I honestly think taking the Beamer or Cutcliffe approach with Dino and at a school like Syracuse is the best approach. He needs time, and with time and the right coordinators around him, it will bear results. This was always going to be a process and will continue to be one forever. This is not 25 years ago where Syracuse football was a brand people along the East Coast knew and respected. We're a generation separated from that, and this is basically a complete and total rebuild. The history is great for the school to tout, but 20 years of essential mediocrity or worse means there's an entire generation that looks at Syracuse as a Wake Forest/Duke/Temple type of team.
Maybe 20 years ago with a good hire and massive facilities upgrades, SU could right the ship on recruiting within a couple of years, start grabbing great classes, and all of a sudden everything gets better.
The university punted on facilities for decades, made a horrific hire that tanked the program even further, lost its East Coast recruiting connections that had been fostered from the early '80s to the 21st century. All of those things are not immediate fixes, and when you have coaches who are tenured for three or four years and leave or get fired, it makes it very difficult to have a unified vision that allows the type of continuity in place that SU needs. We are not Texas, and we are not USC. We don't have talent outside our back door that can instantly rebuild a program if you bring in a charismatic coach with some coaching chops. Those schools have the infrastructures and the alumni backing that eventually they will make a hire that will catapult them back into the national spotlight in short order. SU doesn't have that luxury.
Our bread and butter come from deep recruiting connections in states adjacent to NY, a continuing effort to upgrade facilities to at least middle of the pack ACC, and a coach and AD who understand that to make SU relevant it needs a long-term plan. It needs to be upgraded in recruiting, in the development of players once in the program, in roster depth, and in making good game-day decisions. Only the last one can be remedied quickly with a new coach. The other ones would all flounder by switching in six years.
Football more than any other intercollegiate sport relies on recruiting connections and a comfort level that is fostered through DECADES of reaching out. Especially when you don't have the name cache and the homegrown players like the Florida's, USC's, and Texas' of the world have.
In my mind the ONLY way SU rights the ship is by keeping Dino for many more years and constantly giving him upgrades to facilities, assistant coaching hire salaries, and recruiting budget. Dino has the charisma and the personality to win here, but what he needs is the institutional knowledge of the recruiting landscape where a high school coach KNOWS "if I point my guys towards that SU program they're going to be well taken care of." We don't have that right now, and if we fired the whole staff that relationship building would be back at square one.
It's honestly one of the reasons I thought Gerg faltered so badly. He was used to the USC's and Texas' of the world in recruiting. A plentiful bounty anywhere you stepped. The relationship building is still important but there are SO MANY players there, if you miss you have five other players that can fill that spot. He wasn't ready for recruiting to a school where the relationships on the recruiting trail were the MAIN reason SU was grabbing the Ray Rice's and Johnny Morant's of the world.
Doug was an NYC guy and had some ins with those pipelines. That helped. He was also a very dedicated X&O guy who was going to minimize talent gaps on the field where you might not win games but you'd play a style where you were never going to get blasted. That helped in recruiting. He also understood the development part of it as well.
So I'm with Dino because I think he has what it takes as a coach and as a leader of men, and because I do believe he and his staff are building connections with HS staff in the areas we need to be able to pluck kids from. But it will take time. Winning football helps, but a commitment to a long-term plan and constantly growing the budget that we DON'T see is what's going to pay dividends.
This is a similar story to Frank Beamer who recruited players to a middle of nowhere Ag. School because the AD recognized that if he continued to get resources and the right types of coaches around him they could be successful long term. It helps to be in Virginia near the DMV players, but they dominated that area only after Beamer had been there about seven or eight years. It will be harder here because we can't say "and you'll still be in Virginia!" SU's biggest Achilles heel is the fact we don't have a backyard full of talent. So those connections mean even more and require a lot of patience.