SWC75
Bored Historian
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Each year I do an SU football and later basketball preview. I send it to my friends, (some of whom don't live in this area and thus aren't up on all the details) and post it to this board. It's very long, (I crammed in everything I could find out and everything I thought about), so i'm breaking it up into several posts.
BACK TO THE PAST
Our beloved Coach McPherson has been laid into his grave. We remember him for his great personality but also for his great achievements. He took over a moribund program and built it into one that had national respect. We all want that respect back again and are looking to Dino Babers to do what Mac did. We want this era’s Nebraska game, Penn State game and West Virginia game. We want to expect a winning season every year, which now means we’d go to a bowl game every year. Maybe we can make a run at the Divisional title. If we ever win it, we’ll be the favorite to win the conference and a contender to join the national championship playoff! We did it before so we can do it again. Coach Mac is proof of that. So is Ben Schwartzwalder.
But I have other memories of the past. I grew up in the Schwartzwalder Era. We had great players and strong teams seemingly every year. We once beat Penn State four years in row. But when Floyd Little graduated, he made a comment that Syracuse would be having losing seasons in a few years. My older brother reassured me that we still had Larry Csonka so we would be OK. We had Larry for one more year and went 8-2, which would be our best record for 20 years. We got off to a 3-1 start the next year and went out to play California on the west coast. We were ranked #10. They were ranked #11 and we’d beaten them in Archbold Stadium the year before. That afternoon was an orange-colored nightmare. We had 9 turnovers, the last an interception returned for a touchdown that produced a 0-43 score and a field storming so over-whelming that the referees and coaches agreed to end the game seven minutes early.
Good teams didn’t lose by scores like that in those days. (Actually they don’t these days, either- normally.) It shook the program and punched a hole in our reputation. What happened subsequently was impacted much more by other, long-term factors but that was the day everything seemed to change. Syracuse just didn’t seem to be SYRACUSE after that. We wound up a rather hollow 6-4. In 1969 we lost to a Kansas team that lost to everyone else but still had a 3-1 record when Penn State came to town with the nation’s longest winning streak. We took a 14-0 lead and might have made it 21-0 at halftime except for a goal line stand. Then we fumbled away the lead in the fourth quarter and lost on a two point conversion, 14-15, the Nittany Lions getting a reprieve by a penalty after a failed first attempt. We tumbled to 5-5.
Then came the black boycott, one of a series of protests across the country that seemed to focus on football coaches as symbols of oppression. SU, which had pioneered the use of black players and had black quarterbacks as far back as the 1930’s (Wilmeth Sidat-Singh) and the 1940’s (Bernie Custis), was tagged as having a racial problem. (Alabama didn’t have a racial problem because they had only one race.) We lost the black players we had and would now have a hard time recruiting any more. We got blown out of our first three games. But then the white players on the team came together and produced a 5 game winning streak, including a shocking 24-7 win at Penn State. There was talk of a bowl game but a loss to West Virginia killed that. At least the season ended on a positive note with a 56-16 annihilation of Miami that greatly resembled the 1998 game.
I matriculated at SU in 1971. The black players, (some of them) were back and it was thought we’d have our best team in years combining them with the white players who had played so well the previous year. It didn’t work. The first game I saw as a student was against Wisconsin. We fell behind but scored an apparent winning touchdown on the last play only to have the extra point blocked and tie a game for the first time in 14 years. That failure would also seem symbolic of what was happening to the program. In the 5th game that year we got crushed by Penn State 0-31 in Archbold and it seemed obvious we were no longer on their level. (The game was 0-24 at halftime). It was the first of 16 consecutive losses. That team wound up 5-5-1. They next year we were 5-6, the first losing record since Ben’s first year in 1949. But even that record was deceiving: Our 1972 team got out-scored 141-229, losing the last two games 0-37 to Boston College and 12-43 to West Virginia, teams we used to be superior to and still thought we were on the same level as. Our second opponent that year was Temple, who had been a small college team in the 60’s. The Daily Orange complained that it was embarrassing for Syracuse to play such a team “if we are to retain our reputation as a national power”. It hadn’t sunk in yet that we’d long lost that reputation.
But is sure sunk in with the opener the next year. We were playing another school thought to be beneath us: Bowling Green, coached by Don Nehlen, who had put his name in the sweepstakes to replace Ben Schwartzwalder who was being forced into retirement at age 65, and been turned down. In the fourth quarter the score was 6-41. We were driving to try to get a score to make it a little closer. A pass was intercepted and a Falcon ran about 90 yards for a score. I got up and left, only find out later that the pick six had been negated by a penalty and we did score to make it 13-41. I got on a bus to go home for the weekend and people asked me what the score was. I said “48-6”. They said they guessed SU was looking pretty good this year. I had to explain we had the 6. Some people were shocked. Others started laughing.
We lost our first 8 games. There was a column in the paper ranking the 10 worst teams in the country. We made #1 over Army and Florida State, (yes, Florida State) who were also winless, “because of the money they spend on the sport up there”. We finally beat Holy Cross, 5-3. Yes, 5-3. This was team who had taken over from Colgate as our patsy. We’d won games from them 32-6, 28-6, 41-7, 47-0 and 63-21 in recent years. The kind-hearted Holy Cross coach said, “Syracuse is still Syracuse”. No, we weren’t.
