SWC75
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2012 SU Football Preview
THE SITUATION
A year ago we were coming off an 8-5 season and the feeling was “We’re Back”. But we weren’t. We struggled through a 5-7 follow-up season. The year started promisingly with a 5-2 record and a tremendous victory over West Virginia, 49-23. They’d been shaky before that, pulling out a couple of overtime wins, coming back from a 15 point deficit for one and being the beneficiary of a blown call on an extra point in the other. We’d also lost a comedy of errors overtime game to hated rival Rutgers, (we don’t like them because they were bad and got good while we were good and got bad, so they are a symbol of our frustrations). Worse yet, we only managed to beat a terrible Tulane team 37-34 on a last minute field goal. That was sandwiched around Green Wave losses to Army of 6-45 and UTEP by 7-44. But against West Virginia we dominated from start to finished the school that has dominated the conference in recent years and which would go on to blow ACC champ Clemson out of the Orange Bowl, 70-33. My feeling at the time is that the team had “found itself” and, having seen what they could accomplish when they worked at peak efficiency, they would do so for the rest of the season. They would listen to the coaches, work hard and come out and play quality football the rest of the way.
The exact opposite happened. We bungled our way through five straight losses. We lost 10-27 to Louisville, their biggest margin of victory of the season. We lost 21-28 to a bad Connecticut team. We lost 17-37 at home to South Florida, their only win their last 8 games. A good Cincinnati team handled us 13-30, also at home. Still, we just needed one win to get bowl eligible. But that went down the drain in a 20-33 loss to a Pittsburgh team in the same boat. They got it, we didn’t.
A big factor in these games is how they started. We got punched in the nose early. Two games were 12 Noon road games in which I tuned in at 12 Noon only to find out the other team had already scored. In another they scored a minute after I tuned in. Louisville got a 44 yard pass on their second play and a 42 yard TD pass on their fourth. Connecticut got a 61 yard kick-off return, and 18 yard pass, a 5 yard run and 10 yard TD pass. Then we fumbled on our second play. We got it back with an interception but the team had to be pretty shaky at that point. South Florida got a field goal on their first possession. Cincinnati missed one and we hung in that game until the second half when the Bearcats opened with a 74 yard kick-off return and scored on the next play.
But the biggest mess was against Pitt, here we fumbled the opening kick-off, gave up a TD on the first play, then threw an interception on our second scrimmage play and gave up a field goal. We managed to get back into that one at 20-26 until Ryan Nassib was sacked n the fourth quarter and a fumble was returned for a touchdown, followed by a Nassib interception on the first play after the kick-off. A team’s confidence sags when things go that far wrong so quickly. They may still be putting forth an effort but they are swimming upstream emotionally. In 300 minutes in those last five games, we were behind for 235 minutes and 11 seconds. They were ahead for 25 minutes and 47 seconds. Being behind all the time weighs on you. When the season ended, we’d played well for 60 minutes once, in spurts in other games and seemingly never down the stretch.
After the 15 point comeback in the opener, Doug Marrone took pains to attribute it to his off-the-field “leadership” program. After we put on a 4th quarter drive to beat Rhode Island, (yes, Rhode Island) 21-14, he was perturbed that the news coverage the previous week had not stressed this enough. He wondered if he should even talk about it because “no one really believes me when I say that all the things we do off the field, structure and discipline, keeps us strong and helps us deal with adversity. Now what I have to do as a coach is to get us better focused with better execution.” Down the stretch of the season the team didn’t deal with adversity well and seemed to lack discipline and focus. There were reports of locker room fights. Safety Philip Thomas got thrown off the team. Cornerback Keon Lyn was told to return to Syracuse the morning of the Pitt game. There were rumors that certain members of the team wanted to lose the Pitt game so they wouldn’t have to go to a bowl game. They just wanted the season to end. Marrone appeared tired and disheartened in his late-season press conferences and there was no talk of the fruits of his off-the-field program. He looked like a guy who had ’lost’ his team.
