SWC75
Bored Historian
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(This one is a bit long. I have some friends and relatives on the west coast who know more about Cal, Stanford and UNLV than they do about Syracuse and I wanted to bring them up-to-date about where we have bene and where we are.)
The Coaches
We’ve had five coaches during our long stretch of mediocrity and ‘irrelevance’. It started under a very successful coach, Paul Pasqualoni, the second winningest coach in SU football history, (behind Ben Schwartzwalder). Paul’s record here was 107-59-1. If our new coach, Fran Brown, goes 107-59-1 here, they will build a statue to him, (maybe Paul should have one?). We might even get into a super-conference with that record. But like Schwartzwalder, his record wasn’t lubricated with enough wins in his later years, (Ben went 29-33-1 over his last six seasons, Paul 39-33), and friction built up. Both were gruff football men who were certainly respected but not beloved in their time. They didn’t know how to ‘charm’ and audience and didn’t try.
Both had the burden of trying to follow up our two greatest seasons and not being able to duplicate their magic, (11-0 in 1959 and 11-0-1 under Coach Mac in 1987). Both suffered from the school falling behind in the budget and facility battles. (What Paul had was a 5 star resort compared to what Ben had but facilities probably meant even more in Paul’s time.) Ben had his share of debacles, (losing the 1953 Orange Bowl to Alabama, 6-61, 0-43 at California in 1968, thanks to 9 turnovers, to Penn State and 14-41 to Bowling Green in his final season, among others). Paul had some, too - too many of them - usually televised, (consecutive 0-49 and 0–43 loses to Miami and West Virginia, causing Lee Corso to beg ESPN to not show our games any more, 0-62 in Blacksburg to play Virginia Tech, a 0-59 “battle for the Big East title” vs. a great Miami team – which meant we weren’t great, and the bookend losses of his last season: 0-51 to Purdue in the opener and 14-51 to Georgia Tech in the bowl game).
Bad losses and lost opportunities came, over time, to obscure their accomplishments and gave rise to feelings we could do better. We didn’t. The first 13 years after Ben ‘retired’ we went 62-82 and since Paul retired, we are 91-141. We came to realize that winning college football games at the highest level is not easy, especially for a school like Syracuse, a mid-size private institution in a state that does not stress the sport in high school and thus does not produce a lot of Division 1 talent. Academic requirements and tuition tend to be higher in a private school than a state school and we don’t’ have the whole state behind us. There are some good recruiting areas adjacent to our state: Long Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Basically, every notable player Ben ever had here came from this state and those areas. But two platoon football, which came in in the mid-60’s, requires more than twice as many players as the old, limited substitution, one platoon version of the sport. Ben’s 1959 national champions had a roster of 56 players and his traveling squads often had less than 40. Now we use an average of 52 players per game, have 85 on scholarship and over 100 on the roster. We have to import busloads of players from as far away as Florida, Texas and California and we don’t necessarily get the A-listers from there. That makes it tough and Paul Pasqualoni’s replacements have had a tough time giving the fans what they want to see.
Paul’s replacement was Greg Robinson, a 30 year assistant coach with a confident smile and a couple of Super Bowl rings from when he was the defensive coordinator of the Denver Broncos. Pasqualoni’s resume when he came here was that he had been a head coach at Western Connecticut and then a linebacker coach with us. It seemed like the ‘A’ team had arrived. There was a great feeling of confident anticipation during the spring and summer of 2005, (not unlike what we are feeling now). It turned out to be the ‘Z’ team. Part of the problem is that we’d fired our coach after a bowl game, which is very, very late in the season as far as assembling coaching staffs. We got a bunch of guys who themselves had just been fired from their old jobs or had been promoted to jobs they had never done before. And in many cases, including Robinson, they had been promoted to their level of incompetence.
We went 1-10 in the fall of 2005. We had never been 1-10 before. We were 0-8-1 in 1892 but nobody remembered 1892. We were 1-7 in 1936. I think my parents remembered that. The year before Ben came here, 1948, we were 1-8. Ben had finished with a 2-9 season and his replacement, Frank Maloney, went 2-9 the next year. Even Coach Mac went 2-9 in 1982. But we’d never been 1-10. People were shocked and dismayed. We lost our first two in 2006 but then won 3 in a row. At last, we have lift-off to Greg Robinson Era. Then we lost 6 of our last 7. Then came a 2-10 team that was probably the worst G-Rob team, (the 2005 team had a decent defense: 2007 was terrible on both sides of the ball). There were scenes from practice showing players throwing uppercut punches rather than tacking. Robinson said “it’s the same motion”. Pictures of our linemen showed stomachs falling over their belts. “We tell them to lift weights”.
He had to come up with a winner in 2008 to save his job…and went 3-9, finishing at 10-37 for four years. Greg was supposed to arrest and reverse the decline of the program. Instead, he accelerated it. We’ve never really recovered from that disaster. Maybe the worst memory of that era is the pathetic “farewell” press conference, where he insisted he’d “seen flashes” while he was here, that the university should hire a coach “just like me”. Then he read a segment from the children’s book “the little engine that could”. He was the little engine that couldn’t.
We sent out an SOS to Coach Mac’s former All-East tackle, Doug Marrone, who had been an assistant at some top programs and in the NFL. He showed he wanted the job by arriving for his job interview with an arm-load of binders full of pages and graphs describing his plan for revitalizing the Syracuse program. He’d already been in touch with the guys he wanted on his coaching staff. He said that this was his “dream job”, the one he’d been working his whole life to get. He created visions of an SU alum having a long career, (he was in his early 40’s) as our football coach, joining Jim Boeheim as an alum having a legendary career as our basketball coach and Roy Simmons Jr. and his successor, John Desko, as alums having legendary careers as our lacrosse coaches.
Doug was positively euphoric at the beginning of his tenure here. He loved explaining every aspect of his job and what goes on during a game. He clearly was doing what he always dreamed of. He and his staff turned the recruiting emphasis back to the east after Robinson, a west coast guy with a staff full of guys with western backgrounds, had gone after top national recruits and done well to make the lists of many of them. But he hadn’t done well in actually getting them to come to Syracuse. Doug had a more focused approach, concentrating on traditional recruiting areas and guys who may not have been blue chippers but who could be ‘coached up’ to become good players at this level.
Doug’s first team went 4-8 but was more competitive than any of G-Rob’s teams. A big thing was that our offensive line got better and better. By his second year it was one of the best units on the team, a real positive for the first time in years. His defensive coordinator, Scott Shafer was an aggressive type who liked his defense to be a force on the field. That second year we went 8-5, including an exciting win over Kansas State, 36-34, in the initial Pinstripe Bowl in Yankee Stadium. We weren’t ‘back’, but we were getting there.
