Boeheim’s postgame press conference lasted all of 42 words. His parting shot seemed to be directed at the officiating, proclaiming ‘We’re not going to win any games when the fouls are 25-to-14 and we’re playing zone and they’re playing man-to-man.’

Which was Nichols’s point. High-pressure man-to-man defense is more apt to foul than a zone defense. Syracuse was forced to slide out its 2-3 zone and into a man-to-man defense on Saturday because Connecticut freshman guard Jerome Dyson let loose for a career-high 27 points, including five first-half 3-pointers. Yet Syracuse had only 23 personal fouls on Saturday while in the man-to-man for much of the game compared to 25 on Feb. 5, when it was in zone.

The commonality between the two games, though, was five of the fouls were committed by Roberts. SU’s senior forward fouled out both games against UConn. His fifth foul on Saturday was a charge.

After the Feb. 5 game, Roberts was pointed in his comments about the officiating. He called the fifth foul in that game a ‘ticky-tack foul.’ On Saturday, Roberts didn’t hold back again.

‘If they’re going to call ticky-tack fouls, then that’s how it’s going to be,’ Roberts said. ‘More people are going to be fouling out.’

He thinks the supposed physicality of the SU-UConn games is a byproduct of the officials and not the rivalry.

‘They’re not physical; I don’t know why everyone says they’re more physical,’ Roberts said. ‘They go out and play dirty, so we play dirty, too. But it all comes back to how the refs call it.’

Two Syracuse players – Roberts and Devendorf – fouled out of Saturday’s game. The name that’s missing from that list is center Darryl Watkins. Watkins fouled out of five games this season, including the last UConn game. He finished with four fouls on Saturday and was actually called for his fifth late in the game before the officials changed the call and swung it to Devendorf.

It was a relief to Watkins, who made a deliberate effort not to foul out on Saturday.

‘I came into the game saying I was going to stay out of foul trouble, whatever it will take,’ Watkins said. ‘I knew I had to play the whole time and make a difference in today’s game.’

His matchup was with 7-foot-3 UConn freshman center Hasheem Thabeet. The Tanzania native is difficult to play against for anyone, but he’s even more difficult to deal with when Watkins is out of the lineup. Thabeet said after the game he couldn’t tell whether the game was more physical than some of the other Big East games he’s played this season. But he said before he even played his first game at UConn, he knew the magnitude of the SU-UConn rivalry.

Much of the hype for the rivalry stems from the two Jims on the sideline, Boeheim and Calhoun. Their careers have been linked after creating Big East powerhouses, winning 700 games within four days of each other and being elected into the Basketball Hall of Fame together.

Boeheim, though, refused to acknowledge the UConn rivalry as a ‘bigger game.’

‘I get up for every game,’ Boeheim said. ‘The biggest mistake you can make in this job over anything else is to try and get up for just one game and not for another. You get up the same for every game you play or you’re not doing a good job.’

Published on February 18, 2007 at 12:00 pm