Two other big concerns overlap: our Big East record and our November record. The Big East has always been regarded, (not always but often with justification) as the weakest of the “Big Six” conferences. It’s problem is that it represents the Northeast, the most populous section of the country. That would seem like a good thing but it also means it has the most competition from pro sports. There just aren’t enough “college towns” in the conference and college towns are the lifeblood of college sports. Most Big East schools are to the pro sports teams in the same town what LeMoyne is to Syracuse in our town. They will never get the support they need to be an Ohio State or Oklahoma or Alabama. Yet they are still part of major TV markets and the decisions in college sports are made by TV executives more than college administrators. Thus, the Big East schools have an appeal to other conferences who want rich TV contracts. For that reason the conference is constantly raided and constantly has to re-invent itself. It’s become the entrance porthole for college football’s wannabes, schools with little or no tradition in the sport but who want to be part of the BCS and are trying to build up their programs: Connecticut, Rutgers, South Florida, Cincinnati, Louisville. This should be the perfect conference for a struggling program to find itself but we’d tended to find ourselves in last place. We actually won a share of the conference title in Paul Pasqualoni’s last year. Under Greg Robinson we went 0-7, 1-6, 1-6, and 1-6. Under Doug Marrone we went 1-6 again, then jumped up to 4-3 with, incredibly all four wins on the road. But last year we fell back to 1-6 again and didn’t look much better than G-Rob’s teams.
On top of that Marrone is 2-9 in November and that doesn’t include last year’s Pitt game, which was played on December 3rd. He’s 15-10 before November. The reason for that is obvious: his teams have lacked depth. They can’t absorb injuries and they wear out as the season goes on. By November, we are just being bullied around by stronger, fresher teams.
It was all very discouraging and has created a lot of negative feelings going into this season. There are already fans calling into local radio shows calling for Marrone to be fired if we have a bad year or even get off to a bad start. The usual August optimism seems to be absent.
It’s a huge year for the program. It’s going to be our last year in the Big East. We want to go out strong, not with another last place team. You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression and if we go into the ACC looking like a bottom feeder, we’ll recruit like one and be one for a long time, a sort of second Duke- a basketball power that can’t play football. Continuity in the coaching staff is vital to recruiting. If we wind up firing Marrone, it will be the third time we’ve done that in a decade. If you develop a reputation as being a revolving door for coaches, good coaches won’t want to come here, except as a stepping stone for another job. Players won’t want to come here because they won’t know who the coach will be. That’s the best way to kill a program. But if Marrone “isn’t the guy”, what do you do? If you keep him around after criticism and rumors that he’s gone build up, recruiting stops anyway. That’s what happened to his two predecessors.
We badly need Marrone to be successful and to be successful this year. If he is, that will allow us to extend his contract and to continue his recruiting, which looks like it’s pretty good. A coach going into the last year of his contract, (2013 in this case) is a “dead man walking”. He also needs to regain control of his team. That may have already happened. There are reports current members of this team have been active in helping to recruit high school prospects they have known. I have a feeling much of the trouble last year came from some of the last hold-overs of the Robinson who didn’t take to Marrone’s more aggressive attempts at discipline. This team will be almost all his own recruits, guys who knew what they were getting into when they came here.
I think there is a third year syndrome at work here. Coach P was plagued by criticism and rumors he’d be gone his last couple of years and his recruiting fell off as a result. Greg Robinson’s first team had a bad record but was competitive because it had a good defense. The next year he won three more games than the first and there was hope he was turning things around. In his third year, we collapsed back to 2-10 and weren’t even competitive. Basically, the last good Pasqualoni recruits had graduated and G-Rob had to go with the sub-Division One players of Coach P’s last couple of recruiting classes and the “not ready for prime time” guys of G-Robs first two classes., with disastrous results. He was clearly on his way out at this point and his recruiting fell off. Doug Marrone came in two years alter and fielded a competitive 4-8 team, then went 8-5 in his second year and everybody was all excited about the future. He did that mostly with the matured players from G-Robs first couple of classes. Most of them were gone in Doug’s third year and we stumbled to 5-7 and were probably lucky to have that record. If we don’t get better, the coals will get hot under Marrone’s feet and his recruiting will go sour. And I’ll bet his successor looks like he might be “the guy” after two years and then has a rough third season. We’ve got to prevent this from becoming a vicious circle.
