SWC75
Bored Historian
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- Aug 26, 2011
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This is my annual look back at what I said in my SU Football Preview – and how things look now that the season is over. This should be interesting.
THE SITUATION
Then:
Syracuse has always been in the highest level of college football. By that I don’t mean they’ve always been an elite program, always competing for a national championship. I mean whatever the highest level of the college sport was, we competed at that level. We were ‘big time’ and not ‘small time’. We were in the ‘University Division’, not the ‘College Division”. We were in ‘Division 1’, not 2 or 3. We were in ‘Division 1A‘ not 1AA. We are ‘FBS’ not FCS and in the ‘Power 5’, not the Group of 5. Many have the mindset that if we aren’t at the top level, that would be a huge disaster and the fans would lose interest and the program would fade into irrelevance or even disappear. I don’t think it will be that bad. Fans of North Dakota State and Mount Union have been having fun at less than the highest level for years and we could, too.
What would we do without the big money? We never made big money when Ben Schwartzwalder or even Dick McPherson and Paul Pasqualoni were here. We still played college football. Being ‘left behind’ might put an end to or at least tone down the facilities arms race and that would be a good thing. A dose of sanity would be welcome.
Now:
My view is clearly not that of AD John Wildhack or the administration. We’re going all out to get and stay big time, whatever it that will mean in the future. Can we achieve that and maintain it?
Then:
Syracuse’s situation is that we just had the second winning season of the Dino Babers era and the third in the 10 years we’ve been in the ACC. Here is each school’s conference record over that time:
Clemson 73-8, Florida State 48-32, U of Miami 48-33, Pittsburgh 48-34, Virginia Tech 42-39, North Carolina 43-39, Louisville 37-37, North Carolina State 38-44, Georgia Tech 36-45, Virginia 29-51, Wake Forest 31-48, Boston College 31-51, Duke 31-51, Syracuse 26-56, Notre Dame 13-1, Maryland 3-5.
That’s right. Literally everyone in the conference has done better than we have.
We thought we’d done it in 2018. We’d built all kinds of new stuff, including an indoor practice facility, new weight room, a museum, etc. We’d gotten a new coach, Dino Babers, with a history of success and a reputation for offensive football. He’d started 4-8 in 2016 same as the year before, but his losses were more interesting, (61-76 to Pitt). He engineered the second greatest upset in program history, a 27-24 win over #2 Clemson in 2017. Then came the breakthrough of 2018. We went 10-3 and it was a strong 10-3: we lost in OT to Pitt and had Clemson on the ropes until they scored on us in the last minute. If we’d won those games we would have been 11-1 and favored to beat Pitt again in the ACC title game. At 12-1 and ACC champion with a win over Clemson, we’d would have had to have been considered for the 4 team national championship playoff. I don’t think we would have gotten it or won it but that’s still quite a season. We were back, baby! We’d paid the penance of a long period of frustration, mediocrity and irrelevance and now it was time for the next glory era and we were hungry for it. It felt so good that winter, spring and summer, actually looking forward to the next season and telling ourselves, over and over again that we were back!
(But we weren’t: three losing seasons followed.) I came to the assessment that we weren’t going to have a new glory era, at least under the current circumstances. In those other eras, we were strictly a northeastern team playing other northeastern teams. Penn State was our Clemson back then but everybody else was about on our level – or less. BC, Pitt and West Virginia were our real rivals. Rutgers, Temple, Holy Cross and Colgate were punching bags, (except during the HooDoo, but that’s another subject). There’s no punching bag in the ACC – unless it’s us. There’s not going to be any 15 or 22 year streak of winning seasons here. Not for Syracuse, anyway.
Now:
Returning the Syracuse program back to the level it was at in the MacPherson-Pasqualoni Era was too much heavy lifting for the popular Dino Babers, as it had been for Scott Shafer, Doug Marrone and Greg Robinson before him. It appeared that Wildhack wanted someone with experience running a big-time program to pick up the bar next but instead he went in a totally different direction: Fran Brown, Georgia’s D-backs coach, who had been named ‘recruiter of the year’ by 247, who immediately hired Elijah Robinson, Texas A&M’s defensive line coach, who had been 247’s ROY the previous year and Nick Williams, Colorado’s defensive ends coach, who had been Deion Sanders’ leading recruiter. These guys are trying to inflate the Syracuse program with their ability to recruit top talents from high school and the transfer portal and so far they have been getting some exciting results. Will they recruit enough top players to turn around a program suffering from a lack of depth and a lack of top linemen on both sides. How can we afford this? And they’ve never been head coaches or even coordinators. Can they coach as well as they recruit? Stay tuned.