2011 started out strong. We won 5 of our first 7 games, the last a 49-23 thumping of #11 West Virginia in the Dome. We needed just one more win to go to a bowl game again and the possibility of climbing through the Top 25 and getting in a really good bowl was there. The future was bright. We didn’t win another game all season, finishing 5-7. There were rumors of a rift developing between Marrone and his team in the locker room, leading to a fist fight. There were disciplinary problems with star receiver Mike Williams. Marrone was also said to be disappointed with the school administration, which hadn’t kept some promises about coaching salaries. It may be recruiting, the art of begging teenagers to come to your school, was wearing him down a bit. Whatever the cause, the smile seemed to have been wiped off of Doug’s face. Giddy descriptions of a day in the life of a coach were replaced with curt, monosyllabic responses to reporter’s and fan’s questions.
The next year, Marrone and offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hacket devised an effective passing game, using the talents of quarterback Ryan Nassib and receivers Alec Lemon and Marcus Sales to re-write the Syracuse record book. We were snake-bit early on, losing by a point to Northwestern, getting beat by USC, fumbling a game at Minnesota away and losing a frustrating game in the Dome against Rutgers. But we closed out the season with 6 wins in 7 games, including another Pinstripe win over West Virginia, 38-14. During that stretch the news came down that Syracuse would be leaving the Big East conference and joining the ACC. We all felt good that we had a good football coach like Doug Marrone to see us through the transition.
Then, one day I tuned into the news to see a smiling Doug Marrone accepting the head coaching job of the Buffalo Bills. He gave no interviews and issued no statements about it. Syracuse had just ceased to be his ‘dream job’ and the opportunity to be a head coach in the NFL was too great to turn down. He could have coached here for a quarter century. Doug went 6-10, then 9-7 for the Bills, (and declared himself a ‘saint’ for having gone 25-25 at Syracuse), and abruptly left. He wanted the Jets job but didn’t get it, then became the head coach at Jacksonville, where he went 10-6 in his second year and made the AFC title game, losing to the Patriots. But in his 5th year they collapsed to 1-15 and Doug lost that job. Nick Saban hired him to be his offensive line coach and then the Saints, who fired him last February. His old friend Bill O’Brien hired him to be something called the ‘Senior Analyst for Football Strategy/Research’. Sounds like a dream job to me.
We promoted from within and hired Scott Shafer, who had been our defensive coordinator. Scott made an ambitious speech about “locking the doors of the Dome” when their teams came here. He inherited a strong line from Marrone but his defense seemed to decline without him running it. His first year was a bumpy but ultimately successful ride: we went 7-6 for our third winning record and bowl win in four years, this one the Texas Bowl, over Minnesota 21=17. But there had been a 27-48 loss at Northwestern, a 14-49 home drubbing to Clemson and eight touchdown annihilations to Georgia Tech (0-56) and Florida State (3-59). I was invited by friends to watch those last two games and we had lively conversations about anything but football.
In 2014, we opened with wind over Villanova and Central Michigan, and then lost 9 of our remaining 10 games. The offensive line was destroyed by injuries. In 2015 we won our first three games over Rhode Island, Wake Forest and Central Michigan, then lost 8 in a row before winning Shafer’s last game here over Boston College, 20-17. We played pretty well in the losses, especially in 24-34 and 27-37 to two top ten teams, the LSU Tigers and the Clemson Tigers, (whose bands kept playing “Hold That Tiger”). But losing is losing. The thing that may have sealed Shafer’s fate was when he left our start quarterback, Eric Dungey, in a game at Louisville, where we were down 10-41 with 7 minutes left. He got hurt and could not play the rest of the season. Scot said that he had left Eric in because he still thought we could make a comeback and win the game, (31 points in 7 minutes). Then his offensive coordinator said they sent Eric in, (after a Louisville turnover) because the back-up QB “hadn’t had time to get warmed up”. Who’s in charge here? Not Scott Shafer anymore.
This inaugurated a search for “the right guy”. After name names were rumored and discussed, they came up with a guy most of us had never heard of: Dino Babers. Babers had been a running back for the University of Hawaii in the early 80’s. He then went on a 30 year odyssey through the coaching ranged from Hawaii to Arizona State, Eastern Illinois, UNLV, Northern Arizona, Purdue, Arizona, Texas A&M, Pittsburgh, UCLA and Baylor until he finally got be a head coach back at Eastern Illinois. He spent two years there, going 7-5, then 12-2 before moving on to Bowling Green, where he went 8-6 and then 10-3.
What was exciting is the offensive numbers his teams had rolled up. Babers had been an assistant at Baylor under Art Briles when the previously moribund program suddenly erupted for a 10-3 season in 2011 when they scored 589 points, (45 a game). They scored 44 per game the next year, 52 the year after that and 48 the two years after that. Baber’s second year at Eastern Illinois, they scored 49 points a game. Their quarterback, Jimmy Garoppolo, completed 66% of his passes for 5,050 yards, 53 touchdowns and just 9 interceptions. Their leading receiver had 123 catches for 1,544 yards and 19 touchdowns and their second leading receiver had 85/1305/13. They had two 1,000 yard rushers, one of whom ran for 1,563 yards at 7.1 a crack and 12 scores. The other had 1,003/4.6/10. Baber’s second Bowling Green team averaged 42 points per game. Their quarterback, Matt Johnson completed 67% of his passes for 4,946 yards, 46 TDs and 9 picks. The leading receivers had 94/1,033/10 and 85/1,544/16. The leading rusher had 1,299 yards (5.8) and 15TDs.
We’ve never seen such numbers in Syracuse. From the time the Carrier Dome opened, it seemed obvious that this was the ideal place for a wide-open, passing oriented offense, (that could also run the ball because the defense was so spread out). We should have been Brigham Young, Houston or Texas Tech. Instead, we ran an option-based attack. One year, (1994), we had the fourth lowest number of passes in the country, ahead of Rice and a couple of service academies, all of whom ran the wishbone offense. The great Marvin Harrison started for three years here and caught 41,36 and 56 passes. He went to the pros and caught over 100 passes four times, with a high of 143. His son started for Ohio State the last two years and caught 67 and 77 passes. Now, with Babers, we were finally going to use the Dome the way it was meant to be used.
I found I liked Dino a lot. He had a very smooth, intelligent style of talking. He had many interests including movies, which he loved to talk about. He was a great story teller. He was also a man of solid values who viewed himself of “talking care of the children their parents sent us”. I thought he was a great “face of the program”. When he came here, he was full of confidence and enthusiasm. He had a system that he knew worked. He said that the conditioning his players were put through gave his team an edge over the opposition. Their pace of play would do the same. We would exhaust teams by the enormous numbers of plays we would run. They would fade as the game went along and we would keep going. He told us to close our eyes and dream of what would transpire. He also stressed faith, which he defined as “belief without evidence”. We had plenty of that that spring and summer.
