SWC75
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http://www.syracuse.com/orangefootb...ccomplished_syracuse_football_senior_cla.html
Back when I was working, the manager of our office would call a staff meeting from time to time and hand out some performance awards. Certain veteran or outstanding employees would get plaques and bonus checks to a smattering of applause from their colleagues who were happy for them. We might even decide we'd like to get an award and reapply ourselves to our work as a result of the ceremony. (I've been on both sides of that: I'm not disgruntled because I never got an award).
One day, he called a meeting and started calling names to go up front to give out awards and he kept on calling them until half the office was up at the front of the room with plaques and checks and the other half was sitting in the audience, glaring at them, with no applause. (We later found out that he heard that other offices had more employees that had received awards than ours so he decided to 'even things up' all at once, with bad results). The boss had divided the office into those who were "in" and those who were "out" and nobody liked it. He'd gone from awarding deserving employees to insulting those who didn't get awarded.
Back in the day, bowls were rewards for excellence. There were 6-8 of them only the best teams in the country went to them. Ben Schwartzwalder coached his teams to 7 bowl games in 25 years. SU's 1960 team expected to repeat as national champions but lost two games and were so disgusted that they voted not to go to a bowl because we didn't deserve one. When I pine for those days, I'm the 'old man on the porch'. "It's a new era, deal with it."
But one virtue of the old system was that with the bar set as high as it was, two thirds of the teams knew from the beginning of the year that they weren't bowl teams and by this stage, it was 90%, (actually 100% because they only played ten games). Teams went right into the mode of just trying to win the next game, see how much better they could get, how much they could impress the coach to get more playing time for this year or next, maybe pull off a big upset. There was a greater focus on rivalry games as the big game of the season. If you could got a bowl in your career here, that was a big thing. Only the football factories, (especially the southern ones, who could bring more fans), expected to go to a bowl each year. The rest of the schools didn't even evaluate themselves by that standard.
Now a bowl has become a minimum requirement, the failure to achieve it being "devastating" to the player sand a dangerous to a coach wanting to keep his job. Is that really a better thing? Should making a bowl be the "Mendoza Line" of college football?
I still don't know how all those bowls stay in business and I've never gotten used to bowl games being a battle of 6-6 teams. I understand that for a program like Syracuse getting to 6-6 and winning a bowl game can give them a leg up in recruiting and building the program but the downside of not making a bowl when the bar is set too low troubles me. I'd really like to see a dozen bowls with an 8 win minimum, (all against FBS teams), be the standard.
3-7 teams shouldn't even be thinking about bowls, much less being 'devastated' that they didn't get them.
Back when I was working, the manager of our office would call a staff meeting from time to time and hand out some performance awards. Certain veteran or outstanding employees would get plaques and bonus checks to a smattering of applause from their colleagues who were happy for them. We might even decide we'd like to get an award and reapply ourselves to our work as a result of the ceremony. (I've been on both sides of that: I'm not disgruntled because I never got an award).
One day, he called a meeting and started calling names to go up front to give out awards and he kept on calling them until half the office was up at the front of the room with plaques and checks and the other half was sitting in the audience, glaring at them, with no applause. (We later found out that he heard that other offices had more employees that had received awards than ours so he decided to 'even things up' all at once, with bad results). The boss had divided the office into those who were "in" and those who were "out" and nobody liked it. He'd gone from awarding deserving employees to insulting those who didn't get awarded.
Back in the day, bowls were rewards for excellence. There were 6-8 of them only the best teams in the country went to them. Ben Schwartzwalder coached his teams to 7 bowl games in 25 years. SU's 1960 team expected to repeat as national champions but lost two games and were so disgusted that they voted not to go to a bowl because we didn't deserve one. When I pine for those days, I'm the 'old man on the porch'. "It's a new era, deal with it."
But one virtue of the old system was that with the bar set as high as it was, two thirds of the teams knew from the beginning of the year that they weren't bowl teams and by this stage, it was 90%, (actually 100% because they only played ten games). Teams went right into the mode of just trying to win the next game, see how much better they could get, how much they could impress the coach to get more playing time for this year or next, maybe pull off a big upset. There was a greater focus on rivalry games as the big game of the season. If you could got a bowl in your career here, that was a big thing. Only the football factories, (especially the southern ones, who could bring more fans), expected to go to a bowl each year. The rest of the schools didn't even evaluate themselves by that standard.
Now a bowl has become a minimum requirement, the failure to achieve it being "devastating" to the player sand a dangerous to a coach wanting to keep his job. Is that really a better thing? Should making a bowl be the "Mendoza Line" of college football?
I still don't know how all those bowls stay in business and I've never gotten used to bowl games being a battle of 6-6 teams. I understand that for a program like Syracuse getting to 6-6 and winning a bowl game can give them a leg up in recruiting and building the program but the downside of not making a bowl when the bar is set too low troubles me. I'd really like to see a dozen bowls with an 8 win minimum, (all against FBS teams), be the standard.
3-7 teams shouldn't even be thinking about bowls, much less being 'devastated' that they didn't get them.
