SWC75
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Bottoming out
Roy Danforth inherited a mess. Harper, Hicker and Cornwall were gone now. Wayne Ward who had had a decent sophomore season, averaging 13 points and 6 rebounds and shooting 58%, was lost due to academic and legal problems. Ernie Austin who had a poor sophomore season, shooting 37%, was academically ineligible for the first half of the season. Bob McDaniel aced that by flunking out of school, (although he returned for the next season). There were rumors about Bill Smith’s status but he managed to stay eligible. SU’s media guide for 1968-69 says, truthfully, “At the pre-season stage, it is hard to pinpoint a genuine strength.”
On top of that, somebody had scheduled 10 of the first 11 games on the road, (wouldn’t Dick Vitale love that!). In the second game, SU played at Niagara. Danforth must have been in a macho mood because he junked the stall concept and decided to run with the Eagles. When the smoke had cleared, Calvin Murphy had scored more points than any player had ever scored against a major college team, 68. (Pistol Pete Maravich had 69 vs. Alabama later that year and that record stood for a generation- why LSU and Niagara never scheduled a game in this period is difficult to understand, unless Murphy was the wrong color for the Bayou Bengals). Niagara won, 110-118.
After a loss to Fordham came the trip to Kansas to play Kansas State and Kansas on successive nights. Both were national powers in those days. The Wildcats had no problem with SU, winning 68-88. But the real embarrassment came the next night when SU took on the Jayhawks for the first time ever. They were led by their star, Jo Jo White. Danforth decided the only way SU could stay in this game was with the stall. NC State had famously upset Duke in the ACC tournament the previous March by caryring the stall to it’s absurd end in a 12-10 win:
http://www.gopack.com/sports/m-baskbl/spec-rel/031008aad.html
The thing is, Syracuse couldn’t even execute that properly. White and his teammates destroyed it with defensive pressure, running away from SU 41-71 while the crowd booed the Orange’s unwillingness to play normal basketball as well as their ineptitude at even executing their chosen strategy. This was the first of several games in this period that would contend for “The Bottom”- the time when the situation was as bad as it could be, with nowhere to go but up.
The strangest game was the trip to Provo to play Brigham Young. (I suspect that these games were arranged to give SU a national profile in the wake of the Bing years and the good recruiting that followed. Unfortunately we came up empty at the wrong time). The Cougars would go on to win the WAC that year but on this night, SU beat them,. 77-73. Not only did the Orange win the game but they won the brawl that broke out with the Mormons at the end of it. But the optimism that created blew away in Portland, Oregon, where SU played Washington State, Arizona State and Yale, (yes Yale), and lost to all three by an average of 18 points.
After a home win over Pittsburgh, SU traveled to Connecticut to play an 0-10 UCONN team. They got blown out, 94-103, (they were down by 20 points much of the game). If I had to choose a low point in the entire history of my career as an SU basketball fan, that might be it. They lost another five in a row after that. I was “dazed and confused”, wondering how the SU powerhouse I expected to be rooting for had turned into a 4-14 disaster.
I did a lot of such wondering in those days. You may have heard of Pavlov’s dogs. He found that by ringing a bell when he fed them he could get them to salivate at the ringing of the bell, even if there was no food there. He also found that dogs reacted less if they got food every time than they did if they got it only sometimes. Somehow not getting it made them want it all the more. The success SU had had conditioned me to expect success and when it was denied, I wanted it all the more. Rather than losing interest, I actually gained it during this period.
The first good news in a long time came when Ernie Austin again became available. He gave the team some quickness and confidence that had been missing. Smith was having a productive year inside, (19 points and 11.6 rebounds a game). Bob Kouwe, whose nephew Andrew is on this year’s team, (2003-04), came back for his senior year and found the range for 14 points a game, (13.9). SU won five of its last seven games, averaging 86 points a game.
The next year, things were looking up. Smith was back, Austin was available for the whole season and McDaniel had worked his way back into school and was ready to take his place next to Smith. Ward, unfortunately, was gone for good and SU never did adequately fill the other forward position. Tom Green never scored much as a point guard but Smith averaged 20.2 points and 12.4 rebounds, McDaniel 17.8 and 10.6 and Austin 19.3 points a game. SU scored 86.5 for the season. They ripped off wins in their first six games and it looked like the storm clouds were gone. I remember feeling giddy with the 6-0 record, (11 wins in 13 dating back to the end of the previous season) feeling like things were where they belonged. The fever had broken! Bring on the world!
Then the world fell on us. It started with a loss at American U., coached by future Rutgers coach and Boeheim rival Tom Young. SU went on to lose 12 of their final 18 games to finish 12-12. The problem was, this team played no defense. Six different teams scored 100 points vs. SU. Bob McDaniel scored 36 on 18 for 22 shooting and Smith had 28 points and 21 rebounds against LaSalle but we still lost, 101-108. The defensive nadir in SU history was a game vs. Pittsburgh, a team that had been averaging 65 points a game. SU scored 71 points in one half against them- and lost 108-127, the most point s a Syracuse team has ever surrendered in a game. The season ended with a dismal 77-106 loss to Bowling Green.
Bill Smith didn’t play in that game, having slugged a referee, (on Valentine’s Day), in the West Virginia game: http://www.wvusports.com/page.cfm?section=4945
(From Bud Poliquin’s book, “Tales of the Syracuse Hardwood”: “With 61 seconds left in the game, with Smith having been called for a questionable fifth foul and with Smith insisting that he’d just been slapped in the face by official Herb Young, who’d been offended by the complaining Orangeman’s salty tongue, Smith hauled off an punched the referee. And the joint went up for grabs. “Immediately, there are these two cops, one on each of my arm”, Smith recalled, “But I shake them off and when I do a fan grabs me by my feet and tackles me to the ground. And just like that there must have been 500 people on the court with fistfights like you wouldn’t believe. My mother, father sister and fiancé were there. My dad got the guy who tackled me and was punching him in the face My sister was out there, swinging her purse. Somebody had ripped off my sneaker and was hitting me over the head with it. Greg ‘Kid’ Kohl, who everybody always thought was so mild-mannered, uppercutted one guy once and then he uppercutted him again before the guy decided he’d had enough. It was wild. It was a melee. You really had to see it to believe it.“
I thought he had ended his a career, (Per Bud, Danforth had advised him to leave school and join the Army), but it turned out only to be the end of his season. At the end of the year Bob McDaniel left again, having played only one full year with the varsity. (He played in one game the next year and scored 14 points with rebounds against Buffalo before deciding not to show up for practice and being suspended for good- what a waste!) With both he and Ward gone, the team would be called “Roy’s Runts plus one” the next year. And after Smith graduated, they were only “Roy’s Runts”. That beautiful church steeple with the flying buttresses had collapsed. But we kept the faith and it paid off. We’ve had nothing but winning season ever since.
Roy Danforth inherited a mess. Harper, Hicker and Cornwall were gone now. Wayne Ward who had had a decent sophomore season, averaging 13 points and 6 rebounds and shooting 58%, was lost due to academic and legal problems. Ernie Austin who had a poor sophomore season, shooting 37%, was academically ineligible for the first half of the season. Bob McDaniel aced that by flunking out of school, (although he returned for the next season). There were rumors about Bill Smith’s status but he managed to stay eligible. SU’s media guide for 1968-69 says, truthfully, “At the pre-season stage, it is hard to pinpoint a genuine strength.”
On top of that, somebody had scheduled 10 of the first 11 games on the road, (wouldn’t Dick Vitale love that!). In the second game, SU played at Niagara. Danforth must have been in a macho mood because he junked the stall concept and decided to run with the Eagles. When the smoke had cleared, Calvin Murphy had scored more points than any player had ever scored against a major college team, 68. (Pistol Pete Maravich had 69 vs. Alabama later that year and that record stood for a generation- why LSU and Niagara never scheduled a game in this period is difficult to understand, unless Murphy was the wrong color for the Bayou Bengals). Niagara won, 110-118.
After a loss to Fordham came the trip to Kansas to play Kansas State and Kansas on successive nights. Both were national powers in those days. The Wildcats had no problem with SU, winning 68-88. But the real embarrassment came the next night when SU took on the Jayhawks for the first time ever. They were led by their star, Jo Jo White. Danforth decided the only way SU could stay in this game was with the stall. NC State had famously upset Duke in the ACC tournament the previous March by caryring the stall to it’s absurd end in a 12-10 win:
http://www.gopack.com/sports/m-baskbl/spec-rel/031008aad.html
The thing is, Syracuse couldn’t even execute that properly. White and his teammates destroyed it with defensive pressure, running away from SU 41-71 while the crowd booed the Orange’s unwillingness to play normal basketball as well as their ineptitude at even executing their chosen strategy. This was the first of several games in this period that would contend for “The Bottom”- the time when the situation was as bad as it could be, with nowhere to go but up.
