SWC75
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Ben Schwartzwalder was born in West Virginia and played football for the Mountaineers under Coach Greasy Neale in the early 30’s as a 146 pound center, (he was also a wrestler in the 155 pound class). By the time he was a senior he’d built himself up - to 152 pounds- and was team captain. He was also one of the best wrestlers they’d ever had at the school. He became a high school coach at a place called Sisterville, where his team had a roster of 13 guys. When two of them got hurt he had to send the team’s 112 pound manager in. He then moved on to Parkersburg and then to McKinley High in Canton, Ohio, winning a couple of state championships. .
When the war came, he was commissioned in the US Army and became a paratrooper and a company commander in the 82nd airborne. He trained his men like a football team, which they then became during the D-Day preparations in England and they had a 10-0 record, not even being scored upon. But war was the primary occupation and he half-joked about his paratroopers: “When I say Jump!, they jump!”. They jumped over Normandy. Ben landed in a river and nearly lost his left hand when a wound became infected. His unit stated out with 170 men and 13 officers and after 38 days of fighting they had 43 men left and one officer- Ben Schwartzwalder. Ben later fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart, four Battle Stars and Presidential Unit Citation and a promotion to Major. When General Mathew Ridgeway pinned his medals on him, he remarked “Ben, I never expected to see you here to receive this award.”
Back in the states, he looked for another coaching job and was recommended for Muhlenberg, which today is a Division II school but at that time was more like a 1AA school. There he went 25-5 in three years, winning something called the Tobacco Bowl over St. Bonaventure, another basketball school that used to play football back in the day. The president of the college called Schwartzwalder into his office and Ben assumed there would be congratulations and a possible raise. Instead he was told “Ben, we’ve had an understanding with the Mid-Atlantic Conference folks that we can win in basketball and track, but you’re messing up the agreement on the football field. You can’t win over half your games.” The non-plussed Schwartzwalder immediately started to search for another job.
When Schwartzwalder started he was only allowed to give out 12 scholarships per year, less than half the number big time schools were giving out., “I was hopeful of doing some business with Colgate, maybe to catch Cornell. We had no further horizons at the moment. I complained and the chancellor bawled me out for it. But they were doing so little for football that Old Ben was desperate. Finally, in 1952, Chancellor Tolley allowed him to issue 16 scholarships. As his teams got better, that was expanded to 22 and then to 25, (this is from Ken Rappoport’s book: he does not specify when the latter two changes occurred).
Ben had an early “false positive” with the 1952 Lambert Trophy winners. Army, which had been the big power in the East, had suffered its cribbing scandal and the other schools in the East were in decline or rebuilding. We found ourselves in the Orange Bowl against perennial national power Alabama and got humiliated 6-61 on national television. It took four years to fully recover from that. In Jim Brown’s senior year we went 7-1 and won another Lambert and this time went to the Cotton Bowl where TCU, then as now a respected power, barely beat us on a blocked extra point, 27-28. Two years alter we were in the Orange Bowl again, this time taking on the King Kong of 50’s football, Wilkinson’s Oklahoma team, and losing 6-21 despite out-gaining the Sooners. The next year we were all-conquering with one of the greatest teams ever and won our only national championship. Schwartzwalder was a miracle worker!
There were no more miracles after that but there were some good teams and great players Like Ernie Davis, John Mackey, Jim Nance, Floyd Little and Larry Csonka. But eventually events caught up with Bantam Ben.
Archbold Stadium should have been replaced after the national championship. Instead Manley Field House was built as an indoor practice facility until the school realized they could make more money by promoting the basketball team. Then, in 1964, the NCAA gave up its attempt to use rules to enforce one platoon football. This required schools to recruit many more players: not only were there separate teams playing offense and defense but players could now specialize in various functions. Top schools could no longer be satisfied to recruit players from their own area where players grew up being aware of the program. They had to pull in recruits from all over the country. For that they needed a lot of money for facilities and recruiting. Typically, the Syracuse administration thought that since we were doing well, nothing more needed to be done. Schools like Penn State, which expanded its stadium from 30,000 at the beginning of the decade, eventually to over 100,000, were prepared to win those recruiting wars. Syracuse was not.
Dave Meggysey decided he didn’t like being a football player anymore and wrote a book trashing everyone he had ever dealt with in the game, including Ben, whom he claimed had “dehumanized” him. It was a condemnation of football in general but many took it as a condemnation of football at Syracuse.
Then came the black boycott of 1970, (simultaneously with several similar actions across the country) and a demand that a black assistant coach to be hired. Since Ben had no more money for assistant coaches, he would have had to fire one of his long time assistants. There had also been a fight between a white player and black player and incident at a basketball game where some black players refused to stand for the national anthem, which angered Ben, who was derided as a “super patriot”. Ben promised an “interim” black coach for spring practice. That turned out to be Floyd Little, who critcized the player’s for their attitude. They felt he was just a “mouthpiece” for Schwartzwalder. They decided to walk out. Eventually a black coach was hired, Carlmon Jones. The boycotters claimed they got inferior medical attention and academic support and weren’t getting secret payments from the alumni as they claimed the white players were. These allegations were unprovable. Jim Brown then entered the fray, announcing an intention to sue the NCAA for racial discrimination.
Suddenly Ben had a segregated team. They lost the first there games of the year, then rallied to win 6 of 7, including a shocking 24-7 win at Penn State and a season ending demolition of Miami in Archbold, 56-16, (a game that greatly resembled the 1998 victory over the same school). But the damage had been done. The black boycott got national publicity and branded Schwartzwalder and the schools as racist.
Then came a movement within the to re-examine the financial aspect of the football program. This committee determined that it was a waste of money and recommended putting an end to it. Meanwhile, Archbold Stadium had reached a crisis point. The fire department wanted to condemn it. They were persuaded to do it a section at a time. When I was a student there in the early 70’s the stadium had a listed capacity of 41,000 but an actually capacity of 19,000 due to the roped off sections. Then came a decade long debate over whether to build a new stadium , where to put it and how to finance it. We had no formal weight room until a guy’s office was cleared out and some barbells put in it. It wasn’t solved in Schwartzwalder’s time. People who think we have a crisis in facilities now have no idea what a real crisis is.
Ben finally had a losing record in his second to last year, his first since his initial year of 1949. Then the program finally collapsed like a dying elephant in 1973, getting blown out by Bowling Green in their first game and losing 8 in row. I recall the guy who did the “bottom ten” column in the national newspapers each week said we were the worst team in America, (Army, UTEP and, believe it or not, Florida State went winless that year), “because of all the money they spend on football up there”. In fact that was the problem- we weren’t spending anywhere near enough. Fans insisted, as they often do, that “the game had passed him by”. I remember my barber telling me that the players just didn’t have the “spirit” they had in the old days.
Still, the Orange rallied with a win over Holy Cross and a big upset of Boston College. They final game was played against his old school, West Virginia, in a downpour. It looked for a while like we might pull off another upset but the Mountaineers clinched it with a late score, 14-24. I still remember Ben Schwartzwalder, the man who had been SU’s coach for my entire lifetime, walking slowly across the field in the rain to shake hands with the West Virginia coach,(Bobby Bowden), then walking off the field to the locker room with his head down and his thoughts to himself.
There were stories at the time that Don Nehlen, the Bowling Green coach who had embarrassed Ben’s last team, or Tubby Raymond , the coach at Delaware who had won a couple of small college championships there, wanted to come to Syracuse. Considering the circumstances, it’s had to see why. What we wound up with was Michigan’s linebacker coach, Frank Maloney. Maloney had his limitations, (especially in-game adjustments: we had a lot of games where we looked great in the first quarter and went downhill from there). But Frank has never received the credit he deserved for keeping the football program alive while the politicians bickered about building a new stadium and the school slowly awoke to the need to get modern facilities such as a genuine weight room. He somehow managed to recruit some fine players such as Bill Hurley, Art Monk, Joe Morris, Craig Wolfley and Jimmy Collins whose ability in key positions allowed the team to remain competitive and interesting. He produced three winning seasons and actually won a bowl game, abit a very minor one, (the Independence Bowl over McNeese State).
But there were also seasons of 2-9, 3-8, 3-8 and 5-6 and when the promising 1979 team went into a slump the members of the 1959 team signed a petition asking for Frank to be fired. Also, Jake Crouthamel had become athletic director and new AD’s like to bring in their own people. Officially, Frank resigned to spend more time with his family. There was talk he might get the Northwestern job, being from Chicago, (the Wildcats had started on their record winning streak), but it didn’t happen. Frank wound up with a long-term job running the ticket office for the Chicago Cubs.
Crouthamel remembered Dick MacPherson who had beaten his Dartmouth teams twice when coaching at Massachusetts. That was before Division 1AA and Dartmouth was considered a major college team while UMASS was a small college team. Before that, he’s been Maryland’s defensive backfield coach back in 1966 when SU’s Jim Del Gaizo threw a record-tying four TD passes in a 28-7 win. MacPherson also had pro experience as an assistant coach for the Denver Broncos and Cleveland Browns. In fact he was the Brown’s linebacker coach when Jake hired him to be the new Syracuse coach.
I remember being at work when the announcement came. A co-worker said they’d hired someone named MacPherson. Who? But he was coming from the pros and people figured he was hired to put the program’s coaching on a more professional, now that we were in the Dome and were going to be a big-time program. Maloney’s last team had not been that bad. They would have had a winning season if Joe Morris hadn’t been injured and had to miss several games. Joe was back and healthy so Dick had plenty to work with.
That made it all the more dismaying to see the team start out the 1981 season with three straight losses, the first two to Rutgers and Temple, both of whom Maloney had beaten the year before. It was also disappointing to see MacPherson’s slovenly, disheveled appearance during games, with his shirttail pulled out. He didn’t look professional at all. And the team seemed disorganized with a chaotic sideline and nobody very sure of themselves on the field either. The toughest part of the schedule was in the middle with Maryland, Penn State and Pittsburgh in a row. We somehow managed to beat Indiana and tie the Terps but were 1-5-1 heading into a stretch run. Fortunately Crouthamel had scheduled the first Colgate game in 20 years and we won it 47-24. Then, after a loss on the road to Navy we came home to upset Boston College and West Virginia to finish 4-6-1 with Joe Morris playing all season and setting records along the way. The next year the team totally collapsed to 2-9, the same record that ended Ben Schwartzwalder’s career and started Frank Maloney’s. We had thought such disasters were in the past. This was supposed to be the great new Carrier Dome Era.
Coach Mac’s third year didn’t look any better when it opened with a third straight loss to Temple in Philadelphia, a game where top recruit Don McPherson injured his knee and was out for the year, (which is why he was still around for the 1987 season). Mac’s record at this point was 6 wins, 16 losses and a tie, (G-Rob was 5-18 in his first 23 games). Fortunately, our next opponent was Kent State, who had the country’s longest losing streak. I was one of and official 24,605 fans in the Dome that day, (I remember it as a lot less than that). Syracuse fumbled the first three times we got the ball. As I recall it was twice on kick-off and once on the first play from scrimmage. The Golden Flashes got a field goal and then a touchdown out of it and then got the ball back a third time. A woman next to me said in my ear “This is actually funny”. Then something happened. The four defensive linemen, Tim Green, Blaise Winter, Bill Pendock and Jamie Kimmel started motioning to the crowd to make some noise- “get behind us!”. The fans started cheering them on- why not? They stuffed that third possession and SU slowly took over the game. That line, which came to know as “Four Wheel Drive” kept forcing punts and turnovers and Don McCauley kept kicking field goals for the Orange. We got it to 9-10 by halftime, then took the lead at 12-10 and 15-10 and final punched over a touchdown to win 22-10. The crowd got louder and louder as the game went on and made as much noise as I’ve heard from any capacity crowd. In the subsequent years of great success, I was very proud to say that I was one of the fans who had been there at the Kent State game.
Syracuse went on to win three in a row and suddenly we were 3-1. Then we went out to play one Nebraska’s greatest teams and got crushed like a soda can, 7-63, the first of four straight losses. But the team rallied to win its last three and finish 6-5 against a schedule that included 6 bowl teams when there were less than half as many bowls as we have now. The next year was just as tough, with 5 bowl teams and a 9-1-1 Florida team on probation. This was the year of the great win over Nebraska, followed by three straight road losses at Florida, West Virginia and Penn State. Then we rallied for three wins before losing to Heisman Trophy winner Doug Flutie’s Boston College team, 16-24, for another 6-5 record. Both those teams would have gone to bowls today. The following year we did go to a bowl, losing the Cherry Bowl in Michigan to Maryland. But that gave us “bowl credibility” and allowed Mac to recruit a class full of big offensive linemen.
Hopes were high the next year but there was too much rebuilding to do. We opened the season with four straight losses- all close- and a group called the “Sack Mac Pack” started up. But we rallied to a 5-2 finish and then all those big guys moved into the O-line to clear the way for Donnie McPherson, Moose Johnson, Robert Drummond and Michael Owens and we went on an 11-0 tear. Mrs. MacPherson even convinced the coach to start wearing a blue blazer with an orange tie. He looked like the CEO of a successful corporation. It was the beginning of a 15 year run of winning seasons, something only Michigan, Nebraska and Florida State accomplished in those same years.
Ben Schwartzwalder had been offered the job of being the first ever coach of the New England Patriots after the national championship season. When Coach Mac, a New Englander, got the same offer after the 1990 season, he took it. Since we were now a successful program, Jake Crouthamel decided to promote from within and we got our third straight linebacker coach elevated to the status of a head coach, Paul Pasqualoni. Before coming to Syracuse he’d been a Penn State linebacker, (a Nittany Lion coaching the Orange!), and head coach at Western Connecticut State, a Division III team. He’d inherited a 1-8 squad from 1982 and took them to 9-1 by 1984. In 1985 they went 10-1 and made the DIII playoffs. Mac hired him in 1987. Mac hired him in 1987. His youth and comparatively brief tenure with the program made him a surprise choice but that put him in a category with Coach Mac and Ben Schwartwalder. Paul went on to become the second winningest coach in Syracuse history, going 107-59-1.
He got off to a great start, going 10-2 in his first two years, crushing Steve Spurrier’s Florida team in 1991 and coming up just short of upsetting #1 Miami in 1992. The 1993 team strangely fell apart, losing consecutive games to Miami and West Virginia by a combined 0-92. That team and the next broke the string of bowl teams at 6 in a row, (none of which we lost) but extended the string of winning seasons. Then came the Donovan McNabb Era where we were very good but could never quite break through to greatness. We had a 41-0 Gator Bowl blow-out of Clemson, a 34-0 kick-off Classic rout of Wisconsin, ran Michigan out of the Big House, 38-28, (it was 38-7 at one point), and beat Miami back to back by 96-26. Who could imagine that we’d ever do such things?
But it created an intolerance for upset losses and uncompetitive performances, such as the two losses each to East Carolina, North Carolina State and later Rutgers and Temple when they were the dregs of the conference, as well as 0-62 and 7-51 losses at Virginia Tech, 13-45, 0-59 and 7-49 losses to Miami, and in his final season 0-51 to Purdue to open the season and 14-51 to Georgia Tech to close it. Eventually the talent and patience level declined and a new Athletic Director, Dr. Daryl Gross, fired him and brought in his own man, leaving us to argue about what really went wrong ever since.
Gross had come from USC and his new man, on advice of Pete Carroll was Greg Robinson, a handsome , silver-haired man with a ready smile and a confident gaze. He’d had a thirty year career with several top college programs and NFL teams, including two Super Bowl rings earned as defensive coordinator of the Denver Broncos. His most recent job was with the Texas Longhorns who had re-emerged as a national power and would win the national championship with players Robinson coached during Greg’s first year in Syracuse. The A-Team had arrived!
Except it turned out to be the “” team as we found out why Robinson had been an assistant for 30 years. His teams were out of shape. The game plans didn’t seem to make much sense. New to the East, he didn’t seem to know where to recruit. His first team went from 6-6 the previous year to 1-10, our worst record since 1892. His four year record of 10-37 was the worst such stretch in SU history. That was it for “G-Rob”. At least he lowered the bar for his successors. If Coach P had come after G-Rob, he’d be everyone’s hero now. Maybe he still should be?
Doug Marrone came after G-Rob, another career assistant but one who had played here and had notebooks full of his plans for bringing the program back from the abyss. He immediately made it more competitive, even if he won only one more game than G-Rob’s last year. The next year he won four league road games, thanks to Scott Shafer’s excellent defense. Then came a mysterious collapse after a 5-2 start in 2011, followed by a second bowl win in three years, followed by a mysterious, (to us, anyway), exit to be replaced by Shafer.
Scott’s first year has been a roller-coaster ride and nobody knows if he will be successful here but we are hopeful because, launching ourselves into a new conference, we need him to be a success. If he isn’t, we’ll have to start all over again with someone else.
Shafer is the third straight coach we’ve had who had never been a head coach before. We’ve never hired a coach in the post- World War II Era who had ever previously coached a major college football team. In our entire history we’ve hired two coaches who already had some measure of prominence as head coaches: Bill Hollenbeck, who filled in for Buck O’Neill when he was tending to his law practice in 1916 and Ossie Solem, who had had a losing record at Iowa.
But we’ve had many famous coaches here: O’Neill, the Jones’ boys, Munn, Schwartzwalder and MacPherson are all Hall-of-Famers. The Joneses and Munn are there for what they did after they left here. O’Neill, Schwartzwalder and MacPherson are in because of what they did here. Meehan would probably be a Hall-of-Famer without a scandal that occurred long after his career was over. As I said, I thought Solem might be in but he isn’t. Maybe Coach P will get some support with his 151 wins, (107 at SU).
The main point is that famous coaches don’t come to Syracuse: coaches become famous here. Maybe that will change now that we’re in the ACC. Maybe already prominent coaches will want to come here now. I’ll believe that when I see it. If it does happen, I wonder how long they will be here. If a Jim Tressel decided to restart his career here, would he want to stay and develop the program to its fullest potential or would he use it as a steppingstone to get to a more prominent job? Would that really help us? Would Greg Schiano stay or would he jump back to the NFL as soon as he could? Of course, the Marrone experience may mean that we aren’t a “destination” school for anybody. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
But other things do. Famous coaches are expensive. The money spent on them won’t be available to pay assistant coaches, who do most of the actual coaching and recruiting. It also won’t be available for travel and facilities and other things that impact recruiting. We’d be buying a name in hope that that will make up for other things we won’t have because we bought that name- or rented it for a while. It excites the fans, but is that enough?
And famous coaches who have great success at more than one school are rare. Some guys like Lou Holtz and Nick Saban, (at least prior to Notre Dame and Alabama) were famous as coaching Johnny Appleseeds. But for most coaches there’s a right place and a right time and it’s never quite the same after their glory era. Do we really want someone who is famous for what he did in another place at another time? Finally, if the famous coach is unemployed, you have to wonder why. Do we really want to find out when he’s on our sideline?
If Scott Shafer doesn’t work out, (and based on our experiences with Ben and Mac, we won’t know that for a while), his replacement is likely to be someone with a similar resume- a lifetime assistant getting his first chance at a head job, or someone similar to Ben and Mac, who had had success at a lower level and this is their chance to prove they came make it at this level. We just have to hope they will make the most of it, (and give them the chance to do so).
When the war came, he was commissioned in the US Army and became a paratrooper and a company commander in the 82nd airborne. He trained his men like a football team, which they then became during the D-Day preparations in England and they had a 10-0 record, not even being scored upon. But war was the primary occupation and he half-joked about his paratroopers: “When I say Jump!, they jump!”. They jumped over Normandy. Ben landed in a river and nearly lost his left hand when a wound became infected. His unit stated out with 170 men and 13 officers and after 38 days of fighting they had 43 men left and one officer- Ben Schwartzwalder. Ben later fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart, four Battle Stars and Presidential Unit Citation and a promotion to Major. When General Mathew Ridgeway pinned his medals on him, he remarked “Ben, I never expected to see you here to receive this award.”
Back in the states, he looked for another coaching job and was recommended for Muhlenberg, which today is a Division II school but at that time was more like a 1AA school. There he went 25-5 in three years, winning something called the Tobacco Bowl over St. Bonaventure, another basketball school that used to play football back in the day. The president of the college called Schwartzwalder into his office and Ben assumed there would be congratulations and a possible raise. Instead he was told “Ben, we’ve had an understanding with the Mid-Atlantic Conference folks that we can win in basketball and track, but you’re messing up the agreement on the football field. You can’t win over half your games.” The non-plussed Schwartzwalder immediately started to search for another job.
When Schwartzwalder started he was only allowed to give out 12 scholarships per year, less than half the number big time schools were giving out., “I was hopeful of doing some business with Colgate, maybe to catch Cornell. We had no further horizons at the moment. I complained and the chancellor bawled me out for it. But they were doing so little for football that Old Ben was desperate. Finally, in 1952, Chancellor Tolley allowed him to issue 16 scholarships. As his teams got better, that was expanded to 22 and then to 25, (this is from Ken Rappoport’s book: he does not specify when the latter two changes occurred).
Ben had an early “false positive” with the 1952 Lambert Trophy winners. Army, which had been the big power in the East, had suffered its cribbing scandal and the other schools in the East were in decline or rebuilding. We found ourselves in the Orange Bowl against perennial national power Alabama and got humiliated 6-61 on national television. It took four years to fully recover from that. In Jim Brown’s senior year we went 7-1 and won another Lambert and this time went to the Cotton Bowl where TCU, then as now a respected power, barely beat us on a blocked extra point, 27-28. Two years alter we were in the Orange Bowl again, this time taking on the King Kong of 50’s football, Wilkinson’s Oklahoma team, and losing 6-21 despite out-gaining the Sooners. The next year we were all-conquering with one of the greatest teams ever and won our only national championship. Schwartzwalder was a miracle worker!
There were no more miracles after that but there were some good teams and great players Like Ernie Davis, John Mackey, Jim Nance, Floyd Little and Larry Csonka. But eventually events caught up with Bantam Ben.
Archbold Stadium should have been replaced after the national championship. Instead Manley Field House was built as an indoor practice facility until the school realized they could make more money by promoting the basketball team. Then, in 1964, the NCAA gave up its attempt to use rules to enforce one platoon football. This required schools to recruit many more players: not only were there separate teams playing offense and defense but players could now specialize in various functions. Top schools could no longer be satisfied to recruit players from their own area where players grew up being aware of the program. They had to pull in recruits from all over the country. For that they needed a lot of money for facilities and recruiting. Typically, the Syracuse administration thought that since we were doing well, nothing more needed to be done. Schools like Penn State, which expanded its stadium from 30,000 at the beginning of the decade, eventually to over 100,000, were prepared to win those recruiting wars. Syracuse was not.
Dave Meggysey decided he didn’t like being a football player anymore and wrote a book trashing everyone he had ever dealt with in the game, including Ben, whom he claimed had “dehumanized” him. It was a condemnation of football in general but many took it as a condemnation of football at Syracuse.
Then came the black boycott of 1970, (simultaneously with several similar actions across the country) and a demand that a black assistant coach to be hired. Since Ben had no more money for assistant coaches, he would have had to fire one of his long time assistants. There had also been a fight between a white player and black player and incident at a basketball game where some black players refused to stand for the national anthem, which angered Ben, who was derided as a “super patriot”. Ben promised an “interim” black coach for spring practice. That turned out to be Floyd Little, who critcized the player’s for their attitude. They felt he was just a “mouthpiece” for Schwartzwalder. They decided to walk out. Eventually a black coach was hired, Carlmon Jones. The boycotters claimed they got inferior medical attention and academic support and weren’t getting secret payments from the alumni as they claimed the white players were. These allegations were unprovable. Jim Brown then entered the fray, announcing an intention to sue the NCAA for racial discrimination.
Suddenly Ben had a segregated team. They lost the first there games of the year, then rallied to win 6 of 7, including a shocking 24-7 win at Penn State and a season ending demolition of Miami in Archbold, 56-16, (a game that greatly resembled the 1998 victory over the same school). But the damage had been done. The black boycott got national publicity and branded Schwartzwalder and the schools as racist.
Then came a movement within the to re-examine the financial aspect of the football program. This committee determined that it was a waste of money and recommended putting an end to it. Meanwhile, Archbold Stadium had reached a crisis point. The fire department wanted to condemn it. They were persuaded to do it a section at a time. When I was a student there in the early 70’s the stadium had a listed capacity of 41,000 but an actually capacity of 19,000 due to the roped off sections. Then came a decade long debate over whether to build a new stadium , where to put it and how to finance it. We had no formal weight room until a guy’s office was cleared out and some barbells put in it. It wasn’t solved in Schwartzwalder’s time. People who think we have a crisis in facilities now have no idea what a real crisis is.
Ben finally had a losing record in his second to last year, his first since his initial year of 1949. Then the program finally collapsed like a dying elephant in 1973, getting blown out by Bowling Green in their first game and losing 8 in row. I recall the guy who did the “bottom ten” column in the national newspapers each week said we were the worst team in America, (Army, UTEP and, believe it or not, Florida State went winless that year), “because of all the money they spend on football up there”. In fact that was the problem- we weren’t spending anywhere near enough. Fans insisted, as they often do, that “the game had passed him by”. I remember my barber telling me that the players just didn’t have the “spirit” they had in the old days.
Still, the Orange rallied with a win over Holy Cross and a big upset of Boston College. They final game was played against his old school, West Virginia, in a downpour. It looked for a while like we might pull off another upset but the Mountaineers clinched it with a late score, 14-24. I still remember Ben Schwartzwalder, the man who had been SU’s coach for my entire lifetime, walking slowly across the field in the rain to shake hands with the West Virginia coach,(Bobby Bowden), then walking off the field to the locker room with his head down and his thoughts to himself.
There were stories at the time that Don Nehlen, the Bowling Green coach who had embarrassed Ben’s last team, or Tubby Raymond , the coach at Delaware who had won a couple of small college championships there, wanted to come to Syracuse. Considering the circumstances, it’s had to see why. What we wound up with was Michigan’s linebacker coach, Frank Maloney. Maloney had his limitations, (especially in-game adjustments: we had a lot of games where we looked great in the first quarter and went downhill from there). But Frank has never received the credit he deserved for keeping the football program alive while the politicians bickered about building a new stadium and the school slowly awoke to the need to get modern facilities such as a genuine weight room. He somehow managed to recruit some fine players such as Bill Hurley, Art Monk, Joe Morris, Craig Wolfley and Jimmy Collins whose ability in key positions allowed the team to remain competitive and interesting. He produced three winning seasons and actually won a bowl game, abit a very minor one, (the Independence Bowl over McNeese State).
But there were also seasons of 2-9, 3-8, 3-8 and 5-6 and when the promising 1979 team went into a slump the members of the 1959 team signed a petition asking for Frank to be fired. Also, Jake Crouthamel had become athletic director and new AD’s like to bring in their own people. Officially, Frank resigned to spend more time with his family. There was talk he might get the Northwestern job, being from Chicago, (the Wildcats had started on their record winning streak), but it didn’t happen. Frank wound up with a long-term job running the ticket office for the Chicago Cubs.
Crouthamel remembered Dick MacPherson who had beaten his Dartmouth teams twice when coaching at Massachusetts. That was before Division 1AA and Dartmouth was considered a major college team while UMASS was a small college team. Before that, he’s been Maryland’s defensive backfield coach back in 1966 when SU’s Jim Del Gaizo threw a record-tying four TD passes in a 28-7 win. MacPherson also had pro experience as an assistant coach for the Denver Broncos and Cleveland Browns. In fact he was the Brown’s linebacker coach when Jake hired him to be the new Syracuse coach.
I remember being at work when the announcement came. A co-worker said they’d hired someone named MacPherson. Who? But he was coming from the pros and people figured he was hired to put the program’s coaching on a more professional, now that we were in the Dome and were going to be a big-time program. Maloney’s last team had not been that bad. They would have had a winning season if Joe Morris hadn’t been injured and had to miss several games. Joe was back and healthy so Dick had plenty to work with.
That made it all the more dismaying to see the team start out the 1981 season with three straight losses, the first two to Rutgers and Temple, both of whom Maloney had beaten the year before. It was also disappointing to see MacPherson’s slovenly, disheveled appearance during games, with his shirttail pulled out. He didn’t look professional at all. And the team seemed disorganized with a chaotic sideline and nobody very sure of themselves on the field either. The toughest part of the schedule was in the middle with Maryland, Penn State and Pittsburgh in a row. We somehow managed to beat Indiana and tie the Terps but were 1-5-1 heading into a stretch run. Fortunately Crouthamel had scheduled the first Colgate game in 20 years and we won it 47-24. Then, after a loss on the road to Navy we came home to upset Boston College and West Virginia to finish 4-6-1 with Joe Morris playing all season and setting records along the way. The next year the team totally collapsed to 2-9, the same record that ended Ben Schwartzwalder’s career and started Frank Maloney’s. We had thought such disasters were in the past. This was supposed to be the great new Carrier Dome Era.
Coach Mac’s third year didn’t look any better when it opened with a third straight loss to Temple in Philadelphia, a game where top recruit Don McPherson injured his knee and was out for the year, (which is why he was still around for the 1987 season). Mac’s record at this point was 6 wins, 16 losses and a tie, (G-Rob was 5-18 in his first 23 games). Fortunately, our next opponent was Kent State, who had the country’s longest losing streak. I was one of and official 24,605 fans in the Dome that day, (I remember it as a lot less than that). Syracuse fumbled the first three times we got the ball. As I recall it was twice on kick-off and once on the first play from scrimmage. The Golden Flashes got a field goal and then a touchdown out of it and then got the ball back a third time. A woman next to me said in my ear “This is actually funny”. Then something happened. The four defensive linemen, Tim Green, Blaise Winter, Bill Pendock and Jamie Kimmel started motioning to the crowd to make some noise- “get behind us!”. The fans started cheering them on- why not? They stuffed that third possession and SU slowly took over the game. That line, which came to know as “Four Wheel Drive” kept forcing punts and turnovers and Don McCauley kept kicking field goals for the Orange. We got it to 9-10 by halftime, then took the lead at 12-10 and 15-10 and final punched over a touchdown to win 22-10. The crowd got louder and louder as the game went on and made as much noise as I’ve heard from any capacity crowd. In the subsequent years of great success, I was very proud to say that I was one of the fans who had been there at the Kent State game.
Syracuse went on to win three in a row and suddenly we were 3-1. Then we went out to play one Nebraska’s greatest teams and got crushed like a soda can, 7-63, the first of four straight losses. But the team rallied to win its last three and finish 6-5 against a schedule that included 6 bowl teams when there were less than half as many bowls as we have now. The next year was just as tough, with 5 bowl teams and a 9-1-1 Florida team on probation. This was the year of the great win over Nebraska, followed by three straight road losses at Florida, West Virginia and Penn State. Then we rallied for three wins before losing to Heisman Trophy winner Doug Flutie’s Boston College team, 16-24, for another 6-5 record. Both those teams would have gone to bowls today. The following year we did go to a bowl, losing the Cherry Bowl in Michigan to Maryland. But that gave us “bowl credibility” and allowed Mac to recruit a class full of big offensive linemen.
Hopes were high the next year but there was too much rebuilding to do. We opened the season with four straight losses- all close- and a group called the “Sack Mac Pack” started up. But we rallied to a 5-2 finish and then all those big guys moved into the O-line to clear the way for Donnie McPherson, Moose Johnson, Robert Drummond and Michael Owens and we went on an 11-0 tear. Mrs. MacPherson even convinced the coach to start wearing a blue blazer with an orange tie. He looked like the CEO of a successful corporation. It was the beginning of a 15 year run of winning seasons, something only Michigan, Nebraska and Florida State accomplished in those same years.
Ben Schwartzwalder had been offered the job of being the first ever coach of the New England Patriots after the national championship season. When Coach Mac, a New Englander, got the same offer after the 1990 season, he took it. Since we were now a successful program, Jake Crouthamel decided to promote from within and we got our third straight linebacker coach elevated to the status of a head coach, Paul Pasqualoni. Before coming to Syracuse he’d been a Penn State linebacker, (a Nittany Lion coaching the Orange!), and head coach at Western Connecticut State, a Division III team. He’d inherited a 1-8 squad from 1982 and took them to 9-1 by 1984. In 1985 they went 10-1 and made the DIII playoffs. Mac hired him in 1987. Mac hired him in 1987. His youth and comparatively brief tenure with the program made him a surprise choice but that put him in a category with Coach Mac and Ben Schwartwalder. Paul went on to become the second winningest coach in Syracuse history, going 107-59-1.
He got off to a great start, going 10-2 in his first two years, crushing Steve Spurrier’s Florida team in 1991 and coming up just short of upsetting #1 Miami in 1992. The 1993 team strangely fell apart, losing consecutive games to Miami and West Virginia by a combined 0-92. That team and the next broke the string of bowl teams at 6 in a row, (none of which we lost) but extended the string of winning seasons. Then came the Donovan McNabb Era where we were very good but could never quite break through to greatness. We had a 41-0 Gator Bowl blow-out of Clemson, a 34-0 kick-off Classic rout of Wisconsin, ran Michigan out of the Big House, 38-28, (it was 38-7 at one point), and beat Miami back to back by 96-26. Who could imagine that we’d ever do such things?