The schedule will be tough. The problems winning Big East games and winning in November have been noted. The non-conference schedule has been rated as the toughest in the country, although is as much as comment on the way schedules are put together these days as on the difficulty of this one. The biggie is the second game: #1 rated USC in the Meadowlands. We played them semi-tough last year before falling 17-38. The third game is a possible “trap game”. Stony Brook had no team until 1983 and didn’t offer scholarships until 2006. They have a funny name, (is Stony Brook where the Slippery Rocks are?). But last year they were the highest scoring team in 1AA/FCS and lost in the first round of the playoffs by a touchdown on the road to the #1 ranked FCS team. They are much better than the Rhode Island team we struggled to beat last year. They have been placed after the USC game on the schedule like a runaway truck offshoot on a mountain road. If we get badly beaten by the Trojans, at least we’ll have Stony brook the next week. But what if we lose to Stony Brook? That could be the last nail in the coffin for Marrone the way the Akron loss in 2008 sealed G-Rob’s fate. The other non-conference games are against Big Ten teams Northwestern, (6-7 last year), and Minnesota (3-9) and then there’s a late-season trip to Missouri, now an SEC team in the Bizarro World of College Football. The Tigers have put together a string of 7 straight winning season after a long stretch of mediocrity. They are where we’d like to be in a few years. Meanwhile, West Virginia, the one Big East team we beat last year, has replaced them in the Big 12. Temple has been invited back into the conference to fill in for the Mountaineers. When they left, they were a 2-9, (and we couldn’t beat them that year). They are coming back as a 9-4 team.
Everyone who has seen the team in practice this year says they “look like a Division One team”, which they didn’t in the past. They have more size, more speed and more depth than they’ve had in years. They may be better able to survive the perils of a 12 game schedule than they have been. They may be a physically stronger and tougher team. They may be more of a “team” psychologically than they were last year. They may be disgusted with their performance last year. It wouldn’t have taken much improvement for last year to have been a successful year and it won’t take much this year. But this team must “make it so”.
THE SITUATION
A year ago we were coming off an 8-5 season and the feeling was “We’re Back”. But we weren’t. We struggled through a 5-7 follow-up season. The year started promisingly with a 5-2 record and a tremendous victory over West Virginia, 49-23. They’d been shaky before that, pulling out a couple of overtime wins, coming back from a 15 point deficit for one and being the beneficiary of a blown call on an extra point in the other. We’d also lost a comedy of errors overtime game to hated rival Rutgers, (we don’t like them because they were bad and got good while we were good and got bad, so they are a symbol of our frustrations). Worse yet, we only managed to beat a terrible Tulane team 37-34 on a last minute field goal. That was sandwiched around Green Wave losses to Army of 6-45 and UTEP by 7-44. But against West Virginia we dominated from start to finished the school that has dominated the conference in recent years and which would go on to blow ACC champ Clemson out of the Orange Bowl, 70-33. My feeling at the time is that the team had “found itself” and, having seen what they could accomplish when they worked at peak efficiency, they would do so for the rest of the season. They would listen to the coaches, work hard and come out and play quality football the rest of the way.
The exact opposite happened. We bungled our way through five straight losses. We lost 10-27 to Louisville, their biggest margin of victory of the season. We lost 21-28 to a bad Connecticut team. We lost 17-37 at home to South Florida, their only win their last 8 games. A good Cincinnati team handled us 13-30, also at home. Still, we just needed one win to get bowl eligible. But that went down the drain in a 20-33 loss to a Pittsburgh team in the same boat. They got it, we didn’t.
A big factor in these games is how they started. We got punched in the nose early. Two games were 12 Noon road games in which I tuned in at 12 Noon only to find out the other team had already scored. In another they scored a minute after I tuned in. Louisville got a 44 yard pass on their second play and a 42 yard TD pass on their fourth. Connecticut got a 61 yard kick-off return, and 18 yard pass, a 5 yard run and 10 yard TD pass. Then we fumbled on our second play. We got it back with an interception but the team had to be pretty shaky at that point. South Florida got a field goal on their first possession. Cincinnati missed one and we hung in that game until the second half when the Bearcats opened with a 74 yard kick-off return and scored on the next play.