Early on, there was plenty of evidence that he was the ‘right guy’ and that a great new era was dawning for SU football. His first season was an adventure. We went 4-8, just as Scott Shafer had the previous year. We ran into Lamar Jackson in our second game. He produced four touchdowns in 18 minutes on his way to a 7-35 Louisville lead in what became a 28-62 loss. Jackson rushed for 199 yards and passed for 411 on his way to the Heisman. A trip to Clemson resulted in a “Murphy’s Law 0-54 loss, including a pic six that bounced off 2-3 players. The season ended with a “defense optional” 61-76 loss at Pittsburgh that set an NCAA record for the highest combined score in a game that didn’t go into overtime. Someone said “At least the losses are more interesting”.
But we had a couple of guys put up Babers-like numbers: Amba Etta-Tawo, a Maryland transfer who had a career 38 catches for 438 yards and 1TD prior to 2016, exploded for 94/1482/14. Erv Phillips, who came in with 44/343/5, caught 90 balls for 822 yards and 6 scores. Alec Lemon had held the SU record for passes caught with 72 back in 2012. Our other numbers were mediocre. Eric Dungy passed for 2,679 yards and 15 touchdowns. Our leading rusher ran for 566 yards. But it was a start.
The next year brought the great victory over a #2 ranked Clemson team, in the Dome, 27-24. The circumstances were basically identical to our greatest upset, the 17-9 win over #1 Nebraska in 1984. We’ve been clobbered by the Huskers in Lincoln in 1983, 7-63 and, in ’84 lost to Rutgers the week before the big upset, 0-19 in the Dome. In 2016, we’d lost that 0-54 game at Clemson. In 2017, we’d lost our second game to Middle Tennessee State, (and their defensive coordinator, Scott Shaher, who smoked a victory cigar), 23-30. In both cases the visitors had no reason to think we’d give them any sort of game. In both cases, we did, and stayed in that game until, before the home crowd, we made the plays necessary to win the game and shock the country.
That got people all excited about the great things to come. We were 4-3 and had just defeated the #2 team in the country. Unfortunately, that was our last win of the season and we wound up 4-8 for the third time in a row. Steve Ismael caught 105 passes and Erv Phillips 89 but Dungey had only 14 TD passes and he was our leading rusher with 595 yards.
But the 2018 season was huge, or at least it seemed at the time. We won our first four, including a cathartic 30-7 win over a Florida State team that was at its lowest ebb after having clobbered us for years. Then we played a great game at Clemson, knocking Trevor Lawrence out of his first game as a starter, building up an early lead and holding on for dear life as the Tigers went to their ground game and finally broke through for the winning score in the final minute, 23-27. Then we lost a frustrating OT game at Pitt and won another four in a row. We played an unbeaten Notre Dame in Yankee Stadium and Dungey went down early. We were swimming upstream the rest of the way and lost 3-36. But Dungey was back for a win at BC and another bowl game win over West Virginia. 10-3, with two losses that were as close as they could be. If we’d won those games, we’d have been 11-1 in the regular season, the ACC Atlantic Division Champions and favored to gain revenge on Pitt in the ACC title game. We’d have been in the conversation for the 4 team playoff for the national title, (although I don’t think we would have gotten a bid: Clemson and Notre Dame wound up in it and they wouldn’t have taken another ACC team). We’d scored 523 points, 40 a game, Babers numbers, although nobody had more than 64 receptions or 1,000 yards rushing and Dungey had only 18 TD passes. But, hey, 40 ppg is 40 ppg and 10-3 is 10-3!
It produced another pleasant spring and summer: We were back, baby! Syracuse football was relevant again. When lists were made of opponents that made a team’s schedule difficult, we were on those lists. We were one of the “haves”, not the “have nots”. The good old days were back and the bad new days were gone. Our big fear was that Dino Babers would be ‘plucked’ by one of the big powers, maybe USC, and we’d have to start all over again. That wasn’t something we had to worry about. What did happen is hard to imagine.
The 2019 team seemed fully capable of following up on the success of the 2018 team. Dungy was gone but Tommy DeVito, the quarterback Dino had personally selected to be Syracuse’s version of Jimmy Garoppolo and Matt Johnson. Moe Neal, team’s top running back was back as were most of the receiving corps, to which a talented transfer from Michigan State, Triston Jackson was added. We had amazing talent in the defensive secondary: Andre Cisco, Ifeatu Melifonwu and Trill Williams all wound up in the NFL. But the season was ruined by stunningly inconsistent performances. In the second game, we played a Maryland team that would finish 3-8 and lost to them 20-63. Our guys were getting knocked over on every play. I’ve been a Syracuse fan since Ernie Davis was playing and that was the most unforgivable performance I have seen. It was a game we just didn’t seem ready to play. ESPN Gameday, which has never been at Syracuse, was all set to broadcast the Clemson game the next week but when they saw the Maryland score, they left. We lost that game 6-41. We won a couple of games, then lost five in a row, the last in the Dome to Boston College, a game where the Eagles scored five second quarter touchdowns, four of them on plays of 50 yards or more. We lost 27-58. The next week we went on the road and clobbered Duke 49-6. Then Louisville ran us out of their place, 34-56. The season ended with an overtime win over Wake Forest in the Dome on this play:
You can’t watch that too many times. But you can’t figure out how such a talented team needed that to avoid a 4-8 season record. This was followed up by the soul-crushing 2020 season, in which we got hit by more Covid opt-outs than anyone we played and then more injuries as well, (I think). The season was symbolized by the pre-game warm-up in which a reserve receiver bumped into all-American safety Andre Cisco and Andre sustained an injury that ended his season and, it turned out, his Syracuse career. and tumbled all the way to G-Rob land, 1-10. 2018 seemed 100 years ago.
The rest of Dino’s career here was a series of attempts to climb out of that hole. Each year featured promising starts and dismal endings. In 2021 we started out 3-1 and were 5-4 when we lost our last three games by a total of 79 points to wind up 5-7. In 2022 we won our first 6 games and lost 21-27 at Clemson in a clone of the 2018 game. That was the first of 5 straight losses. We wound up 7-5 but lost the Pinstripe Bowl to Minnesota. In 2023, we won our first 4, again lost to Clemson, the first of 5 in a row. We won 2 of the last three to get to 6-6 and go to a bowl game but Dino was gone by then. Much of the roster and staff opted out of the bowl game, which we lost 0-45 to South Florida.
I was a big Dino fan and felt it was vitally important that he be successful here. It seemed like our last chance to show we weren’t a bottom-feeder in the ACC to teenage recruits who had never seen anything else. I knew he’d reached the end of the line when he resurrected the “belief without evidence” line, urging the fans to have that attitude, even after 8 years. He grew more sullen and less forthcoming in his public appearances, much as Doug Marrone had when the going got rough here.
