SWC75
Bored Historian
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I’ve been recalling what my feelings were when new SU football coaches were hired in the past.
FRANK MALONEY: Ben Schwartzwalder retired. A lot of names were mentioned but, with two exceptions I don’t remember who they were. I recall Frank Maloney, who had been Michigan’s linebacker coach, came out of the blue. The fact that he was with Michigan was encouraging but he was a positon coach, not a head coach or even a coordinator. It was speculated that he was all we could get, considering the state of the program. That surprised those of us who still thought Syracuse was a “national power” and this discussion was an eye-opener. We had a crumbling rock-pile of a stadium and not much that would now be called “facilities”. We were a private school in a sport that, with the exception of Notre Dame and USC was increasingly dominated by state schools. We’d always been a regional recruiter when unlimited substitution football meant you had to become a national recruiter to be any good. Maybe Maloney was the only guy we could get.
Later we heard that Don Nehlen, the coach of the Bowling Green team that had crushed us in the opener of Ben’s last season, 13-41, (and would do it again to a Maloney team in 1976: 7-22), wanted to become the coach here. He eventually got the West Virginia job and was probably better off there at the time. I also remember hearing something about Delaware coach Tubby Raymond, who had started a long and successful career there. Would they have done better than Frank? I suspect they were better coaches but I don’t think they would have had as much success here as they did at West Virginia and Delaware.
Maloney was far from perfect but he kept things alive here while the politicians argued about building the Dome. He recruited Bill Hurley, Art Monk, Joe Morris, Craig Wolfley, Jimmy Collins and others. We won 32 games in 7 years with a program that had the foundation of a D3 team. He was a victim of Joe Morris getting hurt in the first year of the Dome, (otherwise we’d have done better than 5-6 and maybe made a bowl game), and “new boss syndrome”. Jake Crouthamel fired Frank after the losing season- and a DUI.
DICK MACPHERSON: I was at work when a lot of whispering was going on in the office, (I’m always the last guy to hear the rumor). A woman who had no interest in sports at all who sat across from me asked ”Did you hear? Syracuse had a new football coach!” Who, I asked. “Somebody named MacPherson”. My heart sank. We’ve got the Dome built finally and we’re going with a guy nobody ever heard of to coach?
As I learned more about MacPherson- he’s been a successful coach at UMASS and had long experience in the college and poor games as a n assistant, I felt better. He seemed like a seasoned professional, whereas Maloney’s only coaching experience before he got the Michigan linebackers job was in high school.
It was a huge disappointment when Dick opened with losses in the Dome to Rutgers and Temple. It wasn’t just that they were Rutgers and Temple- both would stink later but weren’t too bad at the time. It was that they were home games against teams Frank Maloney had beaten the year before. Beyond that, Coach Mac looked like a mess. He wore a business shirt and tie but no jacket and by the second half the tie was askew and the shirt had become partially untucked. He didn’t look “professional” at all. Mac started 1-5-1 and looked like a huge mistake. How could a guy from the pros look so bad? We rallied to 4-6-1, including Dome upsets of Boston College and West Virginia teams looking ahead to bowl games. He was enthusiastic and his team seemed to want to play hard for him, so I felt better.
The next year we opened with a 31-8 win over Rutgers in the Meadowlands and it looked like we might be pretty good. What followed was a Shaferesque season where we lost 9 of 10, with the only win over Colgate. Then we opened losing to temple in Philly to open the ’83 season to make Mac 6-16-1. We then had 18 winning seasons in 19 years. Mac’s wife got him to wear a blazer and keep it on during the games. He looked positively natty, like Hank Stram. He wound up a Hall Of Famer and our coaching icon emeritus. But it sure didn’t look like it in those early years.
PAUL PASQUALONI: I was surprised that George DeLeone didn’t get the job when Coach Mac went to the Patriots. He was the senior man, in age, in tenure and in positon. I didn’t even know who our linebacker coach was. But P and D were joined at the hip so it really didn’t turn out to matter. When we crushed Steve Spurrier’s Florida team in Paul’s third game to go 3-0, I was convinced we had one of the great young coaches in America. Then we went to New Orleans and built up a 24-0 halftime lead. Meanwhile #1 Florida State was winning a huge confrontation in the big house vs. Michigan, 51-31. We were unable to score in the second half at Tulane and as we suddenly looked kind of inept in one possession after another the crowd started mocking the Orange by chanting “Florida State…Florida State…” They didn’t think we could compete with them.
