BVille44
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Here is what Dino told ESPN yesterday:
AMELIA ISLAND, Fla. -- Dino Babers searches for a way to properly contextualize all he believes about his new regime at Syracuse, but it’s tough. How does he explain a system he’s purposefully worked to keep undefined, unexpected?
What he wants to do at Syracuse is grandiose. He wants to take one of college football’s most tradition-rich but least-interesting programs (at least for the last decade) and make it relevant.
This requires some outside-the-box thinking, and while that comes naturally to Babers, it’s not always easy to extrapolate those big ideas percolating in his head into a nuanced explanation for outsiders. He’s notorious for coaching without a playbook. There’s no sense in writing any of this down, since the whole point is to adjust often enough that he never becomes predictable.
“Do you play checkers?” he asks. “How about chess?” He grins. “I play both, but I prefer chess,” he says. “Frankly, checkers is kind of boring to me.”
In this analogy, the powers that be are playing checkers, and Syracuse has been particularly bad at it. It’s been 14 years since Syracuse last won at least nine games. Since then, the Orange have had 10 seasons in which they won two or fewer conference games. In the three-year regime of previous coach Scott Shafer, Syracuse ranked 107th in scoring, 110th in yards-per-game and 95th in plays-per-game. So Babers wants to change the way the Orange play -- not just in scheme, but in how everyone in the organization thinks about football. He’s not interested in checkers. He wants Syracuse playing chess. “If I try to play it the way everybody else plays it,” Babers says, “we’ll get the result we always got.”
There’s no doubt Babers’ style is different. When he joined Art Briles’ staff at Baylor in 2008, friends begged him not to take the job. It would be a career killer to work for such a dismal program, they said. Instead, Briles taught Babers how to play things different -- speeding up offense, ignoring traditional metrics of a good defense, tearing away the aura of invincibility of college football’s blue bloods and upending how the game is played. They don’t get it, and because they have a capital ‘E’” Babers says of the traditional powers. “It’s ego. Everybody has an ego, but you need your ‘e’ to be a small ‘e.’ When we go against a capital ‘E’ -- those are the most fun games to play, because they’re the most predictable.”
Babers’ teams are anything but predictable. At Bowling Green last season, Babers’ squad ranked sixth nationally in scoring, 15th in yards-per-play and eighth in plays-per-game, en route to a 10-4 campaign. Ten wins isn’t the goal for Syracuse this year, but those other numbers -- the speed, the efficiency, the confidence -- are the building blocks that Babers thinks will eventually get the Orange into the mix atop a stacked ACC Atlantic. “There’ll be a lot of things that happen good to us, a lot of things that happen bad to us, but we’re not going to be a defensive fighter,” Babers said of his expectations for 2016 at Syracuse. “We’re going to go out and make things happen. They could happen quickly in a good manner or a bad manner, but they’ll happen quickly. We’re not going to be bunting. We’re swinging.”
It’s an approach that has excited his team and offered optimism for a fan base that has largely tuned out football in recent years. Last season, the Orange averaged 32,102 fans per game -- the fourth-worst total in the ACC. That number was down more than 8,000 fans per game from the previous year, the biggest percentage drop of any Power 5 school. Babers isn’t concerned with that. The Carrier Dome, he believes, could be one of the biggest home-field advantages in college football, if he can simply sell the fans on his style of football. He gave them a glimpse during the spring game, when the Orange ran 155 plays and scored 13 touchdowns. And that, Babers said, was just the tip of the iceberg. By September, he wants his offense moving faster, scoring more, pushing the envelope so much that the competition is forced to adjust. The Orange likely won't have enough talent to compete for a championship, but they've got a good shot to sneak up on a few teams and surprise them.
But if the system is about changing from the old guard at Syracuse, the big questions now are about the future. Mark Coyle was the athletics director who hired Babers in December, selling Syracuse to a coach in high demand around the country. Then, before Babers has coached a single game in Orange, Coyle departed -- leaving to take the AD job at Minnesota this week. That leaves Babers in a precarious position. His entire approach is about doing things differently, about erasing the blackboard and drawing up a new game plan, and he knows that will take time. Will the next AD be patient enough to see the process through? Will his ego have a big ‘E’ or a little one?
Babers remained mum on the topic during the ACC’s spring meetings this week, when the news was dumped in his lap that Coyle had departed the previous night for Minnesota without so much as a warning to his newly hired head coach. Still, Babers’ primary concern this season at Syracuse is about the building blocks for the future -- rejuvenating the fan base, rebuilding the offense, restocking the talent on the roster. Coyle’s departure puts those building blocks on far shakier ground.
“It’s a process, and I’m not trying to lay down a quick fix,” said Babers -- perhaps the one thing he’s willing to admit he won’t do at hyper speed this season. “I took this job because I don’t want to go anywhere else. You’ve got to build this house right. If we need to blow up the foundation and lay a new one, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll build it slow, but we’ll build it the right way so it will last.”
At a place like Syracuse, being interesting may be more important than being good in the short term, and Babers can promise that. In the long term though, the talent has to catch up to the system, and Syracuse has a long way to go.
But Babers has seen it all done before -- the slow slog toward respectability at Baylor before the Bears blossomed into one of the nation's elite. That's what he believes can happen at Syracuse, too.
It's crazy talk, really. But that's where Babers sees his advantage again. It's only crazy by the standards set doing things the old way, and he's not interested in any of that.
"This is going to look different," he says. "It doesn’t mean we’re going to be successful immediately, but it’ll look different."
AMELIA ISLAND, Fla. -- Dino Babers searches for a way to properly contextualize all he believes about his new regime at Syracuse, but it’s tough. How does he explain a system he’s purposefully worked to keep undefined, unexpected?
What he wants to do at Syracuse is grandiose. He wants to take one of college football’s most tradition-rich but least-interesting programs (at least for the last decade) and make it relevant.
This requires some outside-the-box thinking, and while that comes naturally to Babers, it’s not always easy to extrapolate those big ideas percolating in his head into a nuanced explanation for outsiders. He’s notorious for coaching without a playbook. There’s no sense in writing any of this down, since the whole point is to adjust often enough that he never becomes predictable.
“Do you play checkers?” he asks. “How about chess?” He grins. “I play both, but I prefer chess,” he says. “Frankly, checkers is kind of boring to me.”
In this analogy, the powers that be are playing checkers, and Syracuse has been particularly bad at it. It’s been 14 years since Syracuse last won at least nine games. Since then, the Orange have had 10 seasons in which they won two or fewer conference games. In the three-year regime of previous coach Scott Shafer, Syracuse ranked 107th in scoring, 110th in yards-per-game and 95th in plays-per-game. So Babers wants to change the way the Orange play -- not just in scheme, but in how everyone in the organization thinks about football. He’s not interested in checkers. He wants Syracuse playing chess. “If I try to play it the way everybody else plays it,” Babers says, “we’ll get the result we always got.”
There’s no doubt Babers’ style is different. When he joined Art Briles’ staff at Baylor in 2008, friends begged him not to take the job. It would be a career killer to work for such a dismal program, they said. Instead, Briles taught Babers how to play things different -- speeding up offense, ignoring traditional metrics of a good defense, tearing away the aura of invincibility of college football’s blue bloods and upending how the game is played. They don’t get it, and because they have a capital ‘E’” Babers says of the traditional powers. “It’s ego. Everybody has an ego, but you need your ‘e’ to be a small ‘e.’ When we go against a capital ‘E’ -- those are the most fun games to play, because they’re the most predictable.”
Babers’ teams are anything but predictable. At Bowling Green last season, Babers’ squad ranked sixth nationally in scoring, 15th in yards-per-play and eighth in plays-per-game, en route to a 10-4 campaign. Ten wins isn’t the goal for Syracuse this year, but those other numbers -- the speed, the efficiency, the confidence -- are the building blocks that Babers thinks will eventually get the Orange into the mix atop a stacked ACC Atlantic. “There’ll be a lot of things that happen good to us, a lot of things that happen bad to us, but we’re not going to be a defensive fighter,” Babers said of his expectations for 2016 at Syracuse. “We’re going to go out and make things happen. They could happen quickly in a good manner or a bad manner, but they’ll happen quickly. We’re not going to be bunting. We’re swinging.”
It’s an approach that has excited his team and offered optimism for a fan base that has largely tuned out football in recent years. Last season, the Orange averaged 32,102 fans per game -- the fourth-worst total in the ACC. That number was down more than 8,000 fans per game from the previous year, the biggest percentage drop of any Power 5 school. Babers isn’t concerned with that. The Carrier Dome, he believes, could be one of the biggest home-field advantages in college football, if he can simply sell the fans on his style of football. He gave them a glimpse during the spring game, when the Orange ran 155 plays and scored 13 touchdowns. And that, Babers said, was just the tip of the iceberg. By September, he wants his offense moving faster, scoring more, pushing the envelope so much that the competition is forced to adjust. The Orange likely won't have enough talent to compete for a championship, but they've got a good shot to sneak up on a few teams and surprise them.
But if the system is about changing from the old guard at Syracuse, the big questions now are about the future. Mark Coyle was the athletics director who hired Babers in December, selling Syracuse to a coach in high demand around the country. Then, before Babers has coached a single game in Orange, Coyle departed -- leaving to take the AD job at Minnesota this week. That leaves Babers in a precarious position. His entire approach is about doing things differently, about erasing the blackboard and drawing up a new game plan, and he knows that will take time. Will the next AD be patient enough to see the process through? Will his ego have a big ‘E’ or a little one?
Babers remained mum on the topic during the ACC’s spring meetings this week, when the news was dumped in his lap that Coyle had departed the previous night for Minnesota without so much as a warning to his newly hired head coach. Still, Babers’ primary concern this season at Syracuse is about the building blocks for the future -- rejuvenating the fan base, rebuilding the offense, restocking the talent on the roster. Coyle’s departure puts those building blocks on far shakier ground.
“It’s a process, and I’m not trying to lay down a quick fix,” said Babers -- perhaps the one thing he’s willing to admit he won’t do at hyper speed this season. “I took this job because I don’t want to go anywhere else. You’ve got to build this house right. If we need to blow up the foundation and lay a new one, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll build it slow, but we’ll build it the right way so it will last.”
At a place like Syracuse, being interesting may be more important than being good in the short term, and Babers can promise that. In the long term though, the talent has to catch up to the system, and Syracuse has a long way to go.
But Babers has seen it all done before -- the slow slog toward respectability at Baylor before the Bears blossomed into one of the nation's elite. That's what he believes can happen at Syracuse, too.
It's crazy talk, really. But that's where Babers sees his advantage again. It's only crazy by the standards set doing things the old way, and he's not interested in any of that.
"This is going to look different," he says. "It doesn’t mean we’re going to be successful immediately, but it’ll look different."
... '01 was the exception, thanks to Dwight. So were the Pinstripes.