Then:
Our record in August and September since we joined the ACC is 22-20. In October it’s 12-25. In November and December, (excluding bowl games, where they have a chance to rest up and get some people back) it’s 11-30. We just aren’t the same team at the end of seasons that we are at the beginning. At Clemson, there’s not a lot a lot of drop-off from the first to the second to the third teams. They can not only replace people when they get hurt but they can alternate people and keep them rested to prevent injuries. There is a drop-off at each level for Syracuse. We often wind up with less talented or experienced players starting by the end of the season or injured regulars playing hurt because they are still better than the alternative that way.
We also have the ‘big man’ problem. Dino calls them elephants, (on offense), and hippos, (on defense). In both football and basketball, big men are key. There’s no shortage of them in either sport but there’s a difference between the good ones and the bad ones. And the good ones tend to gravitate toward the most successful programs, allowing them to sustain success. We get some good linemen in football, but not enough of them. Matthew Bergeron was our first offensive lineman to be drafted by the NFL since Justin Pugh a decade ago. Clemson can line up Matthew Bergerons and Justin Pughs, shoulder to shoulder. We have to patch together the rest of the line and hope it holds up.
Now:
We won our first four games and were 4-1 in September 0-3 in October, but managed to finish 2-2 in November thanks to an amazing switch to the wildcat that teams were no prepared for. Then we lost an early bowl game 0-45, (and it could have been worse) to a South Florida team that put everyone in the box. We also had lost something like 13 players to injury, 8 more to the transfer portal and much of the coaching staff, including Dino Babers whom Wildhack, demanding a 7-5 regular season, had fired. That made the final record of the Dino era 26-21, 12-28 and 13-32 plus 1-2 in bowl games. 26-21 in August and September and 26-62 afterwards. We were 20-45 in our conference. It’s hard to argue with making a change. To not make on would be ‘belief without evidence’ to use Dino’s favorite phrase, which he was still using eight years into his tenure here. ADs need the evidence.
Our defensive line tried valiantly but was otherwise undistinguished. Our offensive line was adequate against the weaker teams we played early on. They were over-powered by the good teams but amazingly responded to the use of the wildcat and allowed us to run for an incredible 400 yards in beating Pittsburgh. They were a lot better at run blocking than pass blocking. They could block guys who stayed in front of them but not those who went around them. But they couldn’t handle 11 in the box. No one can.
Last year’s roster had eight 4 star recruits on it, (including transfers who had been 4 star recruits): the top three quarterbacks, Garrett Shrader, Carlos Del Rio Wilson and Braden Daivs, Chris Bleich and Enrique Cruz on the offensive line, Braylen Ingraham on the defensive line and Alijah Clark and Jaeden Gould in defensive backfield. We had no 5 star players and 66 three stars, LeQuint Allen, Oronde Gadsden, Marlowe Wax and Justin Barron among them. Fran Brown so far has recruited 29 players Kyle McCord was a 5 star per some sources and, of course, was Ohio State’s QB1 this year. He’s got 10 four stars: RB Yasin Willis, WRs Yazeed Haynes, (Yasin and Yazeed could be scoring TDs for us), and Emmanuel Ross TE Jamie Trimble, DL Fadil Diggs, King Joseph Edwards, LB James Heard and D-backs Marcellus Barnes, Devin Grant, and coming back for more, Duce Chestnut! No offensive line 4 stars. But among the 17 three stars are O-liners Joshua Miller, who we got away from Georgia, transfer Demetris Weatherspoon form Howard U., who is 6-7 and 330, Noah Rosahoc, who we get away from VaTech, (always good) and the well-named Woody Goodacre and D-liners Dion Wilson, Caden Brown, Marsaad Watson, Jahide Lesaine, so Coach Fran is aware of the need to upgrade the lines. I think the new guys will need the help of the old guys, (who stayed), do get that job done.