We came out very aggressively against the Seminoles, getting plays off quickly and getting the ball moved right up the field quickly. Atomic football: they are so fast they are going to be where ever you go, so go right at ‘em. We blocked them and ran off the blocks. We passed the ball downfield. But for a dropped pass in the end zone, we might have had an 21-7 lead. Instead it was 14-7 but I still felt we were going to shock the world and beat the #1 team in the country in their own place. They’d have to rank us #1 – for the first time since 1960.
Instead, we abandoned our straight ahead attack to try to get around them with the slow-developing nearside option. We kept going 3 and out and punting the ball back to the Noles who scored 39 unanswered points. Everybody said, “Well you can’t expect to compete with the #1 team in that heat”. FSU beat only one team worse than they beat us that year. And that set the tone for the Pasqualoni era: a a lot of wins punctuated by strange losses with strange decisions, leaving the sense that, as good as we were doing, could we be doing better?
GREG ROBINSON: Eventually those questions erodes Coach P’s positon here. Again a new AD was followed by a change of football coaches. When the recruiting dried up and started having .500 seasons, we needed someone to put the brakes on the decline. Several coaches were discussed but the focus went more and more on someone named Greg Robinson. He had an impressive resume. He was the DC at Texas, a national power who had just won the Rose Bowl, (and would be back to win the national championship the next year). He’d been the Denver Broncos DC when they won their two Super Bowls. And he was personally recommended by Pete Carroll, the head man at USC, the reigning dynasty in the sport. What was not to like?
Beyond that , Robinson was handsome man with a confident gaze. He seems to be looking at great success on the horizon. I remember spending the entire offseason , feeling not just good but great about the football program. The “A” tam had arrived. Pasqualoni and DeLeone and most of their staff had come up from the Connecticut small college ranks and their ideas were all small college ideas. We were getting someone from the highest levels of the sport- the powerhouses of college football and the National Football League.
What we got was a guy who was totally over his head. He didn’t’ even have a system for getting plays into his quarterback. He went 1-10, our worst record since 1892, in his first year. I did a study of coaches who had gotten off to really bad starts. I went back to 1980, when the Dome opened, just because that seemed to cover “the modern era”, a period current fans could relate to. I found 96 coaches who had won 2 or fewer games in their first year. I found 7 of them who went on to have successful tenures at their schools: Bill McCartney at Colorado, George Welch at Virginia, Mack Brown at North Carolina, Bobby Ross at Georgia Tech, Bill Snyder at Kansas State Barry Alvarez at Wisconsin and Kirk Ferentz at Iowa. There was a 7% chance that G-Rob would turn out to be a McCartney, Welch, Brown, Ross, Snyder, Alvarez or Ferentz. He wasn’t. He had a modest 3 game winning streak early in his second season and actually had a winning record 3-2. I thought the fever had broken and we’d begin winning now. We then lost 6 of 7 to end the season at 4-8. The 2007 Syracuse team was the worst I have seen and possibly the worst team in the entire history of the program. G-Rob was given one more year but the necessity of winning immediately didn’t produce results. He went 3-9 and was fired with a 1037 career record. His final press conference was utterly embarrassing, with the man reading from a children’s book and saying that Syracuse should hire a coach “just like him”.
How did such an attractive candidate to be such an awful coach? To me the hardest level to coach at is what I call the “true mid-majors”. In high school, it’s about developing youth programs, teaching the game, discipline and motivation. In Division III, there are no youth programs and no formal recruiting, (no scholarships), it’s all teaching, discipline, motivation and developing a reputation for winning so that kids considering DIII ball are more likely to go to your school than a rival. You get into Division II, FCS and the lower majors, now you can recruit. But you aren’t a “selector school”. You have to do a better job of finding and evaluating talent and connecting with it early. You want the under the radar guys but you also want radar guys who might come to your school because you’ve worked so hard with them for so long might still come to your school. Then, besides “coaching them up”, you need to be able to game plan to stress your team’s strengths and hide their weaknesses. But you are competing against schools on your level. In the power conferences, you need to do all that and figure out how to compete with schools that have considerable advantages over you while keeping the fans who remember the old days happy. And the old days, when things were less expensive and you didn’t have to recruit over so wide an area, were an easier time to compete.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the guys who have had success at the lower levels as head coaches are the best choice for a job like Syracuse. You’d think the best coaches would be at the highest levels but at the powerhouse schools you get used to being on the short list of top recruits as soon as you contact them and beating most of your opponents just because you have too much talent for them to compete with you. In the NFL, someone else obtains the talent and you are coaching adults who know the game and how to prepare for it. It’s mostly game-planning. A guy who has been coaching at that level for as long as G-Rob was just wasn’t quipped to run a program like Syracuse’s.
DOUG MARRONE: So we immediately went back to the pros fr another guy who had never been a head coach. But he was a former SU player who said that his entire coaching career had led him to his dream job. The two other major candidates were Chip Holtz, who, the story goes, “just wanted to know how much we were going to pay him” and Turner Gil, who really wanted the Auburn job but would take ours if he couldn’t get it. It was a no-brainer.
I bought into Doug Marrone big time, thinking he’d be football’s Jim Boeheim or John Desko, the alum who was going to be our coach for a generation. I still remember the first game against Minnesota, where we scored 20 first half points after years of pathetic offensive play. The SU assistant coaches were given a standing ovation as they descended through the stand s from the booth. At last had an exciting team worth rooting for! We didn’t score in the second half and exciting offense was not the hallmark of the Marrone career. He proved to be a rather conservative coach, one who didn’t like to take chances. But he did make us more competitive in his first year and in his second year we won 8 games and the Pinstripe Bowl. We seemed to be on schedule. Marrone seemed very enthusiastic about the job, willing to discuss every detail of how he did things and of what happened in every game.
But then something happened. We don’t know precisely what because neither Marrone or anyone with inside knowledge has talked about it. Was it failed promises about facilities or coach’s salaries? Was it problems disciplining some trouble makers, even a fight that supposedly happened in the locker room? Was it the lack of fan support and public criticism? Maybe Marrone just found his dream job wasn’t much of a dream and he just want’s enjoying it any more. Or maybe it never was his dream job and he was just waiting for an NFL opening.
Whatever Marrone started 5-2 in his third year but it was a very shaky 5-2, with close or even lucky wins over inferior teams, followed by a 5 game losing streak when they needed just one win to get back to a bowl game. We got off to s tumbling 2-4 start the next year. Marorne himself looked like a very unhappy man. he answered questions with single sentences, often coaching clichés. He said “That’s on me: I’ve gpt to do a better job.” So much I abbreviated it as TOMIGTDABJ every time he said it. We rallied to finished 8-5 and win the Pinstripe Bowl again, which you’d think would make everything Ok, but it didn’t seem OK, somehow. Then Marrone suddenly appeared at a news conference in Buffalo and he was no longer our coach.
SCOTT SHAFER: the priority seemed to be to promote from within to continue the progress it seemed Marrone was making. But Marrone called basically the rest of the staff with him to Buffalo, so Shafer had to put together his own staff and do it after the bowl game, an awkward time to make a coaching change. He’d been an excellent defensive coordinator at several colleges. Form everything I read he seemed like a good man whose family liked living here so he was likely to stay for a while. It was about time he got a chance at a head coaching job and he was grateful. People liked his straightforward honesty and his combative attitude. We were going to be fine.
His first year was the ultimate roller-coaster ride. It was like all 14 years of the Pasqualoni compressed into one season. We played competitively against Penn State in the season opener, then got blown out at Northwestern, falling behind 7-34 at halftime before losing 27-48. Then we had a couple blow wins over inferior opponents before getting crushed at home by Clemson 14-49. A road win at NC State, who we’d never beaten, was followed by a soul-crushing 0-56 loss at Georgia Tech in which we changed out defense to something we hadn’t been playing to try to deal with their triple option and couldn’t stop anything- or gain anything, either. Two more ACC wins gave us a winning record when we travelled to Tallahassee to take on #1 Florida State. We looked like a Model T in the Indy 500 in losing 3-59. That was the score after three quarters so it could easily have been worse. We lost a 1 pointer to Pittsburgh but beat BC by a field goal to get a bowl game and then won by 4 over Minnesota to wind up with a winning record, but a very shaky one, at 7-6.
Then last year our offense got wiped out by injuries and we went 3-9 despite having one of the better defenses in the country. This year there were more injuries and we had the youngest team I can recall, full of freshmen and sophomores and went 4-8. The encouraging thing was that we had so many good, young players. We needed them to mature and get a couple more recruiting classes like them and we could make some noise in the ACC. But the losses had piled up and with it the opposition to the coach. he himself seemed to be fraying under the pressure. He was twice called for misbehavior on the sidelines and his press conferences had become adversarial.
There wer legitimate criticisms. The biggest was his arch conservative decision making, doing things like punting in the other team’s territory when down by two touchdowns. He said he hoped his defense could stop them or create a turnover. He seemed like a defensive coach whose desire was to set up his defense, to make the plays to win the game, not his offense. His explanations for his decision making became illogical and contradictory. Eric Dungey got hurt being left in a 10-41 game with five minutes left because Shafer still thought we could make a comeback. Then his offensive coordinator said it was because his back-up wasn’t warmed up yet. It made it seem like Safer didn’t know what was happening or what he was doing. Another new AD took advantage of the situation to fire the coach and go get his own man.
DINO BABERS: Ever since the Dome opened people, (including me) have looked at it and considered it the perfe4ct place to run a high-powered, up-tempo offense. The conditions are perfect, out of the elements. Yet for years we always seemed to emphasize the run as the primary means of offensive locomotion. One year, (1994), there were only four teams that passed less than Syracuse and they were all wishbone teams. Meanwhile we watched offensive explosions happening at BYU, Houston, Texas Tech, Boise State, Oregon, Baylor and other places. Why was it happening at those places and not here?
Now the new AD has made us all happy by getting us a new head coach with a wealth of experience in such offenses and who has proven a successful head coach at the FCS and MAC level using the same offense. We were already running many of the types of plays Baber’s teams have bene using. There’s really nothing new in a sport that’s been around for over a century. I think the differences are:
1) How you package the plays you are using: what plays do you use to set up what plays?
2) When do you call those plays? Do you have the right play for the right defense and situation?
3) What kind of pace do you set? Of course, you have to move the ball to maintain pace, (and we found out with George MacDonald). But if you can do that and get plays off at a rapid rate, you can prevent the defense from making substitutions and wear them down.
4) Can you make in-game adjustments?
5) How well do you execute plays?
6) How talented are the players you are suing to execute those plays?
That’s what produces the fancy numbers, not inventing plays we’ve never seen before. Babers has proven he can do that at two different levels and I see no reason he won’t do it at this level. I was impressed last night that he won the game by using two things some people thought was an afterthought for his kind of team: defense and the running game. We’ll be playing defense the new few years. We want the ball back to give it to our offense. But our strategy will be to set things up for the offense to win the game, not the defense. And we’ll use the passing game to set up the running game by pulling the defense part, instead of using the run to suck in the defense to set up an occasional pass. We’ll punt only when we have to: a punt is a turnover. I think Babers wil find that the players Shafer and his staff recruited will be very useful in his offense. And I think Babers will be able to recruit nationwide to get players he wants to play his way in a Dome in a major conference.
On top of that, Baber seems to be man of strong character. He’s not some sleazebag we’ll have to tolerate if we want to win. He might move on to a powerhouse school or the NFL someday. But I think he’ll be here long enough to bring this program back to respectability and make the Dome a fun place to be. And then he can turn the program over to an assistant who will be in a positon to maintain that success. Or maybe, at age 54, this is his last stop. It all seems to be good.
So that’s where I am now.
What will actually happen? :noidea:
Stay tuned.
FRANK MALONEY: Ben Schwartzwalder retired. A lot of names were mentioned but, with two exceptions I don’t remember who they were. I recall Frank Maloney, who had been Michigan’s linebacker coach, came out of the blue. The fact that he was with Michigan was encouraging but he was a positon coach, not a head coach or even a coordinator. It was speculated that he was all we could get, considering the state of the program. That surprised those of us who still thought Syracuse was a “national power” and this discussion was an eye-opener. We had a crumbling rock-pile of a stadium and not much that would now be called “facilities”. We were a private school in a sport that, with the exception of Notre Dame and USC was increasingly dominated by state schools. We’d always been a regional recruiter when unlimited substitution football meant you had to become a national recruiter to be any good. Maybe Maloney was the only guy we could get.
Later we heard that Don Nehlen, the coach of the Bowling Green team that had crushed us in the opener of Ben’s last season, 13-41, (and would do it again to a Maloney team in 1976: 7-22), wanted to become the coach here. He eventually got the West Virginia job and was probably better off there at the time. I also remember hearing something about Delaware coach Tubby Raymond, who had started a long and successful career there. Would they have done better than Frank? I suspect they were better coaches but I don’t think they would have had as much success here as they did at West Virginia and Delaware.
Maloney was far from perfect but he kept things alive here while the politicians argued about building the Dome. He recruited Bill Hurley, Art Monk, Joe Morris, Craig Wolfley, Jimmy Collins and others. We won 32 games in 7 years with a program that had the foundation of a D3 team. He was a victim of Joe Morris getting hurt in the first year of the Dome, (otherwise we’d have done better than 5-6 and maybe made a bowl game), and “new boss syndrome”. Jake Crouthamel fired Frank after the losing season- and a DUI.
DICK MACPHERSON: I was at work when a lot of whispering was going on in the office, (I’m always the last guy to hear the rumor). A woman who had no interest in sports at all who sat across from me asked ”Did you hear? Syracuse had a new football coach!” Who, I asked. “Somebody named MacPherson”. My heart sank. We’ve got the Dome built finally and we’re going with a guy nobody ever heard of to coach?
As I learned more about MacPherson- he’s been a successful coach at UMASS and had long experience in the college and poor games as a n assistant, I felt better. He seemed like a seasoned professional, whereas Maloney’s only coaching experience before he got the Michigan linebackers job was in high school.
It was a huge disappointment when Dick opened with losses in the Dome to Rutgers and Temple. It wasn’t just that they were Rutgers and Temple- both would stink later but weren’t too bad at the time. It was that they were home games against teams Frank Maloney had beaten the year before. Beyond that, Coach Mac looked like a mess. He wore a business shirt and tie but no jacket and by the second half the tie was askew and the shirt had become partially untucked. He didn’t look “professional” at all. Mac started 1-5-1 and looked like a huge mistake. How could a guy from the pros look so bad? We rallied to 4-6-1, including Dome upsets of Boston College and West Virginia teams looking ahead to bowl games. He was enthusiastic and his team seemed to want to play hard for him, so I felt better.
The next year we opened with a 31-8 win over Rutgers in the Meadowlands and it looked like we might be pretty good. What followed was a Shaferesque season where we lost 9 of 10, with the only win over Colgate. Then we opened losing to temple in Philly to open the ’83 season to make Mac 6-16-1. We then had 18 winning seasons in 19 years. Mac’s wife got him to wear a blazer and keep it on during the games. He looked positively natty, like Hank Stram. He wound up a Hall Of Famer and our coaching icon emeritus. But it sure didn’t look like it in those early years.
PAUL PASQUALONI: I was surprised that George DeLeone didn’t get the job when Coach Mac went to the Patriots. He was the senior man, in age, in tenure and in positon. I didn’t even know who our linebacker coach was. But P and D were joined at the hip so it really didn’t turn out to matter. When we crushed Steve Spurrier’s Florida team in Paul’s third game to go 3-0, I was convinced we had one of the great young coaches in America. Then we went to New Orleans and built up a 24-0 halftime lead. Meanwhile #1 Florida State was winning a huge confrontation in the big house vs. Michigan, 51-31. We were unable to score in the second half at Tulane and as we suddenly looked kind of inept in one possession after another the crowd started mocking the Orange by chanting “Florida State…Florida State…” They didn’t think we could compete with them.