We now know that Athletic Director John Wildhack had basically demanded to see the evidence, telling Dino he needed to secure a winning record for 2023 by getting a seventh regular season win. When we lost to Georgia Tech to go 5-6, that was impossible and Dino was out. We never did have an offense that put up the numbers Baylor, Eastern Illinois and Bowling Green put up. Ryan Nassib still holds our passing records, (from 2012: 294/471, 62.4%, 3,749 yads, 26TDs, 10 interceptions). We wound up running the ‘Wildcat’. We were supposed to do everything faster than other teams but that evaporated. We were supposed to be better conditioned than other teams but I’m hearing all kinds of reports about how the 2024 Orangemen will be in better shape than they were last year. At the end Dino seemed like a magician who had run out of rabbits in his hat.
There were a lot of complaints about in-game decision making and clock management but Dino’s big problems were similar to his predecessors: talent and depth. We had some good individuals but usually not enough of them and there was a significant gap from the first team to the second and another beyond that. There was a lot of “under-the-radar recruiting. We couldn’t alternate players as much as other teams, which keeps them fresh and avoid injuries. When we lost a player, his replacement often wasn’t nearly as good and we wound up each year with a lot of players hurt but playing because they were still better than the guys behind them. These challenges will continue for any subsequent coaching staffs.
Another challenge is the lack of fan support. At it’s peak in 1996, Carrier Dome attendance for football averaged 48,177. We had 40,973 for last year’s Clemson game in the Dome and averaged 36,868. Those were tickets sold. A lot of fans came wearing chrome, (which is what the Dome’s benches were made of). The renovation of the Dome will reduce available seating capacity to about 42,000. Why have more seats when they will be empty? The consistently successful schools have stadiums with 70-100,000 capacity and fill them consistently. Basically, we’ve had the football program we deserve, based on the support we’ve given it.
Enter Fran Brown. Still another guy we had never heard of when he became our head coach. Several names we knew were rumored to be in the mix for the job and we wind up with an ‘owl’ (Who?) Well, this owl was voted the #1 recruiter in college football for 2023. Of course it might be easier to win that if you are recruiting for Georgia, the school that had won two national championships in a row and might have won a third if they’d been included in the 2023 playoffs (as they should have been).But Georgia competed with the top football factories in the country for 5 star guys and it was the assessment of recruiting ‘experts’ that the Bulldogs won that battle.
Brown was still another career assistant who got his first head coaching job here. He had been a star quarterback at Camden, NJ high school but wound up as a defensive back at Western Carolina, playing under Matt Ruhle. After failing to make the Cincinnati Bengals roster, he went into high school coaching and then became an assistant at Temple under Steve Addazio and then Ruhle, rising to “associate head coach” by his 6th year there. He was regarded as the top recruiter in the American Conference. (Temple, once the dregs of the old Big East conference, had 8 winning records in 11 years from 2009-19. We had 4.) When Ruhle went to Baylor, Brown followed him there, (another Baylor guy, though this one was post-Art Briles Baylor, which Ruhle brought back to success after the scandals: they were 1-11 his first year and 11-3 two years later). Brown was Ruhle’s top recruiter there, as well. Brown interviewed for the head coaching job at Temple in 2018 but lost out to Manny Diaz but was kept on as defensive coordinator. In 2019, when Greg Schiano returned to Rutgers, Fran moved to his staff as a secondary coach. Georgia hired him in the same capacity for the 2022 and won their second national championship. Then Fran pulled in the best recruiting class in the country and was named the country’s best recruiter. He was hired here based on that reputation and his extensive contacts in the Northeast, especially in the New Jersey and Philadelphia area, which produce a lot of talent. His success in recruiting since he was hired is also an indication that John Wildhack is determined to jack this program up and is providing the financial support necessary to do so. I wonder what Pasqualoni, Marrone, Shafer and Babers think of that? (Robinson is deceased.)
Fran Brown carries tough love, loss, and lessons from Camden as he builds his SU football program
Brown had two jobs: assemble a staff and start being the best recruiter of 2024. He went after them simultaneously, with one announcement following another. I’ll cover the players later but the combined impact was to create a level of excitement greater than we’d had probably since the opening of the Carrier Dome, well beyond the confident optimism G-Rob exuded, the dreamy return of Marrone, the determined speech of Shafer and the wonderful statistics of Babers. Most of the new people had prior relationships with him or came from his hometown recruiting area.
His first, (almost instantaneous) coaching hire was Elijah Robinson, a childhood friend from Camden who was the 2022 recruiter of the year, (giving us the last two winners), at Texas A&M, where he recruited “the greatest class of all time” according to one source. He will be the defensive coordinator and “assistant head coach”. Both men have coached under coaches who have won national championships, (Kriby Smart and Jimbo Fisher). Elijah was a “co-defensive coordinator and defensive line coach at A&M. Cuse.com doesn’t list a ‘defensive line coach’ so I assume he’ll be coaching the defensive tackles. He was an interim head coach at A&M last year after Fisher was fired.
The ”edge” coach, (defensive ends and outside linebackers) is Nick Williams, who was defensive line coach and…you guessed it… top recruiter for Deon Sanders at Colorado last season. Before that, he was at…you also guessed this…. Texas A&M and Georgia, where he landed the nation’s #1 class in 2018 and 2020 but was only #2 in 2019. Those are the guys that won those national championships. These guys could sell refrigerators to Eskimos and now they’ve got to sell Syracuse to recruits.
The new offensive coordinator is Jeff Nixon. Jeff was a co-offensive coordinator under Ruhle at Baylor from 2017-2019 but has otherwise been an NFL guy since 2007, coaching offense and special teams with the Eagles, running backs with the Dolphins, tight ends with the 49ers, running backs and offensive coordinator with the Panthers and “assistant head coach – offense” with the Giants. Before that, he was with…Temple! He’s played running back with West Virginia, then Penn State. He’s from the Pittsburgh area and there’s plenty of good recruiting there. But his best recruit may be his son, Will, who rushed for 301 yards at 6.1 a crack for Washington last year and played in the national championship game. He’s transferred to Syracuse to be coached by his father and will add some much-needed depth to our running back room.
