SWC75
Bored Historian
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- Aug 26, 2011
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I send this to friends and relatives, some of whom are not in the area. Sorry if there's more exposition than you needed.
THE SITUATION
In 1949 Ben Schwartzwalder took over a Syracuse University football program, (they just called it a “team” in those days), that had been 1-8 in 1948. People were suggesting maybe we should give up the sport. Others said we needed a “big name coach” to turn things around. (Ben, who came here from Muhlenberg, joked that they got a “long name coach” instead). He went 4-5 his first year, 5-5 his second and 5-4 in his third year. In his third year we went 7-2 with a one point loss to a service team and won the Lambert Trophy as the best team in the East.
But it was a false positive. Eastern football was down, way down, especially with the setback Army got with its cribbing scandal. Our other loss was a 7-48 drubbing at the hands of national champion Michigan State that was, if anything, not even that close. It was 0-21 after a quarter, 0-27 at the half and 0-41 going into the fourth quarter. Syracuse got invited to the Orange Bowl to play Alabama but it was more of the same. Actually, it was only 6-7 after one quarter and 6-21 at the half: the avalanche occurred after that. The team just wasn’t ready for prime time.
In 1953, Ben went 5-3-1, (some said that was actually a better team than the 1952 team, (they were 18 points away from a perfect season). Then he fell back to 4-4, then 5-3. The big breakthrough came in his 8th season, when Jim Brown was a senior and we went to the Cotton Bowl, losing to TCU, then a national power, by the margin of a blocked extra point. But we’d won the respect of the country and the interest of recruits who would produce a national championship in Ben’s 11th year.
From 1956-1967 Syracuse was the 7th winningest major college team in the country:
http://football.stassen.com/cgi-bin...=1956&end=1967&rpct=30&min=5&se=on&by=Win+Pct
Ahead of them were an Ivy League team, Dartmouth, a MAC team, Bowling Green, two WAC teams, Arizona State and Wyoming and two “power conference” teams, Alabama and Mississippi. Both Alabama and Mississippi refused to use black players or to play anyone who did. For a dozen years, Syracuse was the best integrated power conference team in the country. But it didn’t last. The two platoon system more than doubled the recruiting requirements, (Ben’s traveling squads in the one platoon era were often less than 40 players), and SU’s recruiting budget was inadequate and its facilities were either antiquated or non-existent. Ben’s career record was a bell curve, ending in a 2-9 disaster in 1973 when, after an 0-8 start, we were voted the worst team in the country.
It took a long time for the University and the community to respond but we built the Carrier Dome and upgraded the facilities and budget. We also brought in Dick McPherson, who’d had college head coaching experience at Massachusetts and long NFL experience as an assistant with several teams. He opened winning 6 of his first 23 games and we wondered why we’d ever hired him, (the less experienced Frank Maloney had been 12-11 in his last 23 games). But then we rallied to go 6-5, 6-5, 7-5 but then fell to 5-6 with an 0-4 start in 1986. The “Sack Mac Pack” was in its glory.” But then came Mac’s breakthrough year, 1987, when we went from 5-6 to 11-0.
From 1987-2001 we were the 10th winningest school in major college football. Only four schools had a winning season in every one of those years: Michigan, Nebraska, Florida State and Syracuse. Pretty good company. But this didn’t last, either. All that success created an atmosphere of complacency that allowed the program to slip, (I’m not going to start another argument about the specific reasons), that was summed up when the Chancellor told complaining fans “Get a life”.
There was rejoicing when Greg Robinson, another coach with long experience in both college and the pros and an association with successful programs was brought in. He got off to a worse start than Coach Mac, going 1-10 in his first season. But he was never able to turn it around and was fired after the worse four season run in SU history at 10-37.