We came out very aggressively against the Seminoles, getting plays off quickly and getting the ball moved right up the field quickly. Atomic football: they are so fast they are going to be where ever you go, so go right at ‘em. We blocked them and ran off the blocks. We passed the ball downfield. But for a dropped pass in the end zone, we might have had an 21-7 lead. Instead it was 14-7 but I still felt we were going to shock the world and beat the #1 team in the country in their own place. They’d have to rank us #1 – for the first time since 1960.
Instead, we abandoned our straight ahead attack to try to get around them with the slow-developing nearside option. We kept going 3 and out and punting the ball back to the Noles who scored 39 unanswered points. Everybody said, “Well you can’t expect to compete with the #1 team in that heat”. FSU beat only one team worse than they beat us that year. And that set the tone for the Pasqualoni era: a a lot of wins punctuated by strange losses with strange decisions, leaving the sense that, as good as we were doing, could we be doing better?
GREG ROBINSON: Eventually those questions erodes Coach P’s positon here. Again a new AD was followed by a change of football coaches. When the recruiting dried up and started having .500 seasons, we needed someone to put the brakes on the decline. Several coaches were discussed but the focus went more and more on someone named Greg Robinson. He had an impressive resume. He was the DC at Texas, a national power who had just won the Rose Bowl, (and would be back to win the national championship the next year). He’d been the Denver Broncos DC when they won their two Super Bowls. And he was personally recommended by Pete Carroll, the head man at USC, the reigning dynasty in the sport. What was not to like?
Beyond that , Robinson was handsome man with a confident gaze. He seems to be looking at great success on the horizon. I remember spending the entire offseason , feeling not just good but great about the football program. The “A” tam had arrived. Pasqualoni and DeLeone and most of their staff had come up from the Connecticut small college ranks and their ideas were all small college ideas. We were getting someone from the highest levels of the sport- the powerhouses of college football and the National Football League.
What we got was a guy who was totally over his head. He didn’t’ even have a system for getting plays into his quarterback. He went 1-10, our worst record since 1892, in his first year. I did a study of coaches who had gotten off to really bad starts. I went back to 1980, when the Dome opened, just because that seemed to cover “the modern era”, a period current fans could relate to. I found 96 coaches who had won 2 or fewer games in their first year. I found 7 of them who went on to have successful tenures at their schools: Bill McCartney at Colorado, George Welch at Virginia, Mack Brown at North Carolina, Bobby Ross at Georgia Tech, Bill Snyder at Kansas State Barry Alvarez at Wisconsin and Kirk Ferentz at Iowa. There was a 7% chance that G-Rob would turn out to be a McCartney, Welch, Brown, Ross, Snyder, Alvarez or Ferentz. He wasn’t. He had a modest 3 game winning streak early in his second season and actually had a winning record 3-2. I thought the fever had broken and we’d begin winning now. We then lost 6 of 7 to end the season at 4-8. The 2007 Syracuse team was the worst I have seen and possibly the worst team in the entire history of the program. G-Rob was given one more year but the necessity of winning immediately didn’t produce results. He went 3-9 and was fired with a 1037 career record. His final press conference was utterly embarrassing, with the man reading from a children’s book and saying that Syracuse should hire a coach “just like him”.
How did such an attractive candidate to be such an awful coach? To me the hardest level to coach at is what I call the “true mid-majors”. In high school, it’s about developing youth programs, teaching the game, discipline and motivation. In Division III, there are no youth programs and no formal recruiting, (no scholarships), it’s all teaching, discipline, motivation and developing a reputation for winning so that kids considering DIII ball are more likely to go to your school than a rival. You get into Division II, FCS and the lower majors, now you can recruit. But you aren’t a “selector school”. You have to do a better job of finding and evaluating talent and connecting with it early. You want the under the radar guys but you also want radar guys who might come to your school because you’ve worked so hard with them for so long might still come to your school. Then, besides “coaching them up”, you need to be able to game plan to stress your team’s strengths and hide their weaknesses. But you are competing against schools on your level. In the power conferences, you need to do all that and figure out how to compete with schools that have considerable advantages over you while keeping the fans who remember the old days happy. And the old days, when things were less expensive and you didn’t have to recruit over so wide an area, were an easier time to compete.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the guys who have had success at the lower levels as head coaches are the best choice for a job like Syracuse. You’d think the best coaches would be at the highest levels but at the powerhouse schools you get used to being on the short list of top recruits as soon as you contact them and beating most of your opponents just because you have too much talent for them to compete with you. In the NFL, someone else obtains the talent and you are coaching adults who know the game and how to prepare for it. It’s mostly game-planning. A guy who has been coaching at that level for as long as G-Rob was just wasn’t quipped to run a program like Syracuse’s.
DOUG MARRONE: So we immediately went back to the pros fr another guy who had never been a head coach. But he was a former SU player who said that his entire coaching career had led him to his dream job. The two other major candidates were Chip Holtz, who, the story goes, “just wanted to know how much we were going to pay him” and Turner Gil, who really wanted the Auburn job but would take ours if he couldn’t get it. It was a no-brainer.
I bought into Doug Marrone big time, thinking he’d be football’s Jim Boeheim or John Desko, the alum who was going to be our coach for a generation. I still remember the first game against Minnesota, where we scored 20 first half points after years of pathetic offensive play. The SU assistant coaches were given a standing ovation as they descended through the stand s from the booth. At last had an exciting team worth rooting for! We didn’t score in the second half and exciting offense was not the hallmark of the Marrone career. He proved to be a rather conservative coach, one who didn’t like to take chances. But he did make us more competitive in his first year and in his second year we won 8 games and the Pinstripe Bowl. We seemed to be on schedule. Marrone seemed very enthusiastic about the job, willing to discuss every detail of how he did things and of what happened in every game.
But then something happened. We don’t know precisely what because neither Marrone or anyone with inside knowledge has talked about it. Was it failed promises about facilities or coach’s salaries? Was it problems disciplining some trouble makers, even a fight that supposedly happened in the locker room? Was it the lack of fan support and public criticism? Maybe Marrone just found his dream job wasn’t much of a dream and he just want’s enjoying it any more. Or maybe it never was his dream job and he was just waiting for an NFL opening.
Whatever Marrone started 5-2 in his third year but it was a very shaky 5-2, with close or even lucky wins over inferior teams, followed by a 5 game losing streak when they needed just one win to get back to a bowl game. We got off to s tumbling 2-4 start the next year. Marorne himself looked like a very unhappy man. he answered questions with single sentences, often coaching clichés. He said “That’s on me: I’ve gpt to do a better job.” So much I abbreviated it as TOMIGTDABJ every time he said it. We rallied to finished 8-5 and win the Pinstripe Bowl again, which you’d think would make everything Ok, but it didn’t seem OK, somehow. Then Marrone suddenly appeared at a news conference in Buffalo and he was no longer our coach.
SCOTT SHAFER: the priority seemed to be to promote from within to continue the progress it seemed Marrone was making. But Marrone called basically the rest of the staff with him to Buffalo, so Shafer had to put together his own staff and do it after the bowl game, an awkward time to make a coaching change. He’d been an excellent defensive coordinator at several colleges. Form everything I read he seemed like a good man whose family liked living here so he was likely to stay for a while. It was about time he got a chance at a head coaching job and he was grateful. People liked his straightforward honesty and his combative attitude. We were going to be fine.
His first year was the ultimate roller-coaster ride. It was like all 14 years of the Pasqualoni compressed into one season. We played competitively against Penn State in the season opener, then got blown out at Northwestern, falling behind 7-34 at halftime before losing 27-48. Then we had a couple blow wins over inferior opponents before getting crushed at home by Clemson 14-49. A road win at NC State, who we’d never beaten, was followed by a soul-crushing 0-56 loss at Georgia Tech in which we changed out defense to something we hadn’t been playing to try to deal with their triple option and couldn’t stop anything- or gain anything, either. Two more ACC wins gave us a winning record when we travelled to Tallahassee to take on #1 Florida State. We looked like a Model T in the Indy 500 in losing 3-59. That was the score after three quarters so it could easily have been worse. We lost a 1 pointer to Pittsburgh but beat BC by a field goal to get a bowl game and then won by 4 over Minnesota to wind up with a winning record, but a very shaky one, at 7-6.
Then last year our offense got wiped out by injuries and we went 3-9 despite having one of the better defenses in the country. This year there were more injuries and we had the youngest team I can recall, full of freshmen and sophomores and went 4-8. The encouraging thing was that we had so many good, young players. We needed them to mature and get a couple more recruiting classes like them and we could make some noise in the ACC. But the losses had piled up and with it the opposition to the coach. he himself seemed to be fraying under the pressure. He was twice called for misbehavior on the sidelines and his press conferences had become adversarial.
There wer legitimate criticisms. The biggest was his arch conservative decision making, doing things like punting in the other team’s territory when down by two touchdowns. He said he hoped his defense could stop them or create a turnover. He seemed like a defensive coach whose desire was to set up his defense, to make the plays to win the game, not his offense. His explanations for his decision making became illogical and contradictory. Eric Dungey got hurt being left in a 10-41 game with five minutes left because Shafer still thought we could make a comeback. Then his offensive coordinator said it was because his back-up wasn’t warmed up yet. It made it seem like Safer didn’t know what was happening or what he was doing. Another new AD took advantage of the situation to fire the coach and go get his own man.
DINO BABERS: Ever since the Dome opened people, (including me) have looked at it and considered it the perfe4ct place to run a high-powered, up-tempo offense. The conditions are perfect, out of the elements. Yet for years we always seemed to emphasize the run as the primary means of offensive locomotion. One year, (1994), there were only four teams that passed less than Syracuse and they were all wishbone teams. Meanwhile we watched offensive explosions happening at BYU, Houston, Texas Tech, Boise State, Oregon, Baylor and other places. Why was it happening at those places and not here?
Now the new AD has made us all happy by getting us a new head coach with a wealth of experience in such offenses and who has proven a successful head coach at the FCS and MAC level using the same offense. We were already running many of the types of plays Baber’s teams have bene using. There’s really nothing new in a sport that’s been around for over a century. I think the differences are:
1) How you package the plays you are using: what plays do you use to set up what plays?
2) When do you call those plays? Do you have the right play for the right defense and situation?
3) What kind of pace do you set? Of course, you have to move the ball to maintain pace, (and we found out with George MacDonald). But if you can do that and get plays off at a rapid rate, you can prevent the defense from making substitutions and wear them down.
4) Can you make in-game adjustments?
5) How well do you execute plays?
6) How talented are the players you are suing to execute those plays?
That’s what produces the fancy numbers, not inventing plays we’ve never seen before. Babers has proven he can do that at two different levels and I see no reason he won’t do it at this level. I was impressed last night that he won the game by using two things some people thought was an afterthought for his kind of team: defense and the running game. We’ll be playing defense the new few years. We want the ball back to give it to our offense. But our strategy will be to set things up for the offense to win the game, not the defense. And we’ll use the passing game to set up the running game by pulling the defense part, instead of using the run to suck in the defense to set up an occasional pass. We’ll punt only when we have to: a punt is a turnover. I think Babers wil find that the players Shafer and his staff recruited will be very useful in his offense. And I think Babers will be able to recruit nationwide to get players he wants to play his way in a Dome in a major conference.
On top of that, Baber seems to be man of strong character. He’s not some sleazebag we’ll have to tolerate if we want to win. He might move on to a powerhouse school or the NFL someday. But I think he’ll be here long enough to bring this program back to respectability and make the Dome a fun place to be. And then he can turn the program over to an assistant who will be in a positon to maintain that success. Or maybe, at age 54, this is his last stop. It all seems to be good.
So that’s where I am now.
What will actually happen? :noidea:
Stay tuned.