James Vollono is our new special teams coach. He’s ben at Colorado and Georgia before but spent the last three seasons at Troy – no, not USC. The one in Alabama. This past season, kicker Scott Taylor Renfroe made 19-of-24 field goal attempts, the second-most makes in program history. Punter Robert Cole turned in the ninth-best season in school history, averaging 42.27 yards per punt. His coverage and return units were also strong in his time in Troy. In 2023, his punt unit ranked 36th nationally in punt return defense, surrendering just 5.64 yards per return. The year prior, Troy allowed just one punt return of more than 20 yards (23), and the kickoff team tied for eighth nationally in allowing just one kickoff return of more than 30 yards (36).” (Cuse.com) “Vollono has strong recruiting ties in the DMV (DC, Maryland, Virginia) area, where Syracuse would like to recruit heavily.” (Syracuse.com)
Robert Wright will coach our linebackers. He’s also our “co-defensive coordinator”. (How can you coordinate a defense when another guy is also coordinating it?) He’s a U of Miami grad and a former Texas A&M guy who should be able to recruit in both states. “Seven defensive players off A&M’s defenses have been drafted that were on the teams Wright worked with, including Justin Madubuike (Ravens), Bobby Brown III (Rams), Buddy Johnson (Steelers), DeMarvin Leal (Steelers), Michael Clemons (Jets), Antonio Johnson (Jaguars) and Jaylon Jones (Colts).” (Cuse.com)
Joe Schaefer is our new defensive backs coach. He came here from... Texas A&M! He was a linebackers coach there. “Schaefer started his tenure in College Station ahead of the 2022 season and spent this past year coaching outside linebackers. Texas A&M ranked sixth in the SEC and finished the regular season 21st nationally in passing yards allowed, giving up 188.3 per game over the 12-game slate in 2023. Overall, the Aggies finished third in the conference and 19th nationally in total defense (316.2 ypg.). The A&M defense was consistent in the backfield this season as well. The Aggies led the SEC and finished seventh nationally in sacks this season (3.23 per game) and were fifth nationally in tackles for loss (7.6 per game).” (Cuse.com) He’s from Ohio, another excellent recruiting area and went to Bowling Green.
Our new offensive line coach is Dale Williams, who has 25 years experience in that job, most recently at Louisville, who played in their first ever ACC championship game. Before that, he was at Purdue, where they led the Big Ten in passing, and Western Kentucky, where they put up Babers stats in passing and scoring. In 2014 Brandon Doughty passed for 4,830 yards, 49TDs, 10 picks. Leon Allen ran for 1,542 yards and caught 51 passes. They scored 44 points a game. The next year, Doughty had 5,055/48/9, Taywan Taylor caught 86 passes for 1,467 yards and 17TDs while Anhtony Wales ran for 1,091 yards at 7 yards a pop. They again scored 44 points/game. In 2016 Mike White threw for 4,363/37/7, Taylor had 98/1730/17 and Nick Norris had 76/1318/14 while Wales ran for 1,627 (6.8) and 27TDs. They scored 45.5. Dino’s teams failed to put up numbers like that largely due to the failure to put together a strong offensive line. Dale Williams IS an offensive line coach. He ought to be able to get it done.
Ross Douglas, most recently a wide receivers coach with the Patriots, now has that position with Syracuse. He’s also our “passing game coordinator”. I’m glad it will be coordinated this year. A native of Akron who went to Michigan, (the Wolverines get much of their talent from “that state down there”) and who was on the Rutgers staff when Fran was there. “He helped five Rutgers defensive backs to All-Big Ten honors in his tenure, including Tre Avery, Saquan Hampton (twice), Christian Izien, Brandon White and Avery Young.” (Cuse.com) I hope he doesn’t help any defensive backs to All-ACC honors.
Fran kept two guys from Dino’s staff. One was Nunzio Campanile, who had been a legend in the New jersey High School coaching ranks who was Dino’s tight ends coach, (meaning he helped to develop Oronde Gadsden and Dan Villari) and who took over as our interim coach after Dino was fired, something he’d also done at Rutgers back in 2019, (when he was on the same staff with Fran). That gives us two guys who have coached college football games on an interim basis. He is no Fran’s “Offensive Associate Head Coach/Quarterbacks Coach”. He’ll have to coordinate with the Offensive Coordinator, (Nixon), the Co-Offensive Coordinator, (Michael Johnson) and the Passing Game Coordinator (Douglas). They’ll figure it out.
Michael Johnson was the other hold-over. He’s now the tight ends coach and the “Co-Offensive Coordinator”. A native of LA, (another potentially import recruiting connection now that we have two California teams in the conference), who went to Arizona State and then transferred to Akron, where he set some school quarterback records. He’s coached at Oregon State, with the San Diego Chargers, where he coached Drew Brees and Doug Flutie, then the Falcons, where he coached Michael Vick, then the Ravens and the 49ers. Then he returned to college ball as the OC/WR coach at UCLA, where, he, like Robinson and Campanile filled in as an interim head coach. He then was a head coach in the Southern California high school ranks. Then he went to Oregon, Mississippi State, Florida Atlantic and Syracuse in 2022, so he’s had a long and varied career, mostly as a QB or WR coach. He gives three different coaches who have been, (interim), head coaches in college football games, which may be helpful for a new head coach who hasn’t. Michael also, like Jeff Nixon, had his son, Michael Johnson Jr., on the roster. He gives us some depth in the quarterback room.
This coaching staff was obviously brought together based on past relationships but I think they’ve also been chosen for their experience and the recruiting areas they know well. I think these guys know what they are doing. As the old saying goes, if they can’t do it, no one can. But can anyone do it? My first question on his first coach’s show will be whether this program presently is giving him all the tools he’ll need to succeed or is something missing. I’ll grant him that we need fannies in those new seats and they need to be loud fannies. (I may have to word that differently.)
The Coaches
We’ve had five coaches during our long stretch of mediocrity and ‘irrelevance’. It started under a very successful coach, Paul Pasqualoni, the second winningest coach in SU football history, (behind Ben Schwartzwalder). Paul’s record here was 107-59-1. If our new coach, Fran Brown, goes 107-59-1 here, they will build a statue to him, (maybe Paul should have one?). We might even get into a super-conference with that record. But like Schwartzwalder, his record wasn’t lubricated with enough wins in his later years, (Ben went 29-33-1 over his last six seasons, Paul 39-33), and friction built up. Both were gruff football men who were certainly respected but not beloved in their time. They didn’t know how to ‘charm’ and audience and didn’t try.
Both had the burden of trying to follow up our two greatest seasons and not being able to duplicate their magic, (11-0 in 1959 and 11-0-1 under Coach Mac in 1987). Both suffered from the school falling behind in the budget and facility battles. (What Paul had was a 5 star resort compared to what Ben had but facilities probably meant even more in Paul’s time.) Ben had his share of debacles, (losing the 1953 Orange Bowl to Alabama, 6-61, 0-43 at California in 1968, thanks to 9 turnovers, to Penn State and 14-41 to Bowling Green in his final season, among others). Paul had some, too - too many of them - usually televised, (consecutive 0-49 and 0–43 loses to Miami and West Virginia, causing Lee Corso to beg ESPN to not show our games any more, 0-62 in Blacksburg to play Virginia Tech, a 0-59 “battle for the Big East title” vs. a great Miami team – which meant we weren’t great, and the bookend losses of his last season: 0-51 to Purdue in the opener and 14-51 to Georgia Tech in the bowl game).