But the biggest mess was against Pitt, here we fumbled the opening kick-off, gave up a TD on the first play, then threw an interception on our second scrimmage play and gave up a field goal. We managed to get back into that one at 20-26 until Ryan Nassib was sacked n the fourth quarter and a fumble was returned for a touchdown, followed by a Nassib interception on the first play after the kick-off. A team’s confidence sags when things go that far wrong so quickly. They may still be putting forth an effort but they are swimming upstream emotionally. In 300 minutes in those last five games, we were behind for 235 minutes and 11 seconds. They were ahead for 25 minutes and 47 seconds. Being behind all the time weighs on you. When the season ended, we’d played well for 60 minutes once, in spurts in other games and seemingly never down the stretch.
After the 15 point comeback in the opener, Doug Marrone took pains to attribute it to his off-the-field “leadership” program. After we put on a 4th quarter drive to beat Rhode Island, (yes, Rhode Island) 21-14, he was perturbed that the news coverage the previous week had not stressed this enough. He wondered if he should even talk about it because “no one really believes me when I say that all the things we do off the field, structure and discipline, keeps us strong and helps us deal with adversity. Now what I have to do as a coach is to get us better focused with better execution.” Down the stretch of the season the team didn’t deal with adversity well and seemed to lack discipline and focus. There were reports of locker room fights. Safety Philip Thomas got thrown off the team. Cornerback Keon Lyn was told to return to Syracuse the morning of the Pitt game. There were rumors that certain members of the team wanted to lose the Pitt game so they wouldn’t have to go to a bowl game. They just wanted the season to end. Marrone appeared tired and disheartened in his late-season press conferences and there was no talk of the fruits of his off-the-field program. He looked like a guy who had ’lost’ his team.
Two other big concerns overlap: our Big East record and our November record. The Big East has always been regarded, (not always but often with justification) as the weakest of the “Big Six” conferences. It’s problem is that it represents the Northeast, the most populous section of the country. That would seem like a good thing but it also means it has the most competition from pro sports. There just aren’t enough “college towns” in the conference and college towns are the lifeblood of college sports. Most Big East schools are to the pro sports teams in the same town what LeMoyne is to Syracuse in our town. They will never get the support they need to be an Ohio State or Oklahoma or Alabama. Yet they are still part of major TV markets and the decisions in college sports are made by TV executives more than college administrators. Thus, the Big East schools have an appeal to other conferences who want rich TV contracts. For that reason the conference is constantly raided and constantly has to re-invent itself. It’s become the entrance porthole for college football’s wannabes, schools with little or no tradition in the sport but who want to be part of the BCS and are trying to build up their programs: Connecticut, Rutgers, South Florida, Cincinnati, Louisville. This should be the perfect conference for a struggling program to find itself but we’d tended to find ourselves in last place. We actually won a share of the conference title in Paul Pasqualoni’s last year. Under Greg Robinson we went 0-7, 1-6, 1-6, and 1-6. Under Doug Marrone we went 1-6 again, then jumped up to 4-3 with, incredibly all four wins on the road. But last year we fell back to 1-6 again and didn’t look much better than G-Rob’s teams.
On top of that Marrone is 2-9 in November and that doesn’t include last year’s Pitt game, which was played on December 3rd. He’s 15-10 before November. The reason for that is obvious: his teams have lacked depth. They can’t absorb injuries and they wear out as the season goes on. By November, we are just being bullied around by stronger, fresher teams.
It was all very discouraging and has created a lot of negative feelings going into this season. There are already fans calling into local radio shows calling for Marrone to be fired if we have a bad year or even get off to a bad start. The usual August optimism seems to be absent.