THE SITUATION
Then:
Syracuse has always been in the highest level of college football. By that I don’t mean they’ve always been an elite program, always competing for a national championship. I mean whatever the highest level of the college sport was, we competed at that level. We were ‘big time’ and not ‘small time’. We were in the ‘University Division’, not the ‘College Division”. We were in ‘Division 1’, not 2 or 3. We were in ‘Division 1A‘ not 1AA. We are ‘FBS’ not FCS and in the ‘Power 5’, not the Group of 5. Many have the mindset that if we aren’t at the top level, that would be a huge disaster and the fans would lose interest and the program would fade into irrelevance or even disappear. I don’t think it will be that bad. Fans of North Dakota State and Mount Union have been having fun at less than the highest level for years and we could, too.
What would we do without the big money? We never made big money when Ben Schwartzwalder or even Dick McPherson and Paul Pasqualoni were here. We still played college football. Being ‘left behind’ might put an end to or at least tone down the facilities arms race and that would be a good thing. A dose of sanity would be welcome.
Now:
My view is clearly not that of AD John Wildhack or the administration. We’re going all out to get and stay big time, whatever it that will mean in the future. Can we achieve that and maintain it?
Then:
Syracuse’s situation is that we just had the second winning season of the Dino Babers era and the third in the 10 years we’ve been in the ACC. Here is each school’s conference record over that time:
Clemson 73-8, Florida State 48-32, U of Miami 48-33, Pittsburgh 48-34, Virginia Tech 42-39, North Carolina 43-39, Louisville 37-37, North Carolina State 38-44, Georgia Tech 36-45, Virginia 29-51, Wake Forest 31-48, Boston College 31-51, Duke 31-51, Syracuse 26-56, Notre Dame 13-1, Maryland 3-5.
That’s right. Literally everyone in the conference has done better than we have.
We thought we’d done it in 2018. We’d built all kinds of new stuff, including an indoor practice facility, new weight room, a museum, etc. We’d gotten a new coach, Dino Babers, with a history of success and a reputation for offensive football. He’d started 4-8 in 2016 same as the year before, but his losses were more interesting, (61-76 to Pitt). He engineered the second greatest upset in program history, a 27-24 win over #2 Clemson in 2017. Then came the breakthrough of 2018. We went 10-3 and it was a strong 10-3: we lost in OT to Pitt and had Clemson on the ropes until they scored on us in the last minute. If we’d won those games we would have been 11-1 and favored to beat Pitt again in the ACC title game. At 12-1 and ACC champion with a win over Clemson, we’d would have had to have been considered for the 4 team national championship playoff. I don’t think we would have gotten it or won it but that’s still quite a season. We were back, baby! We’d paid the penance of a long period of frustration, mediocrity and irrelevance and now it was time for the next glory era and we were hungry for it. It felt so good that winter, spring and summer, actually looking forward to the next season and telling ourselves, over and over again that we were back!
(But we weren’t: three losing seasons followed.) I came to the assessment that we weren’t going to have a new glory era, at least under the current circumstances. In those other eras, we were strictly a northeastern team playing other northeastern teams. Penn State was our Clemson back then but everybody else was about on our level – or less. BC, Pitt and West Virginia were our real rivals. Rutgers, Temple, Holy Cross and Colgate were punching bags, (except during the HooDoo, but that’s another subject). There’s no punching bag in the ACC – unless it’s us. There’s not going to be any 15 or 22 year streak of winning seasons here. Not for Syracuse, anyway.
Now:
Returning the Syracuse program back to the level it was at in the MacPherson-Pasqualoni Era was too much heavy lifting for the popular Dino Babers, as it had been for Scott Shafer, Doug Marrone and Greg Robinson before him. It appeared that Wildhack wanted someone with experience running a big-time program to pick up the bar next but instead he went in a totally different direction: Fran Brown, Georgia’s D-backs coach, who had been named ‘recruiter of the year’ by 247, who immediately hired Elijah Robinson, Texas A&M’s defensive line coach, who had been 247’s ROY the previous year and Nick Williams, Colorado’s defensive ends coach, who had been Deion Sanders’ leading recruiter. These guys are trying to inflate the Syracuse program with their ability to recruit top talents from high school and the transfer portal and so far they have been getting some exciting results. Will they recruit enough top players to turn around a program suffering from a lack of depth and a lack of top linemen on both sides. How can we afford this? And they’ve never been head coaches or even coordinators. Can they coach as well as they recruit? Stay tuned.