Bad losses and lost opportunities came, over time, to obscure their accomplishments and gave rise to feelings we could do better. We didn’t. The first 13 years after Ben ‘retired’ we went 62-82 and since Paul retired, we are 91-141. We came to realize that winning college football games at the highest level is not easy, especially for a school like Syracuse, a mid-size private institution in a state that does not stress the sport in high school and thus does not produce a lot of Division 1 talent. Academic requirements and tuition tend to be higher in a private school than a state school and we don’t’ have the whole state behind us. There are some good recruiting areas adjacent to our state: Long Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Basically, every notable player Ben ever had here came from this state and those areas. But two platoon football, which came in in the mid-60’s, requires more than twice as many players as the old, limited substitution, one platoon version of the sport. Ben’s 1959 national champions had a roster of 56 players and his traveling squads often had less than 40. Now we use an average of 52 players per game, have 85 on scholarship and over 100 on the roster. We have to import busloads of players from as far away as Florida, Texas and California and we don’t necessarily get the A-listers from there. That makes it tough and Paul Pasqualoni’s replacements have had a tough time giving the fans what they want to see.
Paul’s replacement was Greg Robinson, a 30 year assistant coach with a confident smile and a couple of Super Bowl rings from when he was the defensive coordinator of the Denver Broncos. Pasqualoni’s resume when he came here was that he had been a head coach at Western Connecticut and then a linebacker coach with us. It seemed like the ‘A’ team had arrived. There was a great feeling of confident anticipation during the spring and summer of 2005, (not unlike what we are feeling now). It turned out to be the ‘Z’ team. Part of the problem is that we’d fired our coach after a bowl game, which is very, very late in the season as far as assembling coaching staffs. We got a bunch of guys who themselves had just been fired from their old jobs or had been promoted to jobs they had never done before. And in many cases, including Robinson, they had been promoted to their level of incompetence.
We went 1-10 in the fall of 2005. We had never been 1-10 before. We were 0-8-1 in 1892 but nobody remembered 1892. We were 1-7 in 1936. I think my parents remembered that. The year before Ben came here, 1948, we were 1-8. Ben had finished with a 2-9 season and his replacement, Frank Maloney, went 2-9 the next year. Even Coach Mac went 2-9 in 1982. But we’d never been 1-10. People were shocked and dismayed. We lost our first two in 2006 but then won 3 in a row. At last, we have lift-off to Greg Robinson Era. Then we lost 6 of our last 7. Then came a 2-10 team that was probably the worst G-Rob team, (the 2005 team had a decent defense: 2007 was terrible on both sides of the ball). There were scenes from practice showing players throwing uppercut punches rather than tacking. Robinson said “it’s the same motion”. Pictures of our linemen showed stomachs falling over their belts. “We tell them to lift weights”.
He had to come up with a winner in 2008 to save his job…and went 3-9, finishing at 10-37 for four years. Greg was supposed to arrest and reverse the decline of the program. Instead, he accelerated it. We’ve never really recovered from that disaster. Maybe the worst memory of that era is the pathetic “farewell” press conference, where he insisted he’d “seen flashes” while he was here, that the university should hire a coach “just like me”. Then he read a segment from the children’s book “the little engine that could”. He was the little engine that couldn’t.
We sent out an SOS to Coach Mac’s former All-East tackle, Doug Marrone, who had been an assistant at some top programs and in the NFL. He showed he wanted the job by arriving for his job interview with an arm-load of binders full of pages and graphs describing his plan for revitalizing the Syracuse program. He’d already been in touch with the guys he wanted on his coaching staff. He said that this was his “dream job”, the one he’d been working his whole life to get. He created visions of an SU alum having a long career, (he was in his early 40’s) as our football coach, joining Jim Boeheim as an alum having a legendary career as our basketball coach and Roy Simmons Jr. and his successor, John Desko, as alums having legendary careers as our lacrosse coaches.
Doug was positively euphoric at the beginning of his tenure here. He loved explaining every aspect of his job and what goes on during a game. He clearly was doing what he always dreamed of. He and his staff turned the recruiting emphasis back to the east after Robinson, a west coast guy with a staff full of guys with western backgrounds, had gone after top national recruits and done well to make the lists of many of them. But he hadn’t done well in actually getting them to come to Syracuse. Doug had a more focused approach, concentrating on traditional recruiting areas and guys who may not have been blue chippers but who could be ‘coached up’ to become good players at this level.
Doug’s first team went 4-8 but was more competitive than any of G-Rob’s teams. A big thing was that our offensive line got better and better. By his second year it was one of the best units on the team, a real positive for the first time in years. His defensive coordinator, Scott Shafer was an aggressive type who liked his defense to be a force on the field. That second year we went 8-5, including an exciting win over Kansas State, 36-34, in the initial Pinstripe Bowl in Yankee Stadium. We weren’t ‘back’, but we were getting there.
2011 started out strong. We won 5 of our first 7 games, the last a 49-23 thumping of #11 West Virginia in the Dome. We needed just one more win to go to a bowl game again and the possibility of climbing through the Top 25 and getting in a really good bowl was there. The future was bright. We didn’t win another game all season, finishing 5-7. There were rumors of a rift developing between Marrone and his team in the locker room, leading to a fist fight. There were disciplinary problems with star receiver Mike Williams. Marrone was also said to be disappointed with the school administration, which hadn’t kept some promises about coaching salaries. It may be recruiting, the art of begging teenagers to come to your school, was wearing him down a bit. Whatever the cause, the smile seemed to have been wiped off of Doug’s face. Giddy descriptions of a day in the life of a coach were replaced with curt, monosyllabic responses to reporter’s and fan’s questions.
The next year, Marrone and offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hacket devised an effective passing game, using the talents of quarterback Ryan Nassib and receivers Alec Lemon and Marcus Sales to re-write the Syracuse record book. We were snake-bit early on, losing by a point to Northwestern, getting beat by USC, fumbling a game at Minnesota away and losing a frustrating game in the Dome against Rutgers. But we closed out the season with 6 wins in 7 games, including another Pinstripe win over West Virginia, 38-14. During that stretch the news came down that Syracuse would be leaving the Big East conference and joining the ACC. We all felt good that we had a good football coach like Doug Marrone to see us through the transition.