I had to try to come to terms with what had happened to my heroes. After a lot of reading and asking, I came up with a list of reasons why the program had declined. The black boycott had hurt, for sure. There had been a committee set up by a group of SU professors to examine the question of whether we should continue to have a football program. Their concern was the cost effectiveness of the program. That sent a message to recruits that the program might be on the verge of being dropped. Then there was Archbold Stadium, as much of a wonder in its day as the Carrier Dome was when it was built. By the 70’s it resembled a rock quarry. It was falling apart and people in some spots sat right on the cold concrete. The fire department wanted to condemn the place and was persuaded to condemn the venue one section at a time. By my time there, more than half the place had been roped off. The listed capacity was 41,000 but the real capacity was about 19,000. It should have been replaced in the wake of the national championship but all the school could come up with was Manley Field House, which was our original indoor practice facility for the football team. The politicians argued about where to get the money for a new stadium and where to put it for two decades until Governor Hugh Carey finally pushed the deal through in the late 70’s. Other facilities were equally ancient or didn’t exist at all. We didn’t have a weight room. Then they cleared out an office and put some barbells in it and so we had a ‘weight room’. People who complain about facilities now don’t know what bad facilities are.
But the biggest changes were in the college game itself. Two platoon football came in in the mid 60’s. It more than doubled the recruiting requirements to have a top team. You had to have separate offensive and defensive units and back-ups for each plus various specialists. In the modern game, an average of 52 players play for one team. You have to have depth and completion for those spots so teams can have 85 scholarship players and walk-ons that bring the full roster to over 100. Ben used to have traveling squads of less than 40 players. He never had a key player that wasn’t from New York State or an adjacent state. Every recruit was aware of the program and many were already fans. Old facilities make less of a difference to such players than they do to imports from places like Florida and Texas. You’ve got to dazzle those guys and we didn’t dazzle back in the 70’s.
In general private schools didn’t dazzle because they tended to have less money to spend on sports, didn’t have the state legislature to build facilities for them, didn’t have identification with an entire state but did have higher tuition and academic requirements. That made it difficult to recruit good players in the numbers that were now necessary to have good teams. We weren’t alone. Private schools like Duke, Georgia Tech, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Tulane, Rice, Texas Christian, Southern Methodist, Baylor and Stanford had had many moments of glory in college football history. But now they became also-rans and patsies. So did some state schools from smaller or poorer states: Mississippi, Kansas, Iowa, Oregon and Oregon State and others. Some of them later came back at great expense.
The big state schools not only had the biggest and best facilities but also had unlimited scholarships to give out. Eventually the NCAA passed a limit of 120 scholarships, which was progressively paired down to the current 85. Before that the big schools could recruit not only the players they wanted but the players their traditional rivals wanted, as well. All the kids had visions of starting for Penn State or Ohio State or other powerhouses, only to find out they were 6th string and essentially being housed so they couldn’t compete against the big powerhouse.
The bottom line was that Syracuse couldn’t be what it once was. We really had the profile of a basketball school, many of which once played big time football but gave up on the sport for one that required much less investment to make your school big-time. We were trying to carry on in a new situation where past achievements were no longer possible. I could remember the days when we had some of the greatest players who ever played the game playing in those orange helmets. I could read about the days we went to major bowls and that one year when we were national champions with Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan, Notre Dame, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama and Southern California all looking up at us. But those days were never coming back. The best we could do was try to tread water, maybe have a winning record sometimes and maybe even go to a minor bowl occasionally. But we could never compete with those powerhouses. We could never again be what they were.
To my delight, I turned out to be wrong. But it took a while. Frank Maloney, a linebacker coach for Michigan got Schwartzwalder’s job and kept the program alive during a critical period where it was a real possibility we might lose it. He recruited Bill Hurley, Art Monk, Joe Morris, Craig Wolfley, Jimmy Collins and others to provide us with enough thrills and three winning seasons. Then the politicians, led by Governor Carey, finally got the Dome built. Facilities were improved, (and, in some cases, created). Maloney had a DUI and his contract was not renewed. In came Dick MacPherson, a coach with a much better resume: he’d been a successful head coach at UMASS and an assistant in the pros with the Broncos and Browns. But it took him two years to scratch out his first winning record. Then after three straight and a bowl game, (which were not automatic if you won six games in those days), we lost four close, frustrating games to open the 1986 season, the Sac Mac Pack was born. We won a game and then got steamrolled at national champion Penn State 3-42.