Then:
Our record in August and September since we joined the ACC is 22-20. In October it’s 12-25. In November and December, (excluding bowl games, where they have a chance to rest up and get some people back) it’s 11-30. We just aren’t the same team at the end of seasons that we are at the beginning. At Clemson, there’s not a lot a lot of drop-off from the first to the second to the third teams. They can not only replace people when they get hurt but they can alternate people and keep them rested to prevent injuries. There is a drop-off at each level for Syracuse. We often wind up with less talented or experienced players starting by the end of the season or injured regulars playing hurt because they are still better than the alternative that way.
We also have the ‘big man’ problem. Dino calls them elephants, (on offense), and hippos, (on defense). In both football and basketball, big men are key. There’s no shortage of them in either sport but there’s a difference between the good ones and the bad ones. And the good ones tend to gravitate toward the most successful programs, allowing them to sustain success. We get some good linemen in football, but not enough of them. Matthew Bergeron was our first offensive lineman to be drafted by the NFL since Justin Pugh a decade ago. Clemson can line up Matthew Bergerons and Justin Pughs, shoulder to shoulder. We have to patch together the rest of the line and hope it holds up.
Now:
We won our first four games and were 4-1 in September 0-3 in October, but managed to finish 2-2 in November thanks to an amazing switch to the wildcat that teams were no prepared for. Then we lost an early bowl game 0-45, (and it could have been worse) to a South Florida team that put everyone in the box. We also had lost something like 13 players to injury, 8 more to the transfer portal and much of the coaching staff, including Dino Babers whom Wildhack, demanding a 7-5 regular season, had fired. That made the final record of the Dino era 26-21, 12-28 and 13-32 plus 1-2 in bowl games. 26-21 in August and September and 26-62 afterwards. We were 20-45 in our conference. It’s hard to argue with making a change. To not make on would be ‘belief without evidence’ to use Dino’s favorite phrase, which he was still using eight years into his tenure here. ADs need the evidence.
Our defensive line tried valiantly but was otherwise undistinguished. Our offensive line was adequate against the weaker teams we played early on. They were over-powered by the good teams but amazingly responded to the use of the wildcat and allowed us to run for an incredible 400 yards in beating Pittsburgh. They were a lot better at run blocking than pass blocking. They could block guys who stayed in front of them but not those who went around them. But they couldn’t handle 11 in the box. No one can.
Last year’s roster had eight 4 star recruits on it, (including transfers who had been 4 star recruits): the top three quarterbacks, Garrett Shrader, Carlos Del Rio Wilson and Braden Daivs, Chris Bleich and Enrique Cruz on the offensive line, Braylen Ingraham on the defensive line and Alijah Clark and Jaeden Gould in defensive backfield. We had no 5 star players and 66 three stars, LeQuint Allen, Oronde Gadsden, Marlowe Wax and Justin Barron among them. Fran Brown so far has recruited 29 players Kyle McCord was a 5 star per some sources and, of course, was Ohio State’s QB1 this year. He’s got 10 four stars: RB Yasin Willis, WRs Yazeed Haynes, (Yasin and Yazeed could be scoring TDs for us), and Emmanuel Ross TE Jamie Trimble, DL Fadil Diggs, King Joseph Edwards, LB James Heard and D-backs Marcellus Barnes, Devin Grant, and coming back for more, Duce Chestnut! No offensive line 4 stars. But among the 17 three stars are O-liners Joshua Miller, who we got away from Georgia, transfer Demetris Weatherspoon form Howard U., who is 6-7 and 330, Noah Rosahoc, who we get away from VaTech, (always good) and the well-named Woody Goodacre and D-liners Dion Wilson, Caden Brown, Marsaad Watson, Jahide Lesaine, so Coach Fran is aware of the need to upgrade the lines. I think the new guys will need the help of the old guys, (who stayed), do get that job done.