Then, one day I tuned into the news to see a smiling Doug Marrone accepting the head coaching job of the Buffalo Bills. He gave no interviews and issued no statements about it. Syracuse had just ceased to be his ‘dream job’ and the opportunity to be a head coach in the NFL was too great to turn down. He could have coached here for a quarter century. Doug went 6-10, then 9-7 for the Bills, (and declared himself a ‘saint’ for having gone 25-25 at Syracuse), and abruptly left. He wanted the Jets job but didn’t get it, then became the head coach at Jacksonville, where he went 10-6 in his second year and made the AFC title game, losing to the Patriots. But in his 5th year they collapsed to 1-15 and Doug lost that job. Nick Saban hired him to be his offensive line coach and then the Saints, who fired him last February. His old friend Bill O’Brien hired him to be something called the ‘Senior Analyst for Football Strategy/Research’. Sounds like a dream job to me.
We promoted from within and hired Scott Shafer, who had been our defensive coordinator. Scott made an ambitious speech about “locking the doors of the Dome” when their teams came here. He inherited a strong line from Marrone but his defense seemed to decline without him running it. His first year was a bumpy but ultimately successful ride: we went 7-6 for our third winning record and bowl win in four years, this one the Texas Bowl, over Minnesota 21=17. But there had been a 27-48 loss at Northwestern, a 14-49 home drubbing to Clemson and eight touchdown annihilations to Georgia Tech (0-56) and Florida State (3-59). I was invited by friends to watch those last two games and we had lively conversations about anything but football.
In 2014, we opened with wind over Villanova and Central Michigan, and then lost 9 of our remaining 10 games. The offensive line was destroyed by injuries. In 2015 we won our first three games over Rhode Island, Wake Forest and Central Michigan, then lost 8 in a row before winning Shafer’s last game here over Boston College, 20-17. We played pretty well in the losses, especially in 24-34 and 27-37 to two top ten teams, the LSU Tigers and the Clemson Tigers, (whose bands kept playing “Hold That Tiger”). But losing is losing. The thing that may have sealed Shafer’s fate was when he left our start quarterback, Eric Dungey, in a game at Louisville, where we were down 10-41 with 7 minutes left. He got hurt and could not play the rest of the season. Scot said that he had left Eric in because he still thought we could make a comeback and win the game, (31 points in 7 minutes). Then his offensive coordinator said they sent Eric in, (after a Louisville turnover) because the back-up QB “hadn’t had time to get warmed up”. Who’s in charge here? Not Scott Shafer anymore.
This inaugurated a search for “the right guy”. After name names were rumored and discussed, they came up with a guy most of us had never heard of: Dino Babers. Babers had been a running back for the University of Hawaii in the early 80’s. He then went on a 30 year odyssey through the coaching ranged from Hawaii to Arizona State, Eastern Illinois, UNLV, Northern Arizona, Purdue, Arizona, Texas A&M, Pittsburgh, UCLA and Baylor until he finally got be a head coach back at Eastern Illinois. He spent two years there, going 7-5, then 12-2 before moving on to Bowling Green, where he went 8-6 and then 10-3.
What was exciting is the offensive numbers his teams had rolled up. Babers had been an assistant at Baylor under Art Briles when the previously moribund program suddenly erupted for a 10-3 season in 2011 when they scored 589 points, (45 a game). They scored 44 per game the next year, 52 the year after that and 48 the two years after that. Baber’s second year at Eastern Illinois, they scored 49 points a game. Their quarterback, Jimmy Garoppolo, completed 66% of his passes for 5,050 yards, 53 touchdowns and just 9 interceptions. Their leading receiver had 123 catches for 1,544 yards and 19 touchdowns and their second leading receiver had 85/1305/13. They had two 1,000 yard rushers, one of whom ran for 1,563 yards at 7.1 a crack and 12 scores. The other had 1,003/4.6/10. Baber’s second Bowling Green team averaged 42 points per game. Their quarterback, Matt Johnson completed 67% of his passes for 4,946 yards, 46 TDs and 9 picks. The leading receivers had 94/1,033/10 and 85/1,544/16. The leading rusher had 1,299 yards (5.8) and 15TDs.
We’ve never seen such numbers in Syracuse. From the time the Carrier Dome opened, it seemed obvious that this was the ideal place for a wide-open, passing oriented offense, (that could also run the ball because the defense was so spread out). We should have been Brigham Young, Houston or Texas Tech. Instead, we ran an option-based attack. One year, (1994), we had the fourth lowest number of passes in the country, ahead of Rice and a couple of service academies, all of whom ran the wishbone offense. The great Marvin Harrison started for three years here and caught 41,36 and 56 passes. He went to the pros and caught over 100 passes four times, with a high of 143. His son started for Ohio State the last two years and caught 67 and 77 passes. Now, with Babers, we were finally going to use the Dome the way it was meant to be used.
I found I liked Dino a lot. He had a very smooth, intelligent style of talking. He had many interests including movies, which he loved to talk about. He was a great story teller. He was also a man of solid values who viewed himself of “talking care of the children their parents sent us”. I thought he was a great “face of the program”. When he came here, he was full of confidence and enthusiasm. He had a system that he knew worked. He said that the conditioning his players were put through gave his team an edge over the opposition. Their pace of play would do the same. We would exhaust teams by the enormous numbers of plays we would run. They would fade as the game went along and we would keep going. He told us to close our eyes and dream of what would transpire. He also stressed faith, which he defined as “belief without evidence”. We had plenty of that that spring and summer.
Early on, there was plenty of evidence that he was the ‘right guy’ and that a great new era was dawning for SU football. His first season was an adventure. We went 4-8, just as Scott Shafer had the previous year. We ran into Lamar Jackson in our second game. He produced four touchdowns in 18 minutes on his way to a 7-35 Louisville lead in what became a 28-62 loss. Jackson rushed for 199 yards and passed for 411 on his way to the Heisman. A trip to Clemson resulted in a “Murphy’s Law 0-54 loss, including a pic six that bounced off 2-3 players. The season ended with a “defense optional” 61-76 loss at Pittsburgh that set an NCAA record for the highest combined score in a game that didn’t go into overtime. Someone said “At least the losses are more interesting”.
But we had a couple of guys put up Babers-like numbers: Amba Etta-Tawo, a Maryland transfer who had a career 38 catches for 438 yards and 1TD prior to 2016, exploded for 94/1482/14. Erv Phillips, who came in with 44/343/5, caught 90 balls for 822 yards and 6 scores. Alec Lemon had held the SU record for passes caught with 72 back in 2012. Our other numbers were mediocre. Eric Dungy passed for 2,679 yards and 15 touchdowns. Our leading rusher ran for 566 yards. But it was a start.