Then we brought in an alum, Doug Marrone who was also a long time NFL assistant who had played a role in building the New Orleans Saints into a powerhouse. Doug made a lot of speeches, calling this his “dream job” and worked hard to improve the team. They only improved from 3-9 to 4-8 in his first year but it was a more competitive team, going from being outscored by 175 points to being out-scored by only 81 points. Then, in Doug’s second year we went 8-5 and won the first Pinstripe Bowl. We got off to a 5-2 start in 2011 and needed one more win for another bowl birth, (in the watered down bowl system we’ve got these days0. But the 5-2 record had been a very shaky 5-2 with two overtime wins, and close wins over 1AA Rhode Island and a Tulane team that had been blown out by the likes of Army and UTEP. Then came a dreadful “ball rolls back down the hill” five game losing streak that left us with a 5-7 record.
There were rumors of dissent and even fights behind the scenes and the enthusiasm seemed to have drained out of Marrone whose public statements after that were mechanically repetitive. Still he managed to lead the team back to the Pinstripe Bowl the next year and we again won it. Then he left town without a word to the fans to take the job as the head coach in Buffalo and took most of his staff with him.
We’d fired Paul Pasqualoni after a bowl game and found out what a bad idea that is: there’s not a lot of good choices for putting together a staff and then recruiting at that late date. You wind up with people doing a job they’ve never done before, (or been fired from), and you find out that some of them have been promoted to their level of incompetence and the others were fired for a reason. Not we were in the same situation again, but not by our own choosing. In an effort to keep the staff together, Dr. Daryl Goss, our AD, promoted defensive coordinator Scott Shafer to head coach. He assembled a staff mostly of people he had worked with before, including the new DC, Chuck Bullough. He also brought George McDonald, a guy with a reputation as a master recruiter, to be offensive coordinator, a job he’d never done before.
The result was a very bumpy ride. We won games 54-0 and 52-17 and lost them 0-56 and 3-59. We got clobbered by a Northwestern team that looked like they belonged in the top ten at the time but wound up 5-7. We were also overmatched against a Clemson team that looked like a national championship contender and was wearing more Orange than we were in our own place. I spent the game next to a Clemson fan and didn’t know whether to say “Go Orange! Or “Go Blue!”
The most discouraging game was the Georgia Tech game. We were coming off two straight wins and Tech had lost three straight. They run the triple option and Shafer and Bullough put us in a 3-4 defense to combat it when the 4-3 was out normal defense. And we had one of the three starting linebackers out. We didn’t give up long runs but we gave up 394 yards rushing anyway, most of it in 5 yard chunks. I keep track of which team “wins” each ply. You win first down if you can get a third of the way to another first down. You win second down if you can get half the distance to a first down. Georgia Tech won 49 of 62 first and second down plays on offense. They scored on runs of 4, 6, 3, 1, 3, 50 and 1 yard. Inevitably, they dropped back to pass and we gave up the big one, a 46 yard touchdown. Meanwhile the offense kept shooting itself in the foot with turnovers and penalties and we never did dent the end zone.
But the team was able to shake off these terrible defeats and come back to win enough games to get into a minor bowl again, the Texas bowl against another mediocre team, Minnesota. The game proved to be a microcosm of the season as we were behind most of the way and fought back to win in the final minutes to finish with a winning record at 7-6.
The staff may have been learning on the job but they did a fine job on the recruiting trail, securing a full class of commitments at the earliest date ever. They are already working toward the 2016 class. It’s a sign the program is on the rise. The reason we joined the ACC is because it meant more money and we’re using that to upgrade the facilities, (again). The future looks bright. People are anticipating the next “breakthrough season” when we again thrust Syracuse, NY into the football limelight.
But history teaches us that it takes 7-8 years to build the football program at a place like Syracuse, (a mid-size private school in an unglamorous location and in a state that doesn’t emphasize high school football). And in this case, virtually the entire coaching staff left four years into the rebuilding plan. One poster last year, pressing his point that we shouldn’t be too patient with a guy who doesn’t seem to be getting the job done, said that past history doesn’t matter because “this is a new era”. I told him a new era doesn’t matter unless it’s an era in which rebuilding the program is going to easier.
And I don’t think it is. Schools like Connecticut, Rutgers, Temple and Cincinnati have moved up into the big time in areas we used to recruit. (Ben Schwartzwalder never had a significant player who wasn’t from New York or an adjacent state.) We’re having to recruit the entire eastern half of the country and even beyond that, (our 2014 roster has players from Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, California, Washington and even one from London and I don’t mean the one in Ontario). The competition for those players is fierce and tons of money has to be spent to create facilities that will impress them when- and if- they visit here.