But the team managed to turn that season around with 4 wins in the last five games and, finally, in Mac’s 7th year, we broke through. Maloney and MacPherson had put all their best players on defense to start out so we could be competitive, (as a third Coach M- Marrone- would later do). Then they tried to build up the offense to catch up with the defense. Frank never got them going together but Dick did and with a consistent game to game performance and miracle finish, we went 11-0. And that set us up for a 15 year run of winning seasons from 1987-2001. The only other schools to have winning records in each of those season s were Michigan, Nebraska and Florida State. Pretty good company. If we could have won one of those close losses in 1986, it would have been a streak of 19 straight winning seasons which included wins over Nebraska, Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Texas, LSU, Georgia, Florida and Miami. We also bobbled away chances to beat Oklahoma and Florida State. Actually that last one came in 2004. But the point is, it was long era in which we proved we could compete with anybody. Not bad for a basketball school.
But it didn’t last. It should have. We were in a great situation. We were in a BCS conference but the weakest of them. There was no championship game. With the worship of undefeated records in college ball, all a Big East team had to do was run the table and they had a good shot at playing for a national title. Virginia Tech did it in 1999 and lost but played credibly. Actually, even though the Big East didn’t formally exist as a football conference, West Virginia did the same back in ’88. We might have done it in ’87 but two national powers, (Miami and Oklahoma) did the same and we wound up playing Auburn in the Sugar Bowl. The Mountaineers almost got another shot at it in 2007 except they had a “Murphy’s Law game at home vs. Pitt where everybody got hurt and they lost. If they’d won that game they would have played Ohio State, (not LSU) for the title and I think a fully healthy West Virginia team would have won that game. In 2009 Cincinnati would have played Alabama for the title if Texas didn’t get a second chance at a game winning field goal vs. Nebraska in the Big 12 title game. I think the Bearcats would have been crushed, (as they were by Florida in the Sugar Bowl), but Brian Kelly might have stuck with them to coach that game and have a shot at a national title and that might have helped. The point is: they would have played in that game. So could we if we could have put together another season like ’87 when no more than one other team went undefeated. But we never did.
Even putting aside thought of a national tile, the Big East was an easy route to a major bowl game. And major bowl games could have helped us recruit well enough for us to keep on having winning seasons. But the program declined at exactly the wrong time. We’d missed some opportunities for great seasons in the 90’s. We always seemed to lose a game to somebody we should have beaten or to get blown out by somebody we should have competed with. Then we didn’t get Michael Vick and other recruits and the program started out what began as a long, slow decline which accelerated when Coach Pasqualoni was fired and replaced by the incompetent Greg Robinson. Doug Marrone pulled us out of the muck, got us back on the road and drove off. Scott Shafer got off to a promising start with our third winning record and bowl win in four years but it was deceiving: blow-out losses to Northwestern, Clemson, Georgia tech and Florida State were revealing. The next two years we went 7-17. Coach Shafer was a fine defensive coach but appeared to be over his head as a head coach. He seemed to prefer having his defense out there. His favorite offensive play appeared to be a punt. And when asked why he made the game decisions he did, he seemed sometimes not to have an explanation that made sense.
Enter Dino Babers. I heartily approved of his hiring and so did everybody else. I still do. I think this is the hardest level of football to coach at. In high school, it’s mostly about teaching and setting up youth programs. In Division III it’s about teaching and developing a reputation as a winner so genuine student-athletes who wish to continue playing football are more likely to consider your school than a rival’s. In Division II, FCS and the non- Power Five sector of FBS it’s about looking for under-the radar recruits and coaching ‘em up so you can beat other schools on your level. At the powerhouses who give the Power 5 their name you are on the short list of any recruits you contact as soon as the phone rings. You can beat 80% of your opponents just because they can’t match your talent or depth. In the NFL, others scout and obtain the players and those players are elite athletes and adult professionals so the coach’s job is all about game planning and in-game decision making. But in a Power 5 conference, if you are not one of the powerhouses you are really swimming upstream. You are typically a program that has had good eras in the past and the fans continue to believe that that level of play is where you properly belong. But your situation may have changed and past glory may be very hard to obtain. The non-powerhouse teams scramble to out-compete the rest and hope to be able to compete with or, on rare occasions upset one of the powerhouses if everything aligns to make that possible. But that is their limit.
That’s where we are now and Coach Babers certainly has his job cut out for him. We’ve tried giving the job to career assistants with mixed results. Coaches used to being with powerhouse or pro teams may not be ideal for a school like Syracuse. I think we are better off with a coach who has coached at the FCS and non-Power Five level with success and knows how to get those under-the-radar recruits and how to get the best out of them. It’s helpful if he has a unique style of play he has confidence in and can bring members of his staff at his previous school to ease the transition rather than having to grab whoever happens to be out of a job off the scrap heap. And, in this case, Coach Baber’s style of play is the sort of thing we should have been doing from the time the Carrier Dome was built. It’s the perfect venue for a high-powered, spread-the-field sort of passing attack. And we finally have one. I like the fact that he’s already had success in FCS and the MAC, so he’s used to finding the recruiting gems and coaching them up and re-inflating programs that were down. . He’s not an untried assistant. And the success of Baylor’s program, from whence he came, is encouraging, (even if some of the off the field activities are not). They’d been down for years and became a national power, really for the first time. If we could play- and win- like them the Dome would be full for every game.
