SWC75
Bored Historian
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2011
- Messages
- 32,516
- Like
- 62,713
(I'll be posting one part per day.)
The Situation
I heard a couple of guys on a local radio show looking over the Syracuse University football schedule, trying to decide which games were likely wins, which games were likely losses and which were the toss-ups. That’s an impossible task. Who could have guess that we would go from 10-3 in 2018 to 5-7 the next year and 1-10 last year? Who can guess what we will do this year – or what other teams will do? The only thing clear is what must we do this year and the only real question is: do we have a team capable of doing it?
We have the worst record in ACC football since we joined it. We won a minor bowl game the first season, then had three losing records in a row, then had an amazingly good and nearly historically great season followed by a very disappointing follow up and a total disaster. College football fans, journalists and, most importantly, recruits, look at us as bottom-feeders. One pre-season rag described our football program as a “mess”. There are reports, not locally but nationally, that Dino Babers is “on the hot seat”. These things can become self-fulfilling prophecies. Why would recruits want to come here if we are known for having lousy teams and if the coaching staff may be on their way out? It’s not too late to turn things around and convince people that 2018 is the kind of program we can be but it’s getting late. Another losing season and the situation will no longer be retrievable. Somebody said that if we could jump from 1-10 to, say 4-8, that would be a noticeable improvement. It would be an improvement, but it wouldn’t be noticed. We all love and respect Dino Babers but he’s not going to survive 5 losing seasons in a 6-year tenure. He might not be fired immediately but it will be inevitable because he won’t be able to recruit well enough to get out of this. We need a winning season and a bowl game. If we get in at 6-6, we’d better win it. Anything less and a program that has done too much starting over again in recent years will be doing it once again.
I think we have a team that could have the kind of season we need. That’s not a prediction. I would have said the same of the 2019 and 2020 teams before the season and all the things that went wrong. But as I look at the roster I do think that we have enough talented players in each sector of the team to be good if things go well. And I think this team will have several advantages over last year’s team.
The first is that we simply aren’t a 1-10 program. We might be a 5-7 program as in 2019. We are very unlikely to go 10-3 as in 2018. But we aren’t going 1-10 again, It’s called “regression to the mean” or in this case maybe accession to the mean. Also, the players and coaches have to have been disgusted with what happened last year. They will be motivated to prove that that was a fluke and want to go on a revenge tour against the teams that beat us. It will take more than a desire to do that to make it happen but that desire will be a factor.
The second is depth, always a problem for a non-powerhouse program in a power conference. The NCAA granted everyone an extra year of eligibility due to Covid and we have several players who took advantage of it in key positions. And the silver lining to a wave of injuries such as we had last year is that we will have a lot of players who have seen game action the next year: the injured players, now healthy and the guys who played in their place. This will allow us to alternate players better and avoid fatigue and injuries and to better replace those who get injured this year. Other teams will have increased depth, too but the important jump is from inadequate depth to adequate depth and we will make that jump this year.
The third is new coordinators. Both our offense and defense have had serious conceptual problems. The 2019 defense had three future NFL draft picks in its secondary and yet often seemed confused, especially when Boston College scored 5 times in 9 second quarter plays, four of them of 50 yards or more. Babers brought in Tony White last year to install an aggressive 3-3-5 scheme that shifted the emphasis away from the defensive line, an area where a school like Syracuse has trouble recruiting in depth, to the backfield, where we’ve had more success. This year our offensive coordinator will be Sterlin Gilbert, who helped Dino create enormously productive offenses at Eastern Illinois and Bowling Green. I’m hoping he’ll provide us with something more versatile than we’ve been seeing and bring back the “Orange is the new fast” tempo that was advertised when Dino came here. He’s also brought in a new offensive line coach in Mike Schmidt, who has a reputation for producing strong running attacks, which we certainly need – and have the raw material to create.
Then there’s the return of the non-conference schedule, which was obliterated last year, save for one game of our choice, for which we made the wrong choice. Liberty proved to be a top 25 team, as good as anyone we played in the ACC save Clemson and Notre Dame and they whipped us in our own place. In the Big East days, after Miami and Virginia Tech left, we felt obligated to schedule powerhouse teams in the non-conference schedule to try to get a reputation, (in case we were any good). But in the ACC Atlantic, which has had multiple national champions and numerous bowl teams, we didn’t need to add to the meat grinder so we softened up the non-conference schedule to give us a chance at a rolling start. It’s designed for 4-0 to be possible and 3-1 a reasonable goal. Coming off a 1-10 season nothing will be easy but it would not have been a 1-10 season if we’d been able to play the teams we had originally scheduled. And this is not a year when we have to play Notre Dame. This year we have a schedule we can at least sink our teeth into without breaking them.
Then there are the fans. There weren’t any last year. The games were played in what must have been an atmosphere resembling practice. Good plays went un-rewarded with the enthusiasm a crowd can bring. And when the team needed bucking up, no one was there to do it. The fans will be back this year. Syracuse fans have never been known for coming out in great numbers or being consistently loud. They tend to be consumers, who examine a product and decide whether they like it or not before they buy it rather than investors who put their enthusiasm into something in hopes that it will pay dividends. “Get good and I’ll come and root for you”. It doesn’t work that way. The consistently successful programs have fan bases that are there win or lose, regardless of who they are playing or who is coaching and who take an active park in the game by cheering for the team. We don’t. We’ve had the program we’ve deserved over the years.
But our fan base, like all of them across the country, has been locked out and locked in for a year. They haven’t had a chance to get out and cheer for a team. I’ve noted at New York Mets and Syracuse Mets games that the fans have been unusually loud and raucous because they are re-discovering the joy of being at a game and rooting for your team. I also noticed going to Syracuse Mets games that the many improvements that have been made to our ballpark have really enhanced the fan experience and even if we have a lousy team, (because everybody’s in New York filling in for the oft-injured Mets), it didn’t seem to matter: the fans were having a good time. Improvements have also been made to the Carrier Dome, too and that should create some excitement now that we are going to get to see them in person. We might even have a whole new generation of SU football fans. It could be the 1980’s all over again.
I’ve told this story before but I’ll tell it again. It’s September 10th, 1983. The Carrier Dome had opened in 1980 and people expected immediate success. But Frank Maloney had a losing record in his last season, thanks to an injury to Joe Morris. Dick McPherson came in promptly lost his first three games, the first two to Rutgers and Temple, teams Frank had beaten the year before. The emotional Coach Mac brought the team back from a 1-5-1 start to finish 4-6-1. But Frank hadn’t done much recruiting at the end of his tenure and the cupboard was bare going into 1982. Mac had to play his freshmen and sophomores and we went 2-9, (a year a lot like last season). We opened 1983 losing 6-17 at Temple, (a game in which promising quarterback recruit Don McPherson was hurt, forcing him to redshirt, which made 1987 his senior year).
Into the Dome came Kent State, the team with the longest losing streak in the nation. We fumbled the opening kickoff but held the Golden Flashes to a field goal. Then we fumbled on the first play after the kick-off. This time they got a touchdown, 0-10. Then we fumbled the kick-off again. A woman next to me laughed and said “This is actually funny”. I wasn’t laughing. Then “Four Wheel Drive”, our defensive line, Tim Green, Bill Pendock, Jaimie Kimmel and Blaise Winter, motioned to the crowd in unison, thrusting their palms up, asking for some noise. “Give us some support!” The crowd, (officially 24,205 but actually under 20,000 in a 50,000 seat stadium), responded and the team responded by stuffing the Flashes. SU took over the game and the crowd kept making noise, (with a roof on the place, 20,000 can sound like 50,000 is they want to), at first almost jokingly but then with increasing enthusiasm. We had trouble punching it in ourselves and Don McAulay set an SU record with five field goals to make it 15-10. Finally we did punch one in and won the game, 22-10. After the game there was a mutual feeling between the fans and the players I had never felt before.
The team won the next two games, had a brutal four game stretch in which we lost to Nebraska, Maryland, Penn State and Pittsburgh, three of them on the road. But the team held together and won their last three games, the last two over bowl teams from Boston College and West Virginia to have a winning record. The next year we beat Nebraska and again had a winning record, despite playing 6 bowl caliber teams, (Florida was 9-1-1 but on probation). In 1985, they went to a bowl game themselves, giving Mac what he called “bowl credibility”, (there were only 17 bowl games that year), and allowing him to recruit the class that, after a redshirt year, turned the program around in 1987, beginning a streak of 15 straight winning seasons.
I doubt we’ll have a streak like that again, unless our circumstances change again. The ACC Atlantic Division is just too tough a row to hoe. We’ll have to build up to years like 2018, which might happen once in a player’s tenure here. But to even get that we’ve got to be competitive in the years that aren’t like that. Last year we weren’t and our task this year is to prove that that’s just not who we are.
