When Gross was hired, he was hired in that period between the SU win over BC, which was probably one of the most gratifying wins in recent SU history, and the bowl game against GaTech. I despised Pasqualoni by that time. Was sick of the team gagging away opportunities to be great, was sick of the offense they were running, was sick of seeing SU embarrass themselves in bowl games, but, since they beat BC that year, and sent them to the ACC sans the BCS bowl berth as Big East Champ, I was like, ok, give P one more year, but unless he goes 8-4, he's gone.
The trouble with waiting til after yet another awful bowl performance was that all of the better coaches had been hired already. And while he didn't do well at Stanford, this included Ty Willingham, who I thought would've been a great hire for SU. So SU sticks with P, suffers another black eye in a bowl, fires the coach, and then is stuck looking at the second choices that were still remaining.
I don't see that Pasqualoni would've done much better than Robinson. Granted, he had a commitment from Ray Rice (I think), but having watched him coach for 15 years, him and Deleone would have rotated him among three other RBs. That pair had no business continuing to coach at SU. He was a good guy, a guy you could trust to run a clean program, a guy who could be a caretaker of a program for a few years, and a guy who could handle a BCS team rated 60s or lower, but he was not a guy who could rebuild a program into a top 25 team. SU had to get rid of him.
Kev