It’s a huge year for the program. It’s going to be our last year in the Big East. We want to go out strong, not with another last place team. You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression and if we go into the ACC looking like a bottom feeder, we’ll recruit like one and be one for a long time, a sort of second Duke- a basketball power that can’t play football. Continuity in the coaching staff is vital to recruiting. If we wind up firing Marrone, it will be the third time we’ve done that in a decade. If you develop a reputation as being a revolving door for coaches, good coaches won’t want to come here, except as a stepping stone for another job. Players won’t want to come here because they won’t know who the coach will be. That’s the best way to kill a program. But if Marrone “isn’t the guy”, what do you do? If you keep him around after criticism and rumors that he’s gone build up, recruiting stops anyway. That’s what happened to his two predecessors.
We badly need Marrone to be successful and to be successful this year. If he is, that will allow us to extend his contract and to continue his recruiting, which looks like it’s pretty good. A coach going into the last year of his contract, (2013 in this case) is a “dead man walking”. He also needs to regain control of his team. That may have already happened. There are reports current members of this team have been active in helping to recruit high school prospects they have known. I have a feeling much of the trouble last year came from some of the last hold-overs of the Robinson who didn’t take to Marrone’s more aggressive attempts at discipline. This team will be almost all his own recruits, guys who knew what they were getting into when they came here.
I think there is a third year syndrome at work here. Coach P was plagued by criticism and rumors he’d be gone his last couple of years and his recruiting fell off as a result. Greg Robinson’s first team had a bad record but was competitive because it had a good defense. The next year he won three more games than the first and there was hope he was turning things around. In his third year, we collapsed back to 2-10 and weren’t even competitive. Basically, the last good Pasqualoni recruits had graduated and G-Rob had to go with the sub-Division One players of Coach P’s last couple of recruiting classes and the “not ready for prime time” guys of G-Robs first two classes., with disastrous results. He was clearly on his way out at this point and his recruiting fell off. Doug Marrone came in two years alter and fielded a competitive 4-8 team, then went 8-5 in his second year and everybody was all excited about the future. He did that mostly with the matured players from G-Robs first couple of classes. Most of them were gone in Doug’s third year and we stumbled to 5-7 and were probably lucky to have that record. If we don’t get better, the coals will get hot under Marrone’s feet and his recruiting will go sour. And I’ll bet his successor looks like he might be “the guy” after two years and then has a rough third season. We’ve got to prevent this from becoming a vicious circle.
The schedule will be tough. The problems winning Big East games and winning in November have been noted. The non-conference schedule has been rated as the toughest in the country, although is as much as comment on the way schedules are put together these days as on the difficulty of this one. The biggie is the second game: #1 rated USC in the Meadowlands. We played them semi-tough last year before falling 17-38. The third game is a possible “trap game”. Stony Brook had no team until 1983 and didn’t offer scholarships until 2006. They have a funny name, (is Stony Brook where the Slippery Rocks are?). But last year they were the highest scoring team in 1AA/FCS and lost in the first round of the playoffs by a touchdown on the road to the #1 ranked FCS team. They are much better than the Rhode Island team we struggled to beat last year. They have been placed after the USC game on the schedule like a runaway truck offshoot on a mountain road. If we get badly beaten by the Trojans, at least we’ll have Stony brook the next week. But what if we lose to Stony Brook? That could be the last nail in the coffin for Marrone the way the Akron loss in 2008 sealed G-Rob’s fate. The other non-conference games are against Big Ten teams Northwestern, (6-7 last year), and Minnesota (3-9) and then there’s a late-season trip to Missouri, now an SEC team in the Bizarro World of College Football. The Tigers have put together a string of 7 straight winning season after a long stretch of mediocrity. They are where we’d like to be in a few years. Meanwhile, West Virginia, the one Big East team we beat last year, has replaced them in the Big 12. Temple has been invited back into the conference to fill in for the Mountaineers. When they left, they were a 2-9, (and we couldn’t beat them that year). They are coming back as a 9-4 team.
Everyone who has seen the team in practice this year says they “look like a Division One team”, which they didn’t in the past. They have more size, more speed and more depth than they’ve had in years. They may be better able to survive the perils of a 12 game schedule than they have been. They may be a physically stronger and tougher team. They may be more of a “team” psychologically than they were last year. They may be disgusted with their performance last year. It wouldn’t have taken much improvement for last year to have been a successful year and it won’t take much this year. But this team must “make it so”.