The next year brought the great victory over a #2 ranked Clemson team, in the Dome, 27-24. The circumstances were basically identical to our greatest upset, the 17-9 win over #1 Nebraska in 1984. We’ve been clobbered by the Huskers in Lincoln in 1983, 7-63 and, in ’84 lost to Rutgers the week before the big upset, 0-19 in the Dome. In 2016, we’d lost that 0-54 game at Clemson. In 2017, we’d lost our second game to Middle Tennessee State, (and their defensive coordinator, Scott Shaher, who smoked a victory cigar), 23-30. In both cases the visitors had no reason to think we’d give them any sort of game. In both cases, we did, and stayed in that game until, before the home crowd, we made the plays necessary to win the game and shock the country.
That got people all excited about the great things to come. We were 4-3 and had just defeated the #2 team in the country. Unfortunately, that was our last win of the season and we wound up 4-8 for the third time in a row. Steve Ismael caught 105 passes and Erv Phillips 89 but Dungey had only 14 TD passes and he was our leading rusher with 595 yards.
But the 2018 season was huge, or at least it seemed at the time. We won our first four, including a cathartic 30-7 win over a Florida State team that was at its lowest ebb after having clobbered us for years. Then we played a great game at Clemson, knocking Trevor Lawrence out of his first game as a starter, building up an early lead and holding on for dear life as the Tigers went to their ground game and finally broke through for the winning score in the final minute, 23-27. Then we lost a frustrating OT game at Pitt and won another four in a row. We played an unbeaten Notre Dame in Yankee Stadium and Dungey went down early. We were swimming upstream the rest of the way and lost 3-36. But Dungey was back for a win at BC and another bowl game win over West Virginia. 10-3, with two losses that were as close as they could be. If we’d won those games, we’d have been 11-1 in the regular season, the ACC Atlantic Division Champions and favored to gain revenge on Pitt in the ACC title game. We’d have been in the conversation for the 4 team playoff for the national title, (although I don’t think we would have gotten a bid: Clemson and Notre Dame wound up in it and they wouldn’t have taken another ACC team). We’d scored 523 points, 40 a game, Babers numbers, although nobody had more than 64 receptions or 1,000 yards rushing and Dungey had only 18 TD passes. But, hey, 40 ppg is 40 ppg and 10-3 is 10-3!
It produced another pleasant spring and summer: We were back, baby! Syracuse football was relevant again. When lists were made of opponents that made a team’s schedule difficult, we were on those lists. We were one of the “haves”, not the “have nots”. The good old days were back and the bad new days were gone. Our big fear was that Dino Babers would be ‘plucked’ by one of the big powers, maybe USC, and we’d have to start all over again. That wasn’t something we had to worry about. What did happen is hard to imagine.
The 2019 team seemed fully capable of following up on the success of the 2018 team. Dungy was gone but Tommy DeVito, the quarterback Dino had personally selected to be Syracuse’s version of Jimmy Garoppolo and Matt Johnson. Moe Neal, team’s top running back was back as were most of the receiving corps, to which a talented transfer from Michigan State, Triston Jackson was added. We had amazing talent in the defensive secondary: Andre Cisco, Ifeatu Melifonwu and Trill Williams all wound up in the NFL. But the season was ruined by stunningly inconsistent performances. In the second game, we played a Maryland team that would finish 3-8 and lost to them 20-63. Our guys were getting knocked over on every play. I’ve been a Syracuse fan since Ernie Davis was playing and that was the most unforgivable performance I have seen. It was a game we just didn’t seem ready to play. ESPN Gameday, which has never been at Syracuse, was all set to broadcast the Clemson game the next week but when they saw the Maryland score, they left. We lost that game 6-41. We won a couple of games, then lost five in a row, the last in the Dome to Boston College, a game where the Eagles scored five second quarter touchdowns, four of them on plays of 50 yards or more. We lost 27-58. The next week we went on the road and clobbered Duke 49-6. Then Louisville ran us out of their place, 34-56. The season ended with an overtime win over Wake Forest in the Dome on this play:
You can’t watch that too many times. But you can’t figure out how such a talented team needed that to avoid a 4-8 season record. This was followed up by the soul-crushing 2020 season, in which we got hit by more Covid opt-outs than anyone we played and then more injuries as well, (I think). The season was symbolized by the pre-game warm-up in which a reserve receiver bumped into all-American safety Andre Cisco and Andre sustained an injury that ended his season and, it turned out, his Syracuse career. and tumbled all the way to G-Rob land, 1-10. 2018 seemed 100 years ago.
The rest of Dino’s career here was a series of attempts to climb out of that hole. Each year featured promising starts and dismal endings. In 2021 we started out 3-1 and were 5-4 when we lost our last three games by a total of 79 points to wind up 5-7. In 2022 we won our first 6 games and lost 21-27 at Clemson in a clone of the 2018 game. That was the first of 5 straight losses. We wound up 7-5 but lost the Pinstripe Bowl to Minnesota. In 2023, we won our first 4, again lost to Clemson, the first of 5 in a row. We won 2 of the last three to get to 6-6 and go to a bowl game but Dino was gone by then. Much of the roster and staff opted out of the bowl game, which we lost 0-45 to South Florida.
I was a big Dino fan and felt it was vitally important that he be successful here. It seemed like our last chance to show we weren’t a bottom-feeder in the ACC to teenage recruits who had never seen anything else. I knew he’d reached the end of the line when he resurrected the “belief without evidence” line, urging the fans to have that attitude, even after 8 years. He grew more sullen and less forthcoming in his public appearances, much as Doug Marrone had when the going got rough here.
We now know that Athletic Director John Wildhack had basically demanded to see the evidence, telling Dino he needed to secure a winning record for 2023 by getting a seventh regular season win. When we lost to Georgia Tech to go 5-6, that was impossible and Dino was out. We never did have an offense that put up the numbers Baylor, Eastern Illinois and Bowling Green put up. Ryan Nassib still holds our passing records, (from 2012: 294/471, 62.4%, 3,749 yads, 26TDs, 10 interceptions). We wound up running the ‘Wildcat’. We were supposed to do everything faster than other teams but that evaporated. We were supposed to be better conditioned than other teams but I’m hearing all kinds of reports about how the 2024 Orangemen will be in better shape than they were last year. At the end Dino seemed like a magician who had run out of rabbits in his hat.
There were a lot of complaints about in-game decision making and clock management but Dino’s big problems were similar to his predecessors: talent and depth. We had some good individuals but usually not enough of them and there was a significant gap from the first team to the second and another beyond that. There was a lot of “under-the-radar recruiting. We couldn’t alternate players as much as other teams, which keeps them fresh and avoid injuries. When we lost a player, his replacement often wasn’t nearly as good and we wound up each year with a lot of players hurt but playing because they were still better than the guys behind them. These challenges will continue for any subsequent coaching staffs.
Another challenge is the lack of fan support. At it’s peak in 1996, Carrier Dome attendance for football averaