First Games

[SWC75]

...should produce reactions, complaints and concerns. But not judgments.

 

[FortyFourCT]

I thought this would be a long analysis of the results of each first game of every season and how the rest of the season turned out.

 

[Libero2]

I wonder how many years it will take people before they realize it's called "mid-season form" for a reason. They don't call it first game form people...

 

[FAL]

A voice of reason in the howling wilderness of SU fandom. Well said, sir. Well said.

 

[Crusty]

Problem is with our schedule we can't afford early season losses to teams we are supposed to beat. We are so used to digging out of holes that we have become accustomed to it. Starting 3-0 would be huge for this team. Remember our bye weak is gone early and why it may seem like a blessing at the moment we will not be saying that later when we are all banged up from conference play.

 

[SWC75]

I thought this would be a long analysis of the results of each first game of every season and how the rest of the season turned out.

First games in the Dome era, ranked, (imperfectly) by point differential, with comments, including how the season ended.


2000: Syracuse 63 Buffalo 7. We sure looked sharp in that one. Then we lost to Cincinnati and East Carolina and wound up 6-5 with no bowl.


1989: Syracuse 43 Temple 3. The beginning of Temple’s decline into awfulness and a continuation of our new-found success. But it was bumpy ride that year. We beat Army only 10-7 in the Dome and then lost three in a row before rallying to win 6 of 7, including beating Georgia by a point in the Peach Bowl.


1997: Syracuse 34 Wisconsin 0. National Championship, here we come! Three straight losses, here we come! Then we had another 8 game winning streak, (see 1996, below), in which we out-score the opposition 321-94, (40-12). Deja Vu all over again. We finished 9-4 after losing to Kansas State in the Fiesta Bowl.


1991 Syracuse 37 Vanderbilt 10. Paul Pasqualoni’s first season as head coach and the last time we started 3-0. We wound up a strong 10-2 with a win over Ohio State in the Hall of Fame Bowl.


2010: Syracuse 29 Akron 3. Our comeback year beings with a throttling of an Akron team that was probably the worst team in FBS that year. This year’s Nova team would have beaten them by 2-3 touchdowns. We ran out of gas at the end of the regular season but beat K-State in the Pinstripe Bowl to finish 8-5, our first winning record since 2001.


1982: Syracuse 31 Rutgers 8. We opened Mac’s second season with an impressive show in the Meadowlands. Steve Peach was the new quarterback. “Peach leads the Orange to victory”. Perfect! But we could beat only Colgate the rest of the way and Peach transferred. Many were wishing Coach Mac would, too.


1993: Syracuse 35 Ball State 12. We were thinking about a national championship run. Those hopes were already done when we endured the consecutive 0-49 and 0-43 national TV losses to first Miami and the West Virginia. Lee Corso begged ESPN not to put us on TV anymore. We finished a weak 6-4-1.


1999 Syracuse 35 Toledo 12. Some doubts about this one in a rebuilding year but we get the job done on the road. The team started well at 5-1 with only a loss to Michigan that Troy Nunes threw away. We were ranked #15 and then went to Blacksburg. We never really recovered from the 0-62 game but managed to win the Music City Bowl over Kentucky to finish at 7-5.


1992: Syracuse 42 East Carolina 21. We were expecting a big year and got one, going 10-2 for the second straight year and beating Colorado in the Fiesta Bowl.


1984: Syracuse 23 Maryland 7. The Terps were a second-line national power at the time and this was in their place. It seemed like a big deal until we barely nipped a lousy Northwestern team by a point the next week and then got shut out by Rutgers. The next week Nebraska came to town and we wound up 6-5 over a schedule with 8 bowl teams.


1987: Syracuse 25 Maryland 11. Ben Schwartzwalder’s breakthrough year in 1956 began with a 26-12 win over Maryland and Dick MacPherson's began with a 25-11 topping of the Terps. Everyone remembers how the Penn State game began that year but how many remember that the Maryland game started out the same way, except the D-back didn’t fall down and made the tackle after about a 50 yard gain. It was an exciting way to begin a great season. Now we begin them with bubble screens.


1995: Syracuse 20 North Carolina 9. Hello, Donovan McNabb! We shock the Tar Heels after a couple of down seasons and beginning a new era with a 9-3 record, ending with a bigger shocker, the 41-0 thumping of the Clemson Tigers in the Gator Bowl.


