SWC75
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(This is something I send to friends and relatives, including some who don't live in this area and don't know all the details that have already been discussed on this board. I'm also posting it here, as I do each year. I'll do it in separate posts for each chapter.)
The Situation
It always seems to be a pivotal year for the SU football program but when you are at this level, every year is a year that could send the program in one direction or the other. There’s not a lot of carry-over in the respect the program gains from one season to the next. Going into last year, we’d won three bowl games in four years. That doesn’t mean what it once did, (when going to a bowl meant that you were one of the best teams in the country), but it should still earn some measure of respect. Injuries cut through last year’s team like a scythe: 18 of 22 starters missed at least one game. It hit the offense especially hard: at one point we had a 4th string quarterback lining up behind a line that had none of the original starters and every member of which was playing hurt, including a couple of guys who probably should have even suited up. So we couldn’t score and lost 9 of our last 10 games, finishing 3-9. That could be viewed as an anomaly but the prognosticators don’t seem to see it that way: they have us as either the worst or second worst team in the conference. We see our program as a bowl-winning program. They see us as the 3-9 we had last year. Who is right?
We very much want to prove to the ACC and the media that we are right. To do that we have to have a strong comeback year. “Strong” would mean getting back to 6-6 which we were in Scot Shafer’s first year and getting to some bowl, somewhere, which, with the number of bowls, would be a lock at 6-6 and a power conference team. But the downside of being in a power conference is that you are going to play a lot more good teams than bad ones, so a 6-6 record is actually a pretty good achievement, one that you need a pretty good team to be able to do. Do we have a pretty good team this year? That remains to be seen. There seem to be more reason to think not than to think so. Maybe the writers will be proven right.
And it is a pivotal year for the SU program. We are still the newbies in the conference and are trying to upgrade our recruiting in areas we haven’t heavily recruited before using the increased revenue and attention the ACC gives us and the better facilities we have built as a result. If we develop a reputation as one of the conference’s bottom feeders that could show up in our talent and depth and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We need to earn respect as quickly as we can. Only winning will do that.
At the same time, the termites are gnawing at the underpinnings of the program, (or they are awaiting the first loss so they can resume doing so). During the 1-9 streak, many fans were insisting that we needed to get rid of Scot Shafer as soon as possible because it had become obvious to them that “he’s not the guy”. They want us to keep firing coaches until we get the genius who can turn the program around immediately just by his presence. That, of course, means a famous coach. The problems with trying to get a famous coach are:
1) We’ve never had a famous coach come here. Coaches become famous here but this is not a ‘destination’ school to most coaches. Our last three coaches were career assistants. Paul Pasqualoni had been the head coach at Western Connecticut, Dick McPherson at Massachusetts, Ben Schwartwalder at Muhlenberg. That’s the kind of resume our next head coach will have. He might prove better than Shafer but it won’t be because he was ‘famous’.
2) Famous coaches demand famous salaries, which would probably mean less money for the assistant coaches, who actually do much of the recruiting and coaching.
3) Famous coaches became famous at schools that had a lot more to offer than we do in terms of location, academic requirements, tuition, facilities and recent winning tradition. Mr. Famous Coach is unlikely to perform any miracles without those advantages.
4) If a famous coach did come here, he’s likely leave as soon as a better job became open. I know we’ve had that problem anyway but I still think we’re better off with someone who is trying to make his reputation here. At least he’s got to elevate the program to some extent for those other opportunities to open up.
To me the hardest level to coach at is what I call the “true mid-majors”. The term mid- major is usually applied to what are actually the lower majors: schools, many of them former small colleges, who are in the top division but at the periphery of it. I’d define a lower major in football as a school that is in the “Football Bowl Subdivision”, or FBS but not in a power conference. Syracuse is in that group of schools that are in power conferences but are not powerhouses- they just have to try to compete with them. Such schools have had times in their history when they were very good but have had difficulty sustaining such success. They usually lack depth, (their third string quarterback is likely to be someone like A. J. Long rather than Cardale Jones), and their great periods were keyed by great individuals rather than great overall talent. When they lack the great individuals, they fall back to mediocrity or worse. Yet their fans demand to know why they can’t be as good as they remember from their great periods and beat teams that recruit truck-loads of blue chippers every year.
In high school, it’s about developing youth programs, teaching the game, discipline and motivation. In Division III, there are no youth programs and no formal recruiting, (no scholarships), it’s all teaching, discipline, motivation and developing a reputation for winning so that kids considering DIII ball are more likely to go to your school than a rival. You get into Division II, FCS and the lower majors, now you can recruit. But you aren’t a “selector school”. You have to do a better job of finding and evaluating talent and connecting with it early. You want the under the radar guys but you also want radar guys who might come to your school because you’ve worked so hard with them for so long might still come to your school. Then, besides “coaching them up”, you need to be able to game plan to stress your team’s strength and hide their weaknesses. But you are competing against schools on your level. In the power conferences, you need to do all that and figure out how to compete with schools that have considerable advantages over you while keeping the fans who remember the old days happy. And the old days, when things were less expensive and you didn’t have to recruit over so wide an area, were an easier time to compete.
At a place like Syracuse, you need time to build a program. Ben Schwartzwalder’s real breakthrough was in his 8th season, (1956, when he had Jim Brown as a senior). Dick McPherson’s was in his 7th season (1987, when Don McPherson should have won the Heisman). The clock started ticking again when Doug Marrone took over in the wake of the G-Rob disaster in 2009. He got the program back above the water line but then rowed off for another boat, (and then abandoned that ship as well). We hired Scott Shafer to maintain continuity but Doug took the rest of the staff with him, so we basically were starting over, at least in terms of the coaching staff. Again they are the ones that do most of the recruiting and most of the coaching when the kids get here. So basically the Shafer era is not an extension of the Marrone Era. We started all over again, just had we had in 2009 and in 2005. If we fire Shafer, we’ll be starting over for the fourth time in a little over a decade. You can’t build a program doing that, at least not a mid-major like Syracuse.
But if Shafer doesn’t get us back on the winning track, we might wind up starting over again anyway. The complaints will grow and grow. The writers will put Shafer on their list of “hot seat” coaches, (rather than their list of ‘hot’ coaches). Recruits will read that and wonder if it’s worth it coming here, with all the losing and considering that the guys recruiting them might be out of a job before they get there. That’s suicide for a mid-major program.
At the same time, I can’t say if Shafer is truly the “right guy”. His first season had a successful ending with a winning (7-6) record and a minor bowl win but it was a very, very bumpy ride. We absorbed some of the worst defeats the program has ever experienced. I was twice invited to other people’s houses to watch SU road games: Georgia tech and Florida State. We lost both games by 8 touchdowns. We wound up turning down the sound and talking over old times. We got blown out by a Northwestern team that wound up with a losing record and blown out of our own Dome by a Clemson team that wore far more orange than we did. (I couldn’t shout “Let’s Go Orange”). Then came last year’s disaster. He’s now 10-15 through two seasons, 5-11 in the conference. And frankly, the prospects this year don’t look tremendously better. The lynch mob insists that if a guy “isn’t the guy”, why waste time in getting rid of him? Do we need a couple more bad season before we do anything?
The strongest point in Shafer’s favor, besides that people seem to like his feisty and openly honest personality and that he’s got a strong record as a defensive coordinator, is that he and his staff have been doing some of the best recruiting SU has had in years. You can’t tell for sure at this point how good a recurring class will be but there are indicators that things are looking up. This link, based on Rival’s rankings, says that Syracuse’s class rankings from 2005-2013 averaged 71st in the country:
http://regressing.deadspin.com/char...ource=deadspin_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
I’ve found other links saying that last year’s class ranked from 45th-57th and the incomplete 2016 class ranks from 46-51st. Another ranking is star ratings, from 1-5. We haven’t brought in a 5 star recruit in years but we seem to be getting more 3 and 4 star players, rankings that would project the player to be a college starter or star-quality player, if not an All-American. Greg Robinson recruited 30 such players in four years, with a high of 9 in 2007 and Doug Marrone recruited 39, with a high of 13 in 2011. Shafer and his staff recruited 9 such players in his, below, drops that to 6 and 61 put the point remains.)
Many suggest that those numbers are meaningless since many highly rated players have not panned out and many unheralded players become quite good. But the more highly rated players you bring in, the more good ones you are likely to get. There are two other measures that probably mean more: the coaches are wrapping up recruiting classes earlier than they have in past years, which makes it more likely that they are getting their own top choices at each positon: they aren’t having to scramble to fill out classes with warm bodies at the end of the year. Another measure is to see who else was interested in the recruit. We are getting fewer guys who were looking at Connecticut, Rutgers of a Buffalo and more guys who were being considered by schools like Alabama, Florida and Ohio State. Those guys were probably not their #1 choices but they are high quality recruits for a mid-major like Syracuse. We even have a guy in next year’s class who would like to wear #44 and reinstitute the tradition of famous running backs wearing that number, Robert Washington. (Update: Washington has decommitted because of “trust issues” with his recruiter, SU running backs coach DeAndre Smith, something about Smith contacting his estranged father. )
If we keep recruiting well, there has to be a breakthrough eventually. Shafer and his staff deserve a shot at coaching the talent they are bringing in and the school deserves to give their coaching staff every chance to succeed. We don’t want to interrupt the recruiting momentum by changing the coaching staff once again. But they have to go out and win games or the pressure to make still another change may get to be too strong to resist. And that’s why this is yet another pivotal year for the Syracuse Orangemen.
The Situation
It always seems to be a pivotal year for the SU football program but when you are at this level, every year is a year that could send the program in one direction or the other. There’s not a lot of carry-over in the respect the program gains from one season to the next. Going into last year, we’d won three bowl games in four years. That doesn’t mean what it once did, (when going to a bowl meant that you were one of the best teams in the country), but it should still earn some measure of respect. Injuries cut through last year’s team like a scythe: 18 of 22 starters missed at least one game. It hit the offense especially hard: at one point we had a 4th string quarterback lining up behind a line that had none of the original starters and every member of which was playing hurt, including a couple of guys who probably should have even suited up. So we couldn’t score and lost 9 of our last 10 games, finishing 3-9. That could be viewed as an anomaly but the prognosticators don’t seem to see it that way: they have us as either the worst or second worst team in the conference. We see our program as a bowl-winning program. They see us as the 3-9 we had last year. Who is right?
We very much want to prove to the ACC and the media that we are right. To do that we have to have a strong comeback year. “Strong” would mean getting back to 6-6 which we were in Scot Shafer’s first year and getting to some bowl, somewhere, which, with the number of bowls, would be a lock at 6-6 and a power conference team. But the downside of being in a power conference is that you are going to play a lot more good teams than bad ones, so a 6-6 record is actually a pretty good achievement, one that you need a pretty good team to be able to do. Do we have a pretty good team this year? That remains to be seen. There seem to be more reason to think not than to think so. Maybe the writers will be proven right.
And it is a pivotal year for the SU program. We are still the newbies in the conference and are trying to upgrade our recruiting in areas we haven’t heavily recruited before using the increased revenue and attention the ACC gives us and the better facilities we have built as a result. If we develop a reputation as one of the conference’s bottom feeders that could show up in our talent and depth and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We need to earn respect as quickly as we can. Only winning will do that.
At the same time, the termites are gnawing at the underpinnings of the program, (or they are awaiting the first loss so they can resume doing so). During the 1-9 streak, many fans were insisting that we needed to get rid of Scot Shafer as soon as possible because it had become obvious to them that “he’s not the guy”. They want us to keep firing coaches until we get the genius who can turn the program around immediately just by his presence. That, of course, means a famous coach. The problems with trying to get a famous coach are:
1) We’ve never had a famous coach come here. Coaches become famous here but this is not a ‘destination’ school to most coaches. Our last three coaches were career assistants. Paul Pasqualoni had been the head coach at Western Connecticut, Dick McPherson at Massachusetts, Ben Schwartwalder at Muhlenberg. That’s the kind of resume our next head coach will have. He might prove better than Shafer but it won’t be because he was ‘famous’.
2) Famous coaches demand famous salaries, which would probably mean less money for the assistant coaches, who actually do much of the recruiting and coaching.
3) Famous coaches became famous at schools that had a lot more to offer than we do in terms of location, academic requirements, tuition, facilities and recent winning tradition. Mr. Famous Coach is unlikely to perform any miracles without those advantages.
4) If a famous coach did come here, he’s likely leave as soon as a better job became open. I know we’ve had that problem anyway but I still think we’re better off with someone who is trying to make his reputation here. At least he’s got to elevate the program to some extent for those other opportunities to open up.
To me the hardest level to coach at is what I call the “true mid-majors”. The term mid- major is usually applied to what are actually the lower majors: schools, many of them former small colleges, who are in the top division but at the periphery of it. I’d define a lower major in football as a school that is in the “Football Bowl Subdivision”, or FBS but not in a power conference. Syracuse is in that group of schools that are in power conferences but are not powerhouses- they just have to try to compete with them. Such schools have had times in their history when they were very good but have had difficulty sustaining such success. They usually lack depth, (their third string quarterback is likely to be someone like A. J. Long rather than Cardale Jones), and their great periods were keyed by great individuals rather than great overall talent. When they lack the great individuals, they fall back to mediocrity or worse. Yet their fans demand to know why they can’t be as good as they remember from their great periods and beat teams that recruit truck-loads of blue chippers every year.
In high school, it’s about developing youth programs, teaching the game, discipline and motivation. In Division III, there are no youth programs and no formal recruiting, (no scholarships), it’s all teaching, discipline, motivation and developing a reputation for winning so that kids considering DIII ball are more likely to go to your school than a rival. You get into Division II, FCS and the lower majors, now you can recruit. But you aren’t a “selector school”. You have to do a better job of finding and evaluating talent and connecting with it early. You want the under the radar guys but you also want radar guys who might come to your school because you’ve worked so hard with them for so long might still come to your school. Then, besides “coaching them up”, you need to be able to game plan to stress your team’s strength and hide their weaknesses. But you are competing against schools on your level. In the power conferences, you need to do all that and figure out how to compete with schools that have considerable advantages over you while keeping the fans who remember the old days happy. And the old days, when things were less expensive and you didn’t have to recruit over so wide an area, were an easier time to compete.
At a place like Syracuse, you need time to build a program. Ben Schwartzwalder’s real breakthrough was in his 8th season, (1956, when he had Jim Brown as a senior). Dick McPherson’s was in his 7th season (1987, when Don McPherson should have won the Heisman). The clock started ticking again when Doug Marrone took over in the wake of the G-Rob disaster in 2009. He got the program back above the water line but then rowed off for another boat, (and then abandoned that ship as well). We hired Scott Shafer to maintain continuity but Doug took the rest of the staff with him, so we basically were starting over, at least in terms of the coaching staff. Again they are the ones that do most of the recruiting and most of the coaching when the kids get here. So basically the Shafer era is not an extension of the Marrone Era. We started all over again, just had we had in 2009 and in 2005. If we fire Shafer, we’ll be starting over for the fourth time in a little over a decade. You can’t build a program doing that, at least not a mid-major like Syracuse.
But if Shafer doesn’t get us back on the winning track, we might wind up starting over again anyway. The complaints will grow and grow. The writers will put Shafer on their list of “hot seat” coaches, (rather than their list of ‘hot’ coaches). Recruits will read that and wonder if it’s worth it coming here, with all the losing and considering that the guys recruiting them might be out of a job before they get there. That’s suicide for a mid-major program.
At the same time, I can’t say if Shafer is truly the “right guy”. His first season had a successful ending with a winning (7-6) record and a minor bowl win but it was a very, very bumpy ride. We absorbed some of the worst defeats the program has ever experienced. I was twice invited to other people’s houses to watch SU road games: Georgia tech and Florida State. We lost both games by 8 touchdowns. We wound up turning down the sound and talking over old times. We got blown out by a Northwestern team that wound up with a losing record and blown out of our own Dome by a Clemson team that wore far more orange than we did. (I couldn’t shout “Let’s Go Orange”). Then came last year’s disaster. He’s now 10-15 through two seasons, 5-11 in the conference. And frankly, the prospects this year don’t look tremendously better. The lynch mob insists that if a guy “isn’t the guy”, why waste time in getting rid of him? Do we need a couple more bad season before we do anything?
The strongest point in Shafer’s favor, besides that people seem to like his feisty and openly honest personality and that he’s got a strong record as a defensive coordinator, is that he and his staff have been doing some of the best recruiting SU has had in years. You can’t tell for sure at this point how good a recurring class will be but there are indicators that things are looking up. This link, based on Rival’s rankings, says that Syracuse’s class rankings from 2005-2013 averaged 71st in the country:
http://regressing.deadspin.com/char...ource=deadspin_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
I’ve found other links saying that last year’s class ranked from 45th-57th and the incomplete 2016 class ranks from 46-51st. Another ranking is star ratings, from 1-5. We haven’t brought in a 5 star recruit in years but we seem to be getting more 3 and 4 star players, rankings that would project the player to be a college starter or star-quality player, if not an All-American. Greg Robinson recruited 30 such players in four years, with a high of 9 in 2007 and Doug Marrone recruited 39, with a high of 13 in 2011. Shafer and his staff recruited 9 such players in his, below, drops that to 6 and 61 put the point remains.)
Many suggest that those numbers are meaningless since many highly rated players have not panned out and many unheralded players become quite good. But the more highly rated players you bring in, the more good ones you are likely to get. There are two other measures that probably mean more: the coaches are wrapping up recruiting classes earlier than they have in past years, which makes it more likely that they are getting their own top choices at each positon: they aren’t having to scramble to fill out classes with warm bodies at the end of the year. Another measure is to see who else was interested in the recruit. We are getting fewer guys who were looking at Connecticut, Rutgers of a Buffalo and more guys who were being considered by schools like Alabama, Florida and Ohio State. Those guys were probably not their #1 choices but they are high quality recruits for a mid-major like Syracuse. We even have a guy in next year’s class who would like to wear #44 and reinstitute the tradition of famous running backs wearing that number, Robert Washington. (Update: Washington has decommitted because of “trust issues” with his recruiter, SU running backs coach DeAndre Smith, something about Smith contacting his estranged father. )
If we keep recruiting well, there has to be a breakthrough eventually. Shafer and his staff deserve a shot at coaching the talent they are bringing in and the school deserves to give their coaching staff every chance to succeed. We don’t want to interrupt the recruiting momentum by changing the coaching staff once again. But they have to go out and win games or the pressure to make still another change may get to be too strong to resist. And that’s why this is yet another pivotal year for the Syracuse Orangemen.