But it created an intolerance for upset losses and uncompetitive performances, such as the two losses each to East Carolina, North Carolina State and later Rutgers and Temple when they were the dregs of the conference, as well as 0-62 and 7-51 losses at Virginia Tech, 13-45, 0-59 and 7-49 losses to Miami, and in his final season 0-51 to Purdue to open the season and 14-51 to Georgia Tech to close it. Eventually the talent and patience level declined and a new Athletic Director, Dr. Daryl Gross, fired him and brought in his own man, leaving us to argue about what really went wrong ever since.
Gross had come from USC and his new man, on advice of Pete Carroll was Greg Robinson, a handsome , silver-haired man with a ready smile and a confident gaze. He’d had a thirty year career with several top college programs and NFL teams, including two Super Bowl rings earned as defensive coordinator of the Denver Broncos. His most recent job was with the Texas Longhorns who had re-emerged as a national power and would win the national championship with players Robinson coached during Greg’s first year in Syracuse. The A-Team had arrived!
Except it turned out to be the “” team as we found out why Robinson had been an assistant for 30 years. His teams were out of shape. The game plans didn’t seem to make much sense. New to the East, he didn’t seem to know where to recruit. His first team went from 6-6 the previous year to 1-10, our worst record since 1892. His four year record of 10-37 was the worst such stretch in SU history. That was it for “G-Rob”. At least he lowered the bar for his successors. If Coach P had come after G-Rob, he’d be everyone’s hero now. Maybe he still should be?
Doug Marrone came after G-Rob, another career assistant but one who had played here and had notebooks full of his plans for bringing the program back from the abyss. He immediately made it more competitive, even if he won only one more game than G-Rob’s last year. The next year he won four league road games, thanks to Scott Shafer’s excellent defense. Then came a mysterious collapse after a 5-2 start in 2011, followed by a second bowl win in three years, followed by a mysterious, (to us, anyway), exit to be replaced by Shafer.
Scott’s first year has been a roller-coaster ride and nobody knows if he will be successful here but we are hopeful because, launching ourselves into a new conference, we need him to be a success. If he isn’t, we’ll have to start all over again with someone else.
Shafer is the third straight coach we’ve had who had never been a head coach before. We’ve never hired a coach in the post- World War II Era who had ever previously coached a major college football team. In our entire history we’ve hired two coaches who already had some measure of prominence as head coaches: Bill Hollenbeck, who filled in for Buck O’Neill when he was tending to his law practice in 1916 and Ossie Solem, who had had a losing record at Iowa.
But we’ve had many famous coaches here: O’Neill, the Jones’ boys, Munn, Schwartzwalder and MacPherson are all Hall-of-Famers. The Joneses and Munn are there for what they did after they left here. O’Neill, Schwartzwalder and MacPherson are in because of what they did here. Meehan would probably be a Hall-of-Famer without a scandal that occurred long after his career was over. As I said, I thought Solem might be in but he isn’t. Maybe Coach P will get some support with his 151 wins, (107 at SU).
The main point is that famous coaches don’t come to Syracuse: coaches become famous here. Maybe that will change now that we’re in the ACC. Maybe already prominent coaches will want to come here now. I’ll believe that when I see it. If it does happen, I wonder how long they will be here. If a Jim Tressel decided to restart his career here, would he want to stay and develop the program to its fullest potential or would he use it as a steppingstone to get to a more prominent job? Would that really help us? Would Greg Schiano stay or would he jump back to the NFL as soon as he could? Of course, the Marrone experience may mean that we aren’t a “destination” school for anybody. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
But other things do. Famous coaches are expensive. The money spent on them won’t be available to pay assistant coaches, who do most of the actual coaching and recruiting. It also won’t be available for travel and facilities and other things that impact recruiting. We’d be buying a name in hope that that will make up for other things we won’t have because we bought that name- or rented it for a while. It excites the fans, but is that enough?
And famous coaches who have great success at more than one school are rare. Some guys like Lou Holtz and Nick Saban, (at least prior to Notre Dame and Alabama) were famous as coaching Johnny Appleseeds. But for most coaches there’s a right place and a right time and it’s never quite the same after their glory era. Do we really want someone who is famous for what he did in another place at another time? Finally, if the famous coach is unemployed, you have to wonder why. Do we really want to find out when he’s on our sideline?
If Scott Shafer doesn’t work out, (and based on our experiences with Ben and Mac, we won’t know that for a while), his replacement is likely to be someone with a similar resume- a lifetime assistant getting his first chance at a head job, or someone similar to Ben and Mac, who had had success at a lower level and this is their chance to prove they came make it at this level. We just have to hope they will make the most of it, (and give them the chance to do so).