1988: Syracuse 31 Temple 21. An uninspired beginning to the follow-up season after going unbeaten. Then we got clobbered 9-26 at Ohio State, (the Buckeyes went 4-6-1 that year and we should have beaten them but stunk up the joint). Then we put it together to win 7 in a row, looking as impressive as the previous year before losing to the Major Harris West Virginia team but then coming back to beat Pitt and then LSU in the bowl game, 23-10. It turned out to be a fine follow-up to our second best year ever.


2011: Syracuse 36 Wake Forest 29 in 1OT. A bumpy start to a bumpy ride in which we started a shaky 5-2 and then collapsed to an 0-5 finish. You couldn’t see all the problems at the beginning but it looked as if there might be some.


2003: Syracuse 49 North Carolina 47 in 3OT. The start of an up-and-down, no bowl 6-6 season. They almost fired P after a 7-24 loss to Rutgers.


2014: Syracuse 27 Villanova 26 in 2 OT. An unimpressive, often inept performance that somehow produced a win over a very good FCS team that should have beaten us. And then….?


1994: Oklahoma 30 Syracuse 29. We thought we’d scored the winning touchdown after a tremendous comeback. The TD counted but Kevin Johnson, who was redshirting, jumped up and down and his jumps carried him onto the field. A guy who wasn’t even playing that year got flagged for “excessive celebration”, (I think it was the first year of that penalty), and we missed a long extra point. Oklahoma returned the kick to midfield and kicked a long field goal as time ran out. We played Oklahoma in season where they went 6-6 and 4-8, (three years later) and couldn’t beat them in years when we went 7-4 and 9-3. Both were wild and crazy- and frustrating- games.


1998: Tennessee 34 Syracuse 33. We were already celebrating when the late flag came in. The Vols got a second chance and made the game winning field goal. The Vols wind up 13-0 national champions. We go on an 8-4 roller coaster ride, blowing out Michigan and Miami but getting blown out by NC State and Florida. Donovan McNabb doesn’t even get to New York for the Heisman party.


2012: Northwestern 42 Syracuse 41. An exciting, if frustrating, start to and exciting season that featured our first really productive offense of the century and a blow-out of West Virginia in the Pinstripe Bowl


1981: Rutgers 29 Syracuse 27. The Dick MacPherson Era began with losses to Rutgers and Temple, which wasn’t as bad at that point as it sounds. But Frank Maloney had beaten both teams the year before. We wound up 4-6-1 after Maloney had gone 5-6, despite Joe Morris’ injury.


2009: Minnesota 23 Syracuse 20 1OT. The Marrone Era begins with a 20-10 halftime lead and a standing ovation for the offensive coaches as they descended from the booth at halftime. We were shut out the rest of the way and wound up 4-8.


2001: Georgia Tech 13 Syracuse 7. The next week we got clobbered 9-33 at Tennessee and things looked bad. But then we went on the third 8 game winning streak of the Pasqualoni Era, (see 1996 and 1997: this one was a little less dominating at 253-111 or 32-14). That set up the big ”confrontation” with Miami for the Big East title in which the Hurricanes squeaked by, 0-59. But we wound up 10-3, beating K-State in the Insight.com bowl. It was our last winning record until the Doug Marrone Era.


2013: Penn State 23 Syracuse 17. A mistake-prone beginning to a mistake-prone season that somehow wound up with a bowl win and a 7-6 record.


1986: Mississippi State 24 Syracuse 17. After a going to a bowl, (when there were only about a dozen of them), people were talking about making a run at the Lambert Trophy, (remember that?). The first thing on the agenda was revenge against Mississippi State and we would have gotten it except Harold Gayden kept leaving the ball on the turf. More ifs and buts followed and suddenly we were 0-4. Then came the candy and nuts: we won 5 of our last 7, (this was our only losing season from 1983-2001), and then went 11-0 in ’87.


2005: West Virginia 15 Syracuse 7. The Greg Robinson Era begins with a defensive battle between apparently well-matched teams. They went 11-1 while we went 1-10.


1980: Ohio State 31 SU 21 Actually a very impressive performance. The Buckeyes were coming off an 11-1 season where they’d lost by one point to USC in the Rose Bowl. We jumped out to a shocking 21-3 lead before State’s size and talent took over the game. We wound up 5-6, largely thanks to an injury that cost Joe Morris several games.


2006: Wake Forest 20 Syracuse 10. How can we lose to Wake Forest? Well, we can when they have their all-time greatest team that goes 11-3 and to the Orange Bowl while we go 4-8. The next week was the futility vs. Iowa followed by three straight wins. We were 3-2. The rest of the G-Rob Era was 6-25.


1983: Temple 17 Syracuse 6. A freshman named Don McPherson tears up a knee in mop-up time. He had to reshirt will be with us through 1987. Mac is now 6-16-1 on his career here. We wound up 6-5, the first of 18 winning seasons in 19 years. Mac was a keeper, after all.


1996: North Carolina 27 Syracuse 10. The Tar Heels return the favor after we’d beaten them in 1995 opener. We followed this by losing a fumble-fest at Minnesota, then went on a dominating 8 game winning streak in which we out-scored the opposition, 333-91 (42-11) and wound up 9-3 again.


1990: USC 34 Syracuse 16. Not as good a performance as you might think. The Trojans were in a fallow period and only went 8-4-1 that year. We were 7-4-2, including some dominating performances such as our 28-0 shutout of Arizona in the Aloha Bowl. But at least we found a new quarterback, Marvin Graves.


2008: Northwestern 30 Syracuse 10. The last year of the lousy G-Rob Era gets off to a lousy start. It was a “must win” season and became a “must go” season.


2002: BYU 42 Syracuse 21. We’d beaten the Cougars, 42-14 in the Dome two years before. Coming off a 10-3 season we were confident. R. J Anderson threw his first pass into the ground, halfway between him and the receiver and things went downhill from there. We lost 6 of our first 7 and wound up 4-8, our first losing record in 16 years. Things stayed down for the rest of the decade.


1985: Mississippi State 30 Syracuse 3. We opened up the season in Starkville and then went to Blacksburg. Not a good omen. People thought we had “arrived” after a couple of winning seasons but we arrived in the wrong place. After a 2-3 start we won 5 in a row, lost to West Virginia on the last play, then went to the Cherry Bowl where we lost to Maryland but Mac used “bowl credibility” to recruit the class that produced the real breakthrough.


2007: Washington 42 Syracuse 12. Possibly the worst team in Syracuse history was lousy from the beginning.


2004: Purdue 51 Syracuse 0. The start of Paul Pasqualoni’s swan song. Purdue wound up 7-5 after a 5-0 start. We did win the next two and finished the regular season 6-5. If we’d stayed home he might have kept his job but we went to the Champs Sports Bowl and lost 14-51 to a team that had been scoring 19 points a game.


If you can find a trend there, you’re a better man that i. Even when the nature of the opener seemed to presage the nature of the season, that’s 20-20 hindsight.

 

[FAL]

First games in the Dome era, ranked, (imperfectly) by point differential, with comments, including how the season ended.


2000: Syracuse 63 Buffalo 7. We sure looked sharp in that one. Then we lost to Cincinnati and East Carolina and wound up 6-5 with no bowl.


1989: Syracuse 43 Temple 3. The beginning of Temple’s decline into awfulness and a continuation of our new-found success. But it was bumpy ride that year. We beat Army only 10-7 in the Dome and then lost three in a row before rallying to win 6 of 7, including beating Georgia by a point in the Peach Bowl.


1997: Syracuse 34 Wisconsin 0. National Championship, here we come! Three straight losses, here we come!. Then we had another 8 game winning streak, (see 1996, below), in which we out-score the opposition 321-94, (40-12). Deja Vu all over again. We finished 9-4 after losing to Kansas State in the Fiesta Bowl.


1991 Syracuse 37 Vanderbilt 10. Paul Pasqualoni’s first season as head coach and the last time we started 3-0. We wound up a strong 10-2 with a win over Ohio State in the Hall of Fame Bowl.


2010: Syracuse 29 Akron 3. Our comeback year beings with a throttling of an Akron team that was probably the worst team in FBS that year. This year’s Nova team would have beaten them by 2-3 touchdowns. We ran out of gas at the end of the regular season but beat K-State ion the Pinstripe Bowl to finish 8-5, our first winning record since 2001.


1982: Syracuse 31 Rutgers 8. We opened Mac’s second season with an impressive show in the meadowlands. Steve Peach was the new quarterback. “Peach leads the Orange to victory”. Perfect! But we could beat only Colgate the rest of the way and Peach transferred. Many were wishing Coach Mac would, too.


1993: Syracuse 35 Ball State 12. We were thinking about a national championship run. Those hopes were already done when we endured the consecutive 0-49 and 0-43 national TV losses to first Miami and the West Virginia. Lee Corso begged ESPN not to put us on TV anymore. We finished a weak 6-4-1.


1999 Syracuse 35 Toledo 12. Some doubts about this one in a rebuilding year but we get the job done on the road. The team started well at 5-1 with only a loss to Michigan that Troy Nunes threw away. We were ranked and then went to Blacksburg. We never really recovered from the 0-62 game but managed to win the Music City Bowl over Kentucky to finish at 7-5.


1992: Syracuse 42 East Carolina 21. We were expecting a big year and got one, going 10-2 for the second straight year and beating Colorado in the Fiesta Bowl.


1984: Syracuse 23 Maryland 7. The Terps were a second-line national power at the time and this was in their place. It seemed like a big deal until we barely nipped a lousy Northwestern team by a point the next week and then got shut out by Rutgers. The next week Nebraska came to town and we wound up 6-5 over a schedule with 8 bowl teams.


1987: Syracuse 25 Maryland 11. Ben Schwartzwalder’s breakthrough year in 1956 began with a 26-12 win over Maryland and Dick Macphersons began with a 25-11 topping of the Terps. Everyone remembers how the Penn State game began that year but how many remember that the Maryland game started out the same way, except the D-back didn’t fall down and made the tackle after about a 50 yard gain. It was an exciting way to begin a great season. Now we begin them with bubble screens.


1995: Syracuse 20 North Carolina 9. Hello, Donovan McNabb! We shock the Tar Heels after a couple of down seasons and beginning a new era with a 9-3 record, ending with a bigger shocker, the 41-0 thumping of the Clemson Tigers in the Gator Bowl.


1988: Syracuse 31 Temple 21. An uninspired beginning to the follow-up season after going unbeaten. Then we got clobbered 9-26 at Ohio State, (the Buckeyes went 4-6-1 that year and we should have beaten them but stunk up the joint). Then we put it together to win 7 in a row, looking as impressive as the previous year before losing to the Major Harris West Virginia team but then coming back to beat Pitt and then LSU in the bowl game, 23-10. It turned out to be a fine follow-up to our second best year ever.


2011: Syracuse 36 Wake Forest 29 in 1OT. A bumpy start to a bumpy ride in which we started a shaky 5-2 and then collapsed to an 0-5 finish. You couldn’t see all the problems at the beginning but it looked as if there might be some.


2003: Syracuse 49 North Carolina 47 in 3OT. The start of an up-and-down, no bowl 6-6 season. They almost fired P after a 7-24 loss to Rutgers.


2014: Syracuse 27 Villanova 26 in 2 OT. An unimpressive, often inept performance that somehow produced a win over a very good FCS team that should have beaten us. And then….?


1994: Oklahoma 30 Syracuse 29. We thought we’d scored the winning touchdown after a tremendous comeback. The TD counted but Kevin Johnson, who was redshirt6ing, jumped up and down and his jumps carried him onto the field. A guy who wasn’t even playing that year got flagged for “excessive celebration”, (I think it was the first year of that penalty), and we missed a long extra point. Oklahoma returned the kick to midfield and kicked a long field goal as time ran out. We played Oklahoma in season where they went 6-6 and 4-8, (three years later) and couldn’t beat them in years when we went 7-4 and 9-3. Both were wild and crazy games.


1998: Tennessee 34 Syracuse 33. We were already celebrating when the late flag came in. The Vols got a second chance and made the game winning field goal. The Vols wind up 13-0 national champions. We go on an 8-4 roller coaster ride, blowing out Michigan and Miami but getting blown out by NC State and Florida. Donovan McNabb doesn’t even get to New York for the Heisman party.


2012: Northwestern 42 Syracuse 41. An exciting, if frustrating, start to and exciting season that featured our first really productive offense of the century and a blow-out of West Virginia in the pinstripe Bowl


1981: Rutgers 29 Syracuse 27. The Dick MacPherson Era began with losses to Rutgers and Temple, which wasn’t as bad at that point as it sounds. But Frank Maloney had beaten both teams the year before. We wound up 4-61 after Maloney had gone 5-6, despite Joe Morris’ injury.


2009: Minnesota 23 Syracuse 20 1OT. The Marrone Era begins with a 20-10 halftime lead and a standing ovation for the offensive coaches as they descended from the booth at halftime. We were shut out the rest of the way and wound up 4-8.


2001: Georgia Tech 13 Syracuse 7. The next week we got clobbered 9-33 at Tennessee and things looked bad. But then we went on the third 8 game winning streak of the Pasqualoni Era, (see 1996 and 1997: this one was a little less dominating at 253-111 or 32-14). That set up the big ”confrontation” with Miami for the Big East title in which the Hurricanes squeaked by, 0-59. But we wound up 10-3, beating K-State in the Insight.com bowl. It was our last winning record until the Doug Marrone Era.


2013: Penn State 23 Syracuse 17. A mistake-prone beginning to a mistake-prone season that somehow wound up with a bowl win and a 7-6 record.


1986: Mississippi State 24 Syracuse 17. After a going to a bowl, (when there were only about a dozen of them), people were talking about making a run at the Lambert Trophy, (remember that?). The first thing on the agenda was revenge against Mississippi State and we would have gotten it except Harold Gayden kept leaving the ball on the turf. More ifs and but followed and suddenly we were 0-4. Then came the candy and nuts: we won 5 of our last 7, (this was our only losing season from 1983-2001), and then went 11-0 in ’87.


2005: West Virginia 15 Syracuse 7. The Greg Robinson Era begins with a defensive battle between apparently well-matched teams. They went 11-1 while we went 1-10.


1980: Ohio State 31 SU 21 Actually a very impressive performance. The Buckeyes were coming off an 11-1 season where they’d lost by one point to USC in the Rose Bowl. We jumped out to a shocking 21-3 lead before State’s size and talent took over the game. We wound up 5-6, largely thanks to an injury that cost Joe Morris several games.


2006: Wake Forest 20 Syracuse 10. How can we lose to Wake Forest? Well, we can when they have their all-time greatest team that goes 11-3 and to the Orange Bowl while we go 4-8. The next week was the futility vs. Iowa followed by three straight wins. We were 3-2. The rest of the G-Rob Era was 6-25.


1983: Temple 17 Syracuse 6. A freshman named Don McPherson tears up a knee in mop-up time. He had to reshirt will be with us through 1987. Mac is now 6-16-1 on his career here. We wound up 6-5, the first of 18 winning seasons in 19 years. Mac was a keeper, after all.


1996: North Carolina 27 Syracuse 10. The Tar Heels return the favor after we’d beaten them in 1995 opener. We followed this by losing a fumble-fest at Minnesota, then went on a dominating 8 game winning streak in which we out-scored the opposition, 333-91 (42-11) and wound up 9-3 again.


1990: USC 34 Syracuse 16. Not as good a performance as you might think. The Trojans were in a fallow period and only went 8-4-1 that year. We were 7-4-2, including some dominating performances such as our 28-0 shutout of Arizona in the Aloha Bowl. But at least we found a new quarterback, Marvin Graves.


2008: Northwestern 30 Syracuse 10. The last year of the lousy G-Rob Era gets off to a lousy start. It was a “must win” season and became a “must go” season.


2002: BYU 42 Syracuse 21. We’d beaten the Cougars, 42-14 in the Dome two years before. Coming off a 10-3 season we were confident. R. J Anderson threw his first pass into the ground, halfway between him and the receiver and things went downhill from there. We lost 6 of our first 7 and wound up 4-8, our first losing record in 16 years. Things stayed down for the rest of the decade.


1985: Mississippi State 30 Syracuse 3. We opened up the season in Starkville and then went to Blacksburg. Not a good omen. People thought we had “arrived” after a couple of winning seasons but we arrived in the wrong place. After a 2-3 start we won 5 in a row, lost to West Virginia on the last play, then went to the Cherry Bowl where we lost to Maryland but mac used “bowl credibility” to recruit the class that produced the real breakthrough.


2007: Washington 42 Syracuse 12. Possibly the worst team in Syracuse history was lousy from the beginning.


2004: Purdue 51 Syracuse 0. The start of Paul Pasqualoni’s swan song. Purdue wound up 7-5 after a 5-0 start. We did win the next two and finished the regular season 6-5. If we’d stayed home he might have kept his job but we went to the Champs Sports Bowl and lost 14-51 to a team that had been scoring 19 points a game.


If you can find a trend there, you’re a better man that i. Even when the nature of the opener seemed to presage the nature of the season, that’s 20-20 hindsight.

WHOA!!!!!

 

[OrangeTarheel]

Yup, that is what I came here to see. I take that history to say one thing - a win is all you need no matter how you came by it.

 

[OttoinGrotto]

Problem is with our schedule we can't afford early season losses to teams we are supposed to beat. We are so used to digging out of holes that we have become accustomed to it. Starting 3-0 would be huge for this team. Remember our bye weak is gone early and why it may seem like a blessing at the moment we will not be saying that later when we are all banged up from conference play.

Yep, we have a brutal mid season stretch. Getting to 3 and 0 would be huge.

 

[TheCusian]

Yep, we have a brutal mid season stretch. Getting to 3 and 0 would be huge.

No one will remember this game at 3-0 either.

 

[donniesyracuse]

No one will remember this game at 3-0 either.

the team only plays 12 - 13 games per year. I remember them all.