We have a lot more money but it’s the same money everybody else on our level gets. Its purpose is to build a foundation for success, not an extra story on the top of the house. We are held back by an apathetic fan base that no longer fills the Dome, one of the smallest stadiums at our level, even for the games against the best teams. Now that the “Big Five” conferences are partially breaking away from the NCAA, (will it become permanent?), so they can make their own rules and players are winning lawsuits to get a bigger piece of the pie, the deep end of the pool will get even deeper. Are we going to be able to compete?
Then there’s our conference. We were in a great situation in the Big East, although we never took full advantage of it. We were in a BCS conference but it was the weakest of them. And it had no conference title game. With the worship of the undefeated record that dominates the rankings, if we could run the table in a year when no more than one other BCS conference team did it, we could play for the national championship. Virginia Tech did in 1999 and did so credibly. West Virginia would have played Ohio State for the title in 2007 if they could only have beaten Pitt in their own back yard. Cincinnati would have played for the title in 2009 if Texas didn’t get a second chance at a game winning field goal in the Big 12 title game. Our teams of the 90’s, especially in the McNabb era, had a chance to do that but always came up a bit short.
Now we are in a conference division with a locked and loaded perennial national power, Florida State and another strong program in Clemson. I think Louisville has the potential to at least be at Clemson’s level. They will certainly be better than the school they replaced, Maryland. Several of the teams we played in the conference last year had suffered significant injuries to their offensive teams and we were able to beat NC State 24-10, Wake Forest 13-0 and Maryland 20-3. That saved us from what was going to be a disastrous season. We can’t depend on such good fortune this year. And there’s another division in this conference, one with Miami. You know they’ll come back just like Florida State did. They are in the right place and have the right history. If we ever found a way to win our division, they’d likely be waiting for us. I think this places a glass ceiling on what can accomplish that wasn’t there before. We may have another “breakthrough year” but it’s more likely to be 11-2 than 11-0.
And It’s not going to be this year. Not yet.
THE SITUATION
In 1949 Ben Schwartzwalder took over a Syracuse University football program, (they just called it a “team” in those days), that had been 1-8 in 1948. People were suggesting maybe we should give up the sport. Others said we needed a “big name coach” to turn things around. (Ben, who came here from Muhlenberg, joked that they got a “long name coach” instead). He went 4-5 his first year, 5-5 his second and 5-4 in his third year. In his third year we went 7-2 with a one point loss to a service team and won the Lambert Trophy as the best team in the East.
But it was a false positive. Eastern football was down, way down, especially with the setback Army got with its cribbing scandal. Our other loss was a 7-48 drubbing at the hands of national champion Michigan State that was, if anything, not even that close. It was 0-21 after a quarter, 0-27 at the half and 0-41 going into the fourth quarter. Syracuse got invited to the Orange Bowl to play Alabama but it was more of the same. Actually, it was only 6-7 after one quarter and 6-21 at the half: the avalanche occurred after that. The team just wasn’t ready for prime time.
In 1953, Ben went 5-3-1, (some said that was actually a better team than the 1952 team, (they were 18 points away from a perfect season). Then he fell back to 4-4, then 5-3. The big breakthrough came in his 8th season, when Jim Brown was a senior and we went to the Cotton Bowl, losing to TCU, then a national power, by the margin of a blocked extra point. But we’d won the respect of the country and the interest of recruits who would produce a national championship in Ben’s 11th year.
From 1956-1967 Syracuse was the 7th winningest major college team in the country:
http://football.stassen.com/cgi-bin...=1956&end=1967&rpct=30&min=5&se=on&by=Win+Pct
Ahead of them were an Ivy League team, Dartmouth, a MAC team, Bowling Green, two WAC teams, Arizona State and Wyoming and two “power conference” teams, Alabama and Mississippi. Both Alabama and Mississippi refused to use black players or to play anyone who did. For a dozen years, Syracuse was the best integrated power conference team in the country. But it didn’t last. The two platoon system more than doubled the recruiting requirements, (Ben’s traveling squads in the one platoon era were often less than 40 players), and SU’s recruiting budget was inadequate and its facilities were either antiquated or non-existent. Ben’s career record was a bell curve, ending in a 2-9 disaster in 1973 when, after an 0-8 start, we were voted the worst team in the country.