Babers is a good football coach and, given time, I believe he will return the program to respectability. But I think that might be the limit. I find myself back in 70’s mode. Our circumstances have changed in such a way that the glory and excitement of the past seems to me to be basically unobtainable.
We are a northeastern team. Our natural rivals are other northeastern teams. We recruit the same areas and have the same challenges. With Penn State in the Big Ten, (where there are a lot of other state university powerhouses), our ideal football conference would be Syracuse, Boston College, Army, Navy, Connecticut, Rutgers, Temple, Pittsburgh and West Virginia. That’s a 9 team conference, the perfect size, (everybody plays each other once in football and twice in basketball with an equal number of home and road games. Those schools have been competing for years on relatively equal terms. It would be a decent conference in both football and basketball. The schedule would be balanced with good, bad and mediocre teams. If we were good, we’d have good record. if we were bad, we’d have a bad record. if we were mediocre, we’d have a mediocre record. That’s as it should be. And the conference would represent the northeast – the area of the country in which we live.
That’s never going to happen. We joined the ACC for two reasons- money and prestige. But the money is the same money other ACC teams get. It gives us no advantage over them. The prestige helps us if we can win the conference and have aspirations of a national championship. But it does us no good in last place, where we’ve finished in two of the last three years.
We are a guest in a southern conference, trying to create rivalries with teams we’ve rarely played. The balance of power is with the southern teams. In the 20 seasons since the BCS started, there have been 21 national champions, (I consider Southern California to be co-champions with LSU in 2003). The only northern teams to win the national title in that time were two Ohio State squads. They are perhaps the one school capable of competing with the southern powerhouses these days. In 20 years before the BCS there were 24 national champions, (due, again, to split titles) and 10 of them were northern teams from 7 different schools.
My interpretation of this is based on an old axiom of recruiters: recruit size and strength in the north because the players are indoors half the year and they will be lifting weights. Recruit speed and agility in the south because the players are outdoors 12 months a year. Northern teams used to use superior size and strength to dominate the line of scrimmage and wear down their opposition with powerful straight-ahead running games. Southern and western teams preferred to use the option to get around the defense or to pass it over their heads. On defense, they used gang-tackling to make up for the fact that their players were generally smaller. When two platoon football came in and schools began to realize how many players from other areas they would have to recruit, the found out that dazzling new facilities helped them recruit such players. And one of those facilities would be their weight room. Eventually, everybody had a fancy weight room, which meant that now everybody had big, strong players. As with the ACC money, if everybody has something, it’s not an advantage. Thus the only advantage left was to be speedy and agile and the majority of such players were in the south. Northern teams try to recruit in the south as much as they can but, unless they are like Ohio State, they are going to get the C and D listers from the south. Most of the A and B listers are going to stay home and play for their local teams, particularly the powerhouses. I remember years ago when we played Florida and Florida State, they had, respectively, 86 of 92 players and 89 of 104 players from the state of Florida. We had 21 players from New York. It’s tough to compete under those circumstances and a northern team taking on southern teams in a power conference week in and week out are facing a huge challenge. Boston College, Syracuse and Pittsburgh have really struggled trying to be ACC teams.
The alignment of the ACC has not been very helpful. They won’t go North-South – that would be equally unbalanced. They aligned the conference into “Atlantic” and “Coastal” divisions at a time when it was thought that Miami and Florida State would have the strongest programs and by putting them in separate divisions, (and having them play each other each regular season anyway) they would get an exciting rematch in the championship game. Amazingly, Miami has never played in that championship game. It’s turned out that Florida State and Clemson have been the big powers and they are stuck in the same division. They’ve now been joined by Louisville in competing for national championships in a division that challenges the SEC West for being the best in college football. It tends to make the ACC title game anti-climactic, although not necessarily easy). The last four games have been between teams ranked #1, #2, #1 and #1 nationally from the Atlantic vs. teams ranked #20, #12, #8 and #19 from the Coastal.
More importantly, from Syracuse’ perspective, having three national title contenders and a bunch of southern teams in our divisions puts us at quite a disadvantage. In this division a good Syracuse team will have a fair record at best. A mediocre Syracuse team will have a poor record and a bad Syracuse team will get pounded into the turf. Even if Babers can somehow return Syracuse to the talent level we had in under Coach Mac and Coach P, I think the very best they could do in this situation is 9-3 or maybe 10-2. There will be no 11-0 breakthrough season. Much more likely is that our ceiling will be what it was in the three winning seasons we’ve had in this decade: 8-5, 8-5, 7-6. A team that is less than our best will have records like the ones we are having now. If things go really sour, it will be worse than that. Some kind of flexible year-to-year realignment based on the previous year’s results would improve the situation. Rank the teams from 1-14 and have an “odd” division containing 1-3-5-7-9-11-13 and an “even division of 2-4-6-8-10-12-14. You play the other 6 teams in your division and two from the other division, one of which would be your choice, (and theirs), and the other would be against the team you haven’t played in the longest time. That would make sense and be a lot more fun but it doesn’t appear to be in the offing. Without it, we are likely a permanent also ran and will never see anything but a minor bowl.
This puts me back in 70’s mode, feeling that our glory years are past and occasional escapes from mediocrity are the best we can hope for. I hope again to be proven wrong.
BACK TO THE PAST
Our beloved Coach McPherson has been laid into his grave. We remember him for his great personality but also for his great achievements. He took over a moribund program and built it into one that had national respect. We all want that respect back again and are looking to Dino Babers to do what Mac did. We want this era’s Nebraska game, Penn State game and West Virginia game. We want to expect a winning season every year, which now means we’d go to a bowl game every year. Maybe we can make a run at the Divisional title. If we ever win it, we’ll be the favorite to win the conference and a contender to join the national championship playoff! We did it before so we can do it again. Coach Mac is proof of that. So is Ben Schwartzwalder.
But I have other memories of the past. I grew up in the Schwartzwalder Era. We had great players and strong teams seemingly every year. We once beat Penn State four years in row. But when Floyd Little graduated, he made a comment that Syracuse would be having losing seasons in a few years. My older brother reassured me that we still had Larry Csonka so we would be OK. We had Larry for one more year and went 8-2, which would be our best record for 20 years. We got off to a 3-1 start the next year and went out to play California on the west coast. We were ranked #10. They were ranked #11 and we’d beaten them in Archbold Stadium the year before. That afternoon was an orange-colored nightmare. We had 9 turnovers, the last an interception returned for a touchdown that produced a 0-43 score and a field storming so over-whelming that the referees and coaches agreed to end the game seven minutes early.
Good teams didn’t lose by scores like that in those days. (Actually they don’t these days, either- normally.) It shook the program and punched a hole in our reputation. What happened subsequently was impacted much more by other, long-term factors but that was the day everything seemed to change. Syracuse just didn’t seem to be SYRACUSE after that. We wound up a rather hollow 6-4. In 1969 we lost to a Kansas team that lost to everyone else but still had a 3-1 record when Penn State came to town with the nation’s longest winning streak. We took a 14-0 lead and might have made it 21-0 at halftime except for a goal line stand. Then we fumbled away the lead in the fourth quarter and lost on a two point conversion, 14-15, the Nittany Lions getting a reprieve by a penalty after a failed first attempt. We tumbled to 5-5.
Then came the black boycott, one of a series of protests across the country that seemed to focus on football coaches as symbols of oppression. SU, which had pioneered the use of black players and had black quarterbacks as far back as the 1930’s (Wilmeth Sidat-Singh) and the 1940’s (Bernie Custis), was tagged as having a racial problem. (Alabama didn’t have a racial problem because they had only one race.) We lost the black players we had and would now have a hard time recruiting any more. We got blown out of our first three games. But then the white players on the team came together and produced a 5 game winning streak, including a shocking 24-7 win at Penn State. There was talk of a bowl game but a loss to West Virginia killed that. At least the season ended on a positive note with a 56-16 annihilation of Miami that greatly resembled the 1998 game.
I matriculated at SU in 1971. The black players, (some of them) were back and it was thought we’d have our best team in years combining them with the white players who had played so well the previous year. It didn’t work. The first game I saw as a student was against Wisconsin. We fell behind but scored an apparent winning touchdown on the last play only to have the extra point blocked and tie a game for the first time in 14 years. That failure would also seem symbolic of what was happening to the program. In the 5th game that year we got crushed by Penn State 0-31 in Archbold and it seemed obvious we were no longer on their level. (The game was 0-24 at halftime). It was the first of 16 consecutive losses. That team wound up 5-5-1. They next year we were 5-6, the first losing record since Ben’s first year in 1949. But even that record was deceiving: Our 1972 team got out-scored 141-229, losing the last two games 0-37 to Boston College and 12-43 to West Virginia, teams we used to be superior to and still thought we were on the same level as. Our second opponent that year was Temple, who had been a small college team in the 60’s. The Daily Orange complained that it was embarrassing for Syracuse to play such a team “if we are to retain our reputation as a national power”. It hadn’t sunk in yet that we’d long lost that reputation.
But is sure sunk in with the opener the next year. We were playing another school thought to be beneath us: Bowling Green, coached by Don Nehlen, who had put his name in the sweepstakes to replace Ben Schwartzwalder who was being forced into retirement at age 65, and been turned down. In the fourth quarter the score was 6-41. We were driving to try to get a score to make it a little closer. A pass was intercepted and a Falcon ran about 90 yards for a score. I got up and left, only find out later that the pick six had been negated by a penalty and we did score to make it 13-41. I got on a bus to go home for the weekend and people asked me what the score was. I said “48-6”. They said they guessed SU was looking pretty good this year. I had to explain we had the 6. Some people were shocked. Others started laughing.
We lost our first 8 games. There was a column in the paper ranking the 10 worst teams in the country. We made #1 over Army and Florida State, (yes, Florida State) who were also winless, “because of the money they spend on the sport up there”. We finally beat Holy Cross, 5-3. Yes, 5-3. This was team who had taken over from Colgate as our patsy. We’d won games from them 32-6, 28-6, 41-7, 47-0 and 63-21 in recent years. The kind-hearted Holy Cross coach said, “Syracuse is still Syracuse”. No, we weren’t.
