My 2023 SU Football Preview - Part 2 | Syracusefan.com

My 2023 SU Football Preview - Part 2

SWC75

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THE SITUATION PART II

Syracuse’s situation is that we just had the second winning season of the Dino Babers era and the third in the 10 years we’ve been in the ACC. Here is each school’s conference record over that time:
Clemson 73-8, Florida State 48-32, U of Miami 48-33, Pittsburgh 48-34, Virginia Tech 42-39, North Carolina 43-39, Louisville 37-37, North Carolina State 38-44, Georgia Tech 36-45, Virginia 29-51, Wake Forest 31-48, Boston College 31-51, Duke 31-51, Syracuse 26-56, Notre Dame 13-1, Maryland 3-5.
That’s right. Literally everyone in the conference has done better than we have. (And some people want us to be in a super-conference?)

The glory of Syracuse football resides in three eras: we had 22 consecutive winning seasons from 1914-35 (we won 71.8% of our games, 16th in the country), 22 straight seasons without a loser from 1950-71 (66.4%, 18th) and 15 straight winning seasons from 1987-2001 (71.7%, 10th). From 1936-49 we won 43.0% of our games, 131st in the country, (there were more ‘big time’ teams back then). From 1972-86 it was 41.6%, 91st. From 2002-2017 it had been 37.6%, 103rd. We are a mid-sized school in an under-rated but unglamorous location in a state that doesn’t stress high school football. We really have the profile of a basketball school in the modern era and we could easily have been one as giving up football has been contemplated multiple times. That ended with the building of the Carrier Dome: we had to fill it. But for a school like this to have a big-time football program, we have to keep pumping air into the balloon. Sometimes we get tired, and the eras of glory fade and it takes a lot of pumping to re-inflate the balloon.

We thought we’d done it in 2018. We’d built all kinds of new stuff, including an indoor practice facility, new weight room, a museum, etc. We’d gotten a new coach, Dino Babers, with a history of success and a reputation for offensive football. He’d started 4-8 in 2016 same as the year before, but his losses were more interesting, (61-76 to Pitt). He engineered the second greatest upset in program history, a 27-24 win over #2 Clemson in 2017. Then came the breakthrough of 2018. We went 10-3 and it was a strong 10-3: we lost in OT to Pitt and had Clemson on the ropes until they scored on us in the last minute. If we’d won those games we would have been 11-1 and favored to beat Pitt again in the ACC title game. At 12-1 and ACC champion with a win over Clemson, we’d would have had to have been considered for the 4 team national championship playoff. I don’t think we would have gotten it or won it but that’s still quite a season. We were back, baby! We’d paid the penance of a long period of frustration, mediocrity and irrelevance and now it was time for the next glory era and we were hungry for it. It felt so good that winter, spring and summer, actually looking forward to the next season and telling ourselves, over and over again that we were back!

All we had to do is look at the third game of the schedule: Clemson at Syracuse. Surely ESPN Gameday, which had never been here, (we were one of 8 schools in the power 5 that had never hosted it), would come. It would be a 6 hour infomercial for CNY, SU, SU athletics and SU football. There would be features on Ben Schwartzwalder, Dick McPherson and the 44’s. All the SU alumni in pro sports and in broadcast booths would chime in. Jim Boeheim would be interviewed and be the guest picker – unless that was Jim Brown. All we had to do is beat Liberty, new to Division 1, and Maryland, who had had four straight losing seasons and would go 3-9 this year.

And then we lost that game by the astonishing score of 20-63. The biggest reason was that they were ready to play and we weren’t. Gameday, who had already made hotel reservations, left town. We stumbled to a 5-7 season, (that would have been 4-8 against if it had not been for Trill Williams stealing a ball from a Wake Forest receiver as he was about to score in OT). The next year with Covid opt-outs and many injuries we collapsed to a heart-breaking 1-10. We rallied to another 5-7 record in 2021 but it was the third straight loser of our new ‘glory’ era.

I came to the assessment that we weren’t going to have a new glory era, at least under the current circumstances. In those other eras, we were strictly a northeastern team playing other northeastern teams. Penn State was our Clemson back then but everybody else was about on our level – or less. BC, Pitt and West Virginia were our real rivals. Rutgers, Temple, Holy Cross and Colgate were punching bags, (except during the HooDoo, but that’s another subject). There’s no punching bag in the ACC – unless it’s us. And, until this year, there was an imbalance between the Atlantic and Coastal divisions. We had to deal with not only Clemson but Florida State, Louisville and NC State, (who seemed to have our number). Wake Forest, a traditional bottom-feeder was there too, but Dave Clawson, (ironically Dino Babers’ predecessor at Bowling Green), has turned them into a more-than-respectable program. There’s not going to be any 15 or 22 year streak of winning seasons here. Not for Syracuse, anyway.

It will help that they dropped the divisions for a 3-5-5 format, (repeat after me: 3-5-5 is the conference scheduling format, 3-3-5 is our defensive alignment. Try not to confuse them. The refs wouldn’t allow a 3-5-5). You play 3 teams every year (in our case, Boston College, Pittsburgh and Florida State), 5 his year and 5 next year, (it’s a 14 team conference). Some years our conference schedule will be tougher than others. This year it’s about in the middle. We’ve also weakened the non-conference schedule. It should be favorable this year.

Last year we got off to a great start: 6-0 and a #14 national ranking. My brother visited from Hawaii and I took him to the NC State game, which we won 24-9. He said to me “It’s great to have come back when Syracuse is good again”. In fact, last year was basically a repeat of 2018, even down to the Clemson game, which was almost an instant replay. The problem was, the injury bug became a tsunami. Chris Elmore, Sean Tucker’s ferocious lead blocker and Stefon Thompson, our athletic outside linebacker, both went down in the first quarter of the first game. We kept losing key players at the rate of 1-2 per game. The big blow came when our quarterback, Garrett Shrader, went down in the Notre Dame game. Our back-up, Carlos Del Rio Wilson, wasn’t ready for prime time and Shrader was not the same when he came back, (he had off-season surgery). Our record in August and September since we joined the ACC is 22-20. In October it’s 12-25. In November and December, (excluding bowl games, where they have a chance to rest up and get some people back) it’s 11-30. We just aren’t the same team at the end of seasons that we are at the beginning. At Clemson, there’s not a lot a lot of drop-off from the first to the second to the third teams. They can not only replace people when they get hurt but they can alternate people and keep them rested to prevent injuries. There is a drop-off at each level for Syracuse. We often wind up with less talented or experienced players starting by the end of the season or injured regulars playing hurt because they are still better than the alternative that way.

We also have the ‘big man’ problem. Dino calls them elephants, (on offense), and hippos, (on defense). In both football and basketball, big men are key. There’s no shortage of them in either sport but there’s a difference between the good ones and the bad ones. And the good ones tend to gravitate toward the most successful programs, allowing them to sustain success. We get some good linemen in football, but not enough of them. Matthew Bergeron was our first offensive lineman to be drafted by the NFL since Justin Pugh a decade ago. Clemson can line up Matthew Bergerons and Justin Pughs, shoulder to shoulder. We have to patch together the rest of the line and hope it holds up.

Under these circumstances, the best we can hope for may be to have a year like 2018 and 2022 every few years. I’d love to be wrong about this. Maybe if we could build on last year’s success instead of having the ball roll all the way back down the hill, as it did after 2018, and put together a run of winning seasons to get some momentum, I’d change my mind. I’d love to be able to do so.

Looking at this team and this schedule, I’m thinking they might be able to do it. It’s August, a good time to have such thoughts. It might be hard in November.
 

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