The strangest game was the trip to Provo to play Brigham Young. (I suspect that these games were arranged to give SU a national profile in the wake of the Bing years and the good recruiting that followed. Unfortunately we came up empty at the wrong time). The Cougars would go on to win the WAC that year but on this night, SU beat them,. 77-73. Not only did the Orange win the game but they won the brawl that broke out with the Mormons at the end of it. But the optimism that created blew away in Portland, Oregon, where SU played Washington State, Arizona State and Yale, (yes Yale), and lost to all three by an average of 18 points.
After a home win over Pittsburgh, SU traveled to Connecticut to play an 0-10 UCONN team. They got blown out, 94-103, (they were down by 20 points much of the game). If I had to choose a low point in the entire history of my career as an SU basketball fan, that might be it. They lost another five in a row after that. I was “dazed and confused”, wondering how the SU powerhouse I expected to be rooting for had turned into a 4-14 disaster.
I did a lot of such wondering in those days. You may have heard of Pavlov’s dogs. He found that by ringing a bell when he fed them he could get them to salivate at the ringing of the bell, even if there was no food there. He also found that dogs reacted less if they got food every time than they did if they got it only sometimes. Somehow not getting it made them want it all the more. The success SU had had conditioned me to expect success and when it was denied, I wanted it all the more. Rather than losing interest, I actually gained it during this period.
The first good news in a long time came when Ernie Austin again became available. He gave the team some quickness and confidence that had been missing. Smith was having a productive year inside, (19 points and 11.6 rebounds a game). Bob Kouwe, whose nephew Andrew is on this year’s team, (2003-04), came back for his senior year and found the range for 14 points a game, (13.9). SU won five of its last seven games, averaging 86 points a game.
The next year, things were looking up. Smith was back, Austin was available for the whole season and McDaniel had worked his way back into school and was ready to take his place next to Smith. Ward, unfortunately, was gone for good and SU never did adequately fill the other forward position. Tom Green never scored much as a point guard but Smith averaged 20.2 points and 12.4 rebounds, McDaniel 17.8 and 10.6 and Austin 19.3 points a game. SU scored 86.5 for the season. They ripped off wins in their first six games and it looked like the storm clouds were gone. I remember feeling giddy with the 6-0 record, (11 wins in 13 dating back to the end of the previous season) feeling like things were where they belonged. The fever had broken! Bring on the world!
Then the world fell on us. It started with a loss at American U., coached by future Rutgers coach and Boeheim rival Tom Young. SU went on to lose 12 of their final 18 games to finish 12-12. The problem was, this team played no defense. Six different teams scored 100 points vs. SU. Bob McDaniel scored 36 on 18 for 22 shooting and Smith had 28 points and 21 rebounds against LaSalle but we still lost, 101-108. The defensive nadir in SU history was a game vs. Pittsburgh, a team that had been averaging 65 points a game. SU scored 71 points in one half against them- and lost 108-127, the most point s a Syracuse team has ever surrendered in a game. The season ended with a dismal 77-106 loss to Bowling Green.
Bill Smith didn’t play in that game, having slugged a referee, (on Valentine’s Day), in the West Virginia game: http://www.wvusports.com/page.cfm?section=4945
(From Bud Poliquin’s book, “Tales of the Syracuse Hardwood”: “With 61 seconds left in the game, with Smith having been called for a questionable fifth foul and with Smith insisting that he’d just been slapped in the face by official Herb Young, who’d been offended by the complaining Orangeman’s salty tongue, Smith hauled off an punched the referee. And the joint went up for grabs. “Immediately, there are these two cops, one on each of my arm”, Smith recalled, “But I shake them off and when I do a fan grabs me by my feet and tackles me to the ground. And just like that there must have been 500 people on the court with fistfights like you wouldn’t believe. My mother, father sister and fiancé were there. My dad got the guy who tackled me and was punching him in the face My sister was out there, swinging her purse. Somebody had ripped off my sneaker and was hitting me over the head with it. Greg ‘Kid’ Kohl, who everybody always thought was so mild-mannered, uppercutted one guy once and then he uppercutted him again before the guy decided he’d had enough. It was wild. It was a melee. You really had to see it to believe it.“
I thought he had ended his a career, (Per Bud, Danforth had advised him to leave school and join the Army), but it turned out only to be the end of his season. At the end of the year Bob McDaniel left again, having played only one full year with the varsity. (He played in one game the next year and scored 14 points with rebounds against Buffalo before deciding not to show up for practice and being suspended for good- what a waste!) With both he and Ward gone, the team would be called “Roy’s Runts plus one” the next year. And after Smith graduated, they were only “Roy’s Runts”. That beautiful church steeple with the flying buttresses had collapsed. But we kept the faith and it paid off. We’ve had nothing but winning season ever since.
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