I had to try to come to terms with what had happened to my heroes. After a lot of reading and asking, I came up with a list of reasons why the program had declined. The black boycott had hurt, for sure. There had been a committee set up by a group of SU professors to examine the question of whether we should continue to have a football program. Their concern was the cost effectiveness of the program. That sent a message to recruits that the program might be on the verge of being dropped. Then there was Archbold Stadium, as much of a wonder in its day as the Carrier Dome was when it was built. By the 70’s it resembled a rock quarry. It was falling apart and people in some spots sat right on the cold concrete. The fire department wanted to condemn the place and was persuaded to condemn the venue one section at a time. By my time there, more than half the place had been roped off. The listed capacity was 41,000 but the real capacity was about 19,000. It should have been replaced in the wake of the national championship but all the school could come up with was Manley Field House, which was our original indoor practice facility for the football team. The politicians argued about where to get the money for a new stadium and where to put it for two decades until Governor Hugh Carey finally pushed the deal through in the late 70’s. Other facilities were equally ancient or didn’t exist at all. We didn’t have a weight room. Then they cleared out an office and put some barbells in it and so we had a ‘weight room’. People who complain about facilities now don’t know what bad facilities are.
But the biggest changes were in the college game itself. Two platoon football came in in the mid 60’s. It more than doubled the recruiting requirements to have a top team. You had to have separate offensive and defensive units and back-ups for each plus various specialists. In the modern game, an average of 52 players play for one team. You have to have depth and completion for those spots so teams can have 85 scholarship players and walk-ons that bring the full roster to over 100. Ben used to have traveling squads of less than 40 players. He never had a key player that wasn’t from New York State or an adjacent state. Every recruit was aware of the program and many were already fans. Old facilities make less of a difference to such players than they do to imports from places like Florida and Texas. You’ve got to dazzle those guys and we didn’t dazzle back in the 70’s.
In general private schools didn’t dazzle because they tended to have less money to spend on sports, didn’t have the state legislature to build facilities for them, didn’t have identification with an entire state but did have higher tuition and academic requirements. That made it difficult to recruit good players in the numbers that were now necessary to have good teams. We weren’t alone. Private schools like Duke, Georgia Tech, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Tulane, Rice, Texas Christian, Southern Methodist, Baylor and Stanford had had many moments of glory in college football history. But now they became also-rans and patsies. So did some state schools from smaller or poorer states: Mississippi, Kansas, Iowa, Oregon and Oregon State and others. Some of them later came back at great expense.
The big state schools not only had the biggest and best facilities but also had unlimited scholarships to give out. Eventually the NCAA passed a limit of 120 scholarships, which was progressively paired down to the current 85. Before that the big schools could recruit not only the players they wanted but the players their traditional rivals wanted, as well. All the kids had visions of starting for Penn State or Ohio State or other powerhouses, only to find out they were 6th string and essentially being housed so they couldn’t compete against the big powerhouse.
The bottom line was that Syracuse couldn’t be what it once was. We really had the profile of a basketball school, many of which once played big time football but gave up on the sport for one that required much less investment to make your school big-time. We were trying to carry on in a new situation where past achievements were no longer possible. I could remember the days when we had some of the greatest players who ever played the game playing in those orange helmets. I could read about the days we went to major bowls and that one year when we were national champions with Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan, Notre Dame, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama and Southern California all looking up at us. But those days were never coming back. The best we could do was try to tread water, maybe have a winning record sometimes and maybe even go to a minor bowl occasionally. But we could never compete with those powerhouses. We could never again be what they were.
To my delight, I turned out to be wrong. But it took a while. Frank Maloney, a linebacker coach for Michigan got Schwartzwalder’s job and kept the program alive during a critical period where it was a real possibility we might lose it. He recruited Bill Hurley, Art Monk, Joe Morris, Craig Wolfley, Jimmy Collins and others to provide us with enough thrills and three winning seasons. Then the politicians, led by Governor Carey, finally got the Dome built. Facilities were improved, (and, in some cases, created). Maloney had a DUI and his contract was not renewed. In came Dick MacPherson, a coach with a much better resume: he’d been a successful head coach at UMASS and an assistant in the pros with the Broncos and Browns. But it took him two years to scratch out his first winning record. Then after three straight and a bowl game, (which were not automatic if you won six games in those days), we lost four close, frustrating games to open the 1986 season, the Sac Mac Pack was born. We won a game and then got steamrolled at national champion Penn State 3-42.
But the team managed to turn that season around with 4 wins in the last five games and, finally, in Mac’s 7th year, we broke through. Maloney and MacPherson had put all their best players on defense to start out so we could be competitive, (as a third Coach M- Marrone- would later do). Then they tried to build up the offense to catch up with the defense. Frank never got them going together but Dick did and with a consistent game to game performance and miracle finish, we went 11-0. And that set us up for a 15 year run of winning seasons from 1987-2001. The only other schools to have winning records in each of those season s were Michigan, Nebraska and Florida State. Pretty good company. If we could have won one of those close losses in 1986, it would have been a streak of 19 straight winning seasons which included wins over Nebraska, Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Texas, LSU, Georgia, Florida and Miami. We also bobbled away chances to beat Oklahoma and Florida State. Actually that last one came in 2004. But the point is, it was long era in which we proved we could compete with anybody. Not bad for a basketball school.
But it didn’t last. It should have. We were in a great situation. We were in a BCS conference but the weakest of them. There was no championship game. With the worship of undefeated records in college ball, all a Big East team had to do was run the table and they had a good shot at playing for a national title. Virginia Tech did it in 1999 and lost but played credibly. Actually, even though the Big East didn’t formally exist as a football conference, West Virginia did the same back in ’88. We might have done it in ’87 but two national powers, (Miami and Oklahoma) did the same and we wound up playing Auburn in the Sugar Bowl. The Mountaineers almost got another shot at it in 2007 except they had a “Murphy’s Law game at home vs. Pitt where everybody got hurt and they lost. If they’d won that game they would have played Ohio State, (not LSU) for the title and I think a fully healthy West Virginia team would have won that game. In 2009 Cincinnati would have played Alabama for the title if Texas didn’t get a second chance at a game winning field goal vs. Nebraska in the Big 12 title game. I think the Bearcats would have been crushed, (as they were by Florida in the Sugar Bowl), but Brian Kelly might have stuck with them to coach that game and have a shot at a national title and that might have helped. The point is: they would have played in that game. So could we if we could have put together another season like ’87 when no more than one other team went undefeated. But we never did.
Even putting aside thought of a national tile, the Big East was an easy route to a major bowl game. And major bowl games could have helped us recruit well enough for us to keep on having winning seasons. But the program declined at exactly the wrong time. We’d missed some opportunities for great seasons in the 90’s. We always seemed to lose a game to somebody we should have beaten or to get blown out by somebody we should have competed with. Then we didn’t get Michael Vick and other recruits and the program started out what began as a long, slow decline which accelerated when Coach Pasqualoni was fired and replaced by the incompetent Greg Robinson. Doug Marrone pulled us out of the muck, got us back on the road and drove off. Scott Shafer got off to a promising start with our third winning record and bowl win in four years but it was deceiving: blow-out losses to Northwestern, Clemson, Georgia tech and Florida State were revealing. The next two years we went 7-17. Coach Shafer was a fine defensive coach but appeared to be over his head as a head coach. He seemed to prefer having his defense out there. His favorite offensive play appeared to be a punt. And when asked why he made the game decisions he did, he seemed sometimes not to have an explanation that made sense.
Enter Dino Babers. I heartily approved of his hiring and so did everybody else. I still do. I think this is the hardest level of football to coach at. In high school, it’s mostly about teaching and setting up youth programs. In Division III it’s about teaching and developing a reputation as a winner so genuine student-athletes who wish to continue playing football are more likely to consider your school than a rival’s. In Division II, FCS and the non- Power Five sector of FBS it’s about looking for under-the radar recruits and coaching ‘em up so you can beat other schools on your level. At the powerhouses who give the Power 5 their name you are on the short list of any recruits you contact as soon as the phone rings. You can beat 80% of your opponents just because they can’t match your talent or depth. In the NFL, others scout and obtain the players and those players are elite athletes and adult professionals so the coach’s job is all about game planning and in-game decision making. But in a Power 5 conference, if you are not one of the powerhouses you are really swimming upstream. You are typically a program that has had good eras in the past and the fans continue to believe that that level of play is where you properly belong. But your situation may have changed and past glory may be very hard to obtain. The non-powerhouse teams scramble to out-compete the rest and hope to be able to compete with or, on rare occasions upset one of the powerhouses if everything aligns to make that possible. But that is their limit.
That’s where we are now and Coach Babers certainly has his job cut out for him. We’ve tried giving the job to career assistants with mixed results. Coaches used to being with powerhouse or pro teams may not be ideal for a school like Syracuse. I think we are better off with a coach who has coached at the FCS and non-Power Five level with success and knows how to get those under-the-radar recruits and how to get the best out of them. It’s helpful if he has a unique style of play he has confidence in and can bring members of his staff at his previous school to ease the transition rather than having to grab whoever happens to be out of a job off the scrap heap. And, in this case, Coach Baber’s style of play is the sort of thing we should have been doing from the time the Carrier Dome was built. It’s the perfect venue for a high-powered, spread-the-field sort of passing attack. And we finally have one. I like the fact that he’s already had success in FCS and the MAC, so he’s used to finding the recruiting gems and coaching them up and re-inflating programs that were down. . He’s not an untried assistant. And the success of Baylor’s program, from whence he came, is encouraging, (even if some of the off the field activities are not). They’d been down for years and became a national power, really for the first time. If we could play- and win- like them the Dome would be full for every game.
Babers is a good football coach and, given time, I believe he will return the program to respectability. But I think that might be the limit. I find myself back in 70’s mode. Our circumstances have changed in such a way that the glory and excitement of the past seems to me to be basically unobtainable.
We are a northeastern team. Our natural rivals are other northeastern teams. We recruit the same areas and have the same challenges. With Penn State in the Big Ten, (where there are a lot of other state university powerhouses), our ideal football conference would be Syracuse, Boston College, Army, Navy, Connecticut, Rutgers, Temple, Pittsburgh and West Virginia. That’s a 9 team conference, the perfect size, (everybody plays each other once in football and twice in basketball with an equal number of home and road games. Those schools have been competing for years on relatively equal terms. It would be a decent conference in both football and basketball. The schedule would be balanced with good, bad and mediocre teams. If we were good, we’d have good record. if we were bad, we’d have a bad record. if we were mediocre, we’d have a mediocre record. That’s as it should be. And the conference would represent the northeast – the area of the country in which we live.
That’s never going to happen. We joined the ACC for two reasons- money and prestige. But the money is the same money other ACC teams get. It gives us no advantage over them. The prestige helps us if we can win the conference and have aspirations of a national championship. But it does us no good in last place, where we’ve finished in two of the last three years.
We are a guest in a southern conference, trying to create rivalries with teams we’ve rarely played. The balance of power is with the southern teams. In the 20 seasons since the BCS started, there have been 21 national champions, (I consider Southern California to be co-champions with LSU in 2003). The only northern teams to win the national title in that time were two Ohio State squads. They are perhaps the one school capable of competing with the southern powerhouses these days. In 20 years before the BCS there were 24 national champions, (due, again, to split titles) and 10 of them were northern teams from 7 different schools.
My interpretation of this is based on an old axiom of recruiters: recruit size and strength in the north because the players are indoors half the year and they will be lifting weights. Recruit speed and agility in the south because the players are outdoors 12 months a year. Northern teams used to use superior size and strength to dominate the line of scrimmage and wear down their opposition with powerful straight-ahead running games. Southern and western teams preferred to use the option to get around the defense or to pass it over their heads. On defense, they used gang-tackling to make up for the fact that their players were generally smaller. When two platoon football came in and schools began to realize how many players from other areas they would have to recruit, the found out that dazzling new facilities helped them recruit such players. And one of those facilities would be their weight room. Eventually, everybody had a fancy weight room, which meant that now everybody had big, strong players. As with the ACC money, if everybody has something, it’s not an advantage. Thus the only advantage left was to be speedy and agile and the majority of such players were in the south. Northern teams try to recruit in the south as much as they can but, unless they are like Ohio State, they are going to get the C and D listers from the south. Most of the A and B listers are going to stay home and play for their local teams, particularly the powerhouses. I remember years ago when we played Florida and Florida State, they had, respectively, 86 of 92 players and 89 of 104 players from the state of Florida. We had 21 players from New York. It’s tough to compete under those circumstances and a northern team taking on southern teams in a power conference week in and week out are facing a huge challenge. Boston College, Syracuse and Pittsburgh have really struggled trying to be ACC teams.
The alignment of the ACC has not been very helpful. They won’t go North-South – that would be equally unbalanced. They aligned the conference into “Atlantic” and “Coastal” divisions at a time when it was thought that Miami and Florida State would have the strongest programs and by putting them in separate divisions, (and having them play each other each regular season anyway) they would get an exciting rematch in the championship game. Amazingly, Miami has never played in that championship game. It’s turned out that Florida State and Clemson have been the big powers and they are stuck in the same division. They’ve now been joined by Louisville in competing for national championships in a division that challenges the SEC West for being the best in college football. It tends to make the ACC title game anti-climactic, although not necessarily easy). The last four games have been between teams ranked #1, #2, #1 and #1 nationally from the Atlantic vs. teams ranked #20, #12, #8 and #19 from the Coastal.
More importantly, from Syracuse’ perspective, having three national title contenders and a bunch of southern teams in our divisions puts us at quite a disadvantage. In this division a good Syracuse team will have a fair record at best. A mediocre Syracuse team will have a poor record and a bad Syracuse team will get pounded into the turf. Even if Babers can somehow return Syracuse to the talent level we had in under Coach Mac and Coach P, I think the very best they could do in this situation is 9-3 or maybe 10-2. There will be no 11-0 breakthrough season. Much more likely is that our ceiling will be what it was in the three winning seasons we’ve had in this decade: 8-5, 8-5, 7-6. A team that is less than our best will have records like the ones we are having now. If things go really sour, it will be worse than that. Some kind of flexible year-to-year realignment based on the previous year’s results would improve the situation. Rank the teams from 1-14 and have an “odd” division containing 1-3-5-7-9-11-13 and an “even division of 2-4-6-8-10-12-14. You play the other 6 teams in your division and two from the other division, one of which would be your choice, (and theirs), and the other would be against the team you haven’t played in the longest time. That would make sense and be a lot more fun but it doesn’t appear to be in the offing. Without it, we are likely a permanent also ran and will never see anything but a minor bowl.
This puts me back in 70’s mode, feeling that our glory years are past and occasional escapes from mediocrity are the best we can hope for. I hope again to be proven wrong.