It took a long time for the University and the community to respond but we built the Carrier Dome and upgraded the facilities and budget. We also brought in Dick McPherson, who’d had college head coaching experience at Massachusetts and long NFL experience as an assistant with several teams. He opened winning 6 of his first 23 games and we wondered why we’d ever hired him, (the less experienced Frank Maloney had been 12-11 in his last 23 games). But then we rallied to go 6-5, 6-5, 7-5 but then fell to 5-6 with an 0-4 start in 1986. The “Sack Mac Pack” was in its glory.” But then came Mac’s breakthrough year, 1987, when we went from 5-6 to 11-0.
From 1987-2001 we were the 10th winningest school in major college football. Only four schools had a winning season in every one of those years: Michigan, Nebraska, Florida State and Syracuse. Pretty good company. But this didn’t last, either. All that success created an atmosphere of complacency that allowed the program to slip, (I’m not going to start another argument about the specific reasons), that was summed up when the Chancellor told complaining fans “Get a life”.
There was rejoicing when Greg Robinson, another coach with long experience in both college and the pros and an association with successful programs was brought in. He got off to a worse start than Coach Mac, going 1-10 in his first season. But he was never able to turn it around and was fired after the worse four season run in SU history at 10-37.
Then we brought in an alum, Doug Marrone who was also a long time NFL assistant who had played a role in building the New Orleans Saints into a powerhouse. Doug made a lot of speeches, calling this his “dream job” and worked hard to improve the team. They only improved from 3-9 to 4-8 in his first year but it was a more competitive team, going from being outscored by 175 points to being out-scored by only 81 points. Then, in Doug’s second year we went 8-5 and won the first Pinstripe Bowl. We got off to a 5-2 start in 2011 and needed one more win for another bowl birth, (in the watered down bowl system we’ve got these days0. But the 5-2 record had been a very shaky 5-2 with two overtime wins, and close wins over 1AA Rhode Island and a Tulane team that had been blown out by the likes of Army and UTEP. Then came a dreadful “ball rolls back down the hill” five game losing streak that left us with a 5-7 record.
There were rumors of dissent and even fights behind the scenes and the enthusiasm seemed to have drained out of Marrone whose public statements after that were mechanically repetitive. Still he managed to lead the team back to the Pinstripe Bowl the next year and we again won it. Then he left town without a word to the fans to take the job as the head coach in Buffalo and took most of his staff with him.
We’d fired Paul Pasqualoni after a bowl game and found out what a bad idea that is: there’s not a lot of good choices for putting together a staff and then recruiting at that late date. You wind up with people doing a job they’ve never done before, (or been fired from), and you find out that some of them have been promoted to their level of incompetence and the others were fired for a reason. Not we were in the same situation again, but not by our own choosing. In an effort to keep the staff together, Dr. Daryl Goss, our AD, promoted defensive coordinator Scott Shafer to head coach. He assembled a staff mostly of people he had worked with before, including the new DC, Chuck Bullough. He also brought George McDonald, a guy with a reputation as a master recruiter, to be offensive coordinator, a job he’d never done before.
The result was a very bumpy ride. We won games 54-0 and 52-17 and lost them 0-56 and 3-59. We got clobbered by a Northwestern team that looked like they belonged in the top ten at the time but wound up 5-7. We were also overmatched against a Clemson team that looked like a national championship contender and was wearing more Orange than we were in our own place. I spent the game next to a Clemson fan and didn’t know whether to say “Go Orange! Or “Go Blue!”
The most discouraging game was the Georgia Tech game. We were coming off two straight wins and Tech had lost three straight. They run the triple option and Shafer and Bullough put us in a 3-4 defense to combat it when the 4-3 was out normal defense. And we had one of the three starting linebackers out. We didn’t give up long runs but we gave up 394 yards rushing anyway, most of it in 5 yard chunks. I keep track of which team “wins” each ply. You win first down if you can get a third of the way to another first down. You win second down if you can get half the distance to a first down. Georgia Tech won 49 of 62 first and second down plays on offense. They scored on runs of 4, 6, 3, 1, 3, 50 and 1 yard. Inevitably, they dropped back to pass and we gave up the big one, a 46 yard touchdown. Meanwhile the offense kept shooting itself in the foot with turnovers and penalties and we never did dent the end zone.
But the team was able to shake off these terrible defeats and come back to win enough games to get into a minor bowl again, the Texas bowl against another mediocre team, Minnesota. The game proved to be a microcosm of the season as we were behind most of the way and fought back to win in the final minutes to finish with a winning record at 7-6.
The staff may have been learning on the job but they did a fine job on the recruiting trail, securing a full class of commitments at the earliest date ever. They are already working toward the 2016 class. It’s a sign the program is on the rise. The reason we joined the ACC is because it meant more money and we’re using that to upgrade the facilities, (again). The future looks bright. People are anticipating the next “breakthrough season” when we again thrust Syracuse, NY into the football limelight.
But history teaches us that it takes 7-8 years to build the football program at a place like Syracuse, (a mid-size private school in an unglamorous location and in a state that doesn’t emphasize high school football). And in this case, virtually the entire coaching staff left four years into the rebuilding plan. One poster last year, pressing his point that we shouldn’t be too patient with a guy who doesn’t seem to be getting the job done, said that past history doesn’t matter because “this is a new era”. I told him a new era doesn’t matter unless it’s an era in which rebuilding the program is going to easier.
And I don’t think it is. Schools like Connecticut, Rutgers, Temple and Cincinnati have moved up into the big time in areas we used to recruit. (Ben Schwartzwalder never had a significant player who wasn’t from New York or an adjacent state.) We’re having to recruit the entire eastern half of the country and even beyond that, (our 2014 roster has players from Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, California, Washington and even one from London and I don’t mean the one in Ontario). The competition for those players is fierce and tons of money has to be spent to create facilities that will impress them when- and if- they visit here.
We have a lot more money but it’s the same money everybody else on our level gets. Its purpose is to build a foundation for success, not an extra story on the top of the house. We are held back by an apathetic fan base that no longer fills the Dome, one of the smallest stadiums at our level, even for the games against the best teams. Now that the “Big Five” conferences are partially breaking away from the NCAA, (will it become permanent?), so they can make their own rules and players are winning lawsuits to get a bigger piece of the pie, the deep end of the pool will get even deeper. Are we going to be able to compete?
Then there’s our conference. We were in a great situation in the Big East, although we never took full advantage of it. We were in a BCS conference but it was the weakest of them. And it had no conference title game. With the worship of the undefeated record that dominates the rankings, if we could run the table in a year when no more than one other BCS conference team did it, we could play for the national championship. Virginia Tech did in 1999 and did so credibly. West Virginia would have played Ohio State for the title in 2007 if they could only have beaten Pitt in their own back yard. Cincinnati would have played for the title in 2009 if Texas didn’t get a second chance at a game winning field goal in the Big 12 title game. Our teams of the 90’s, especially in the McNabb era, had a chance to do that but always came up a bit short.
Now we are in a conference division with a locked and loaded perennial national power, Florida State and another strong program in Clemson. I think Louisville has the potential to at least be at Clemson’s level. They will certainly be better than the school they replaced, Maryland. Several of the teams we played in the conference last year had suffered significant injuries to their offensive teams and we were able to beat NC State 24-10, Wake Forest 13-0 and Maryland 20-3. That saved us from what was going to be a disastrous season. We can’t depend on such good fortune this year. And there’s another division in this conference, one with Miami. You know they’ll come back just like Florida State did. They are in the right place and have the right history. If we ever found a way to win our division, they’d likely be waiting for us. I think this places a glass ceiling on what can accomplish that wasn’t there before. We may have another “breakthrough year” but it’s more likely to be 11-2 than 11-0.
And It’s not going to be this year. Not yet.