The Situation
I heard a couple of guys on a local radio show looking over the Syracuse University football schedule, trying to decide which games were likely wins, which games were likely losses and which were the toss-ups. That’s an impossible task. Who could have guess that we would go from 10-3 in 2018 to 5-7 the next year and 1-10 last year? Who can guess what we will do this year – or what other teams will do? The only thing clear is what must we do this year and the only real question is: do we have a team capable of doing it?
We have the worst record in ACC football since we joined it. We won a minor bowl game the first season, then had three losing records in a row, then had an amazingly good and nearly historically great season followed by a very disappointing follow up and a total disaster. College football fans, journalists and, most importantly, recruits, look at us as bottom-feeders. One pre-season rag described our football program as a “mess”. There are reports, not locally but nationally, that Dino Babers is “on the hot seat”. These things can become self-fulfilling prophecies. Why would recruits want to come here if we are known for having lousy teams and if the coaching staff may be on their way out? It’s not too late to turn things around and convince people that 2018 is the kind of program we can be but it’s getting late. Another losing season and the situation will no longer be retrievable. Somebody said that if we could jump from 1-10 to, say 4-8, that would be a noticeable improvement. It would be an improvement, but it wouldn’t be noticed. We all love and respect Dino Babers but he’s not going to survive 5 losing seasons in a 6-year tenure. He might not be fired immediately but it will be inevitable because he won’t be able to recruit well enough to get out of this. We need a winning season and a bowl game. If we get in at 6-6, we’d better win it. Anything less and a program that has done too much starting over again in recent years will be doing it once again.
I think we have a team that could have the kind of season we need. That’s not a prediction. I would have said the same of the 2019 and 2020 teams before the season and all the things that went wrong. But as I look at the roster I do think that we have enough talented players in each sector of the team to be good if things go well. And I think this team will have several advantages over last year’s team.
The first is that we simply aren’t a 1-10 program. We might be a 5-7 program as in 2019. We are very unlikely to go 10-3 as in 2018. But we aren’t going 1-10 again, It’s called “regression to the mean” or in this case maybe accession to the mean. Also, the players and coaches have to have been disgusted with what happened last year. They will be motivated to prove that that was a fluke and want to go on a revenge tour against the teams that beat us. It will take more than a desire to do that to make it happen but that desire will be a factor.
The second is depth, always a problem for a non-powerhouse program in a power conference. The NCAA granted everyone an extra year of eligibility due to Covid and we have several players who took advantage of it in key positions. And the silver lining to a wave of injuries such as we had last year is that we will have a lot of players who have seen game action the next year: the injured players, now healthy and the guys who played in their place. This will allow us to alternate players better and avoid fatigue and injuries and to better replace those who get injured this year. Other teams will have increased depth, too but the important jump is from inadequate depth to adequate depth and we will make that jump this year.
The third is new coordinators. Both our offense and defense have had serious conceptual problems. The 2019 defense had three future NFL draft picks in its secondary and yet often seemed confused, especially when Boston College scored 5 times in 9 second quarter plays, four of them of 50 yards or more. Babers brought in Tony White last year to install an aggressive 3-3-5 scheme that shifted the emphasis away from the defensive line, an area where a school like Syracuse has trouble recruiting in depth, to the backfield, where we’ve had more success. This year our offensive coordinator will be Sterlin Gilbert, who helped Dino create enormously productive offenses at Eastern Illinois and Bowling Green. I’m hoping he’ll provide us with something more versatile than we’ve been seeing and bring back the “Orange is the new fast” tempo that was advertised when Dino came here. He’s also brought in a new offensive line coach in Mike Schmidt, who has a reputation for producing strong running attacks, which we certainly need – and have the raw material to create.
Then there’s the return of the non-conference schedule, which was obliterated last year, save for one game of our choice, for which we made the wrong choice. Liberty proved to be a top 25 team, as good as anyone we played in the ACC save Clemson and Notre Dame and they whipped us in our own place. In the Big East days, after Miami and Virginia Tech left, we felt obligated to schedule powerhouse teams in the non-conference schedule to try to get a reputation, (in case we were any good). But in the ACC Atlantic, which has had multiple national champions and numerous bowl teams, we didn’t need to add to the meat grinder so we softened up the non-conference schedule to give us a chance at a rolling start. It’s designed for 4-0 to be possible and 3-1 a reasonable goal. Coming off a 1-10 season nothing will be easy but it would not have been a 1-10 season if we’d been able to play the teams we had originally scheduled. And this is not a year when we have to play Notre Dame. This year we have a schedule we can at least sink our teeth into without breaking them.
Then there are the fans. There weren’t any last year. The games were played in what must have been an atmosphere resembling practice. Good plays went un-rewarded with the enthusiasm a crowd can bring. And when the team needed bucking up, no one was there to do it. The fans will be back this year. Syracuse fans have never been known for coming out in great numbers or being consistently loud. They tend to be consumers, who examine a product and decide whether they like it or not before they buy it rather than investors who put their enthusiasm into something in hopes that it will pay dividends. “Get good and I’ll come and root for you”. It doesn’t work that way. The consistently successful programs have fan bases that are there win or lose, regardless of who they are playing or who is coaching and who take an active park in the game by cheering for the team. We don’t. We’ve had the program we’ve deserved over the years.
But our fan base, like all of them across the country, has been locked out and locked in for a year. They haven’t had a chance to get out and cheer for a team. I’ve noted at New York Mets and Syracuse Mets games that the fans have been unusually loud and raucous because they are re-discovering the joy of being at a game and rooting for your team. I also noticed going to Syracuse Mets games that the many improvements that have been made to our ballpark have really enhanced the fan experience and even if we have a lousy team, (because everybody’s in New York filling in for the oft-injured Mets), it didn’t seem to matter: the fans were having a good time. Improvements have also been made to the Carrier Dome, too and that should create some excitement now that we are going to get to see them in person. We might even have a whole new generation of SU football fans. It could be the 1980’s all over again.
I’ve told this story before but I’ll tell it again. It’s September 10th, 1983. The Carrier Dome had opened in 1980 and people expected immediate success. But Frank Maloney had a losing record in his last season, thanks to an injury to Joe Morris. Dick McPherson came in promptly lost his first three games, the first two to Rutgers and Temple, teams Frank had beaten the year before. The emotional Coach Mac brought the team back from a 1-5-1 start to finish 4-6-1. But Frank hadn’t done much recruiting at the end of his tenure and the cupboard was bare going into 1982. Mac had to play his freshmen and sophomores and we went 2-9, (a year a lot like last season). We opened 1983 losing 6-17 at Temple, (a game in which promising quarterback recruit Don McPherson was hurt, forcing him to redshirt, which made 1987 his senior year).
Into the Dome came Kent State, the team with the longest losing streak in the nation. We fumbled the opening kickoff but held the Golden Flashes to a field goal. Then we fumbled on the first play after the kick-off. This time they got a touchdown, 0-10. Then we fumbled the kick-off again. A woman next to me laughed and said “This is actually funny”. I wasn’t laughing. Then “Four Wheel Drive”, our defensive line, Tim Green, Bill Pendock, Jaimie Kimmel and Blaise Winter, motioned to the crowd in unison, thrusting their palms up, asking for some noise. “Give us some support!” The crowd, (officially 24,205 but actually under 20,000 in a 50,000 seat stadium), responded and the team responded by stuffing the Flashes. SU took over the game and the crowd kept making noise, (with a roof on the place, 20,000 can sound like 50,000 is they want to), at first almost jokingly but then with increasing enthusiasm. We had trouble punching it in ourselves and Don McAulay set an SU record with five field goals to make it 15-10. Finally we did punch one in and won the game, 22-10. After the game there was a mutual feeling between the fans and the players I had never felt before.
The team won the next two games, had a brutal four game stretch in which we lost to Nebraska, Maryland, Penn State and Pittsburgh, three of them on the road. But the team held together and won their last three games, the last two over bowl teams from Boston College and West Virginia to have a winning record. The next year we beat Nebraska and again had a winning record, despite playing 6 bowl caliber teams, (Florida was 9-1-1 but on probation). In 1985, they went to a bowl game themselves, giving Mac what he called “bowl credibility”, (there were only 17 bowl games that year), and allowing him to recruit the class that, after a redshirt year, turned the program around in 1987, beginning a streak of 15 straight winning seasons.
I doubt we’ll have a streak like that again, unless our circumstances change again. The ACC Atlantic Division is just too tough a row to hoe. We’ll have to build up to years like 2018, which might happen once in a player’s tenure here. But to even get that we’ve got to be competitive in the years that aren’t like that. Last year we weren’t and our task this year is to prove that that’s just not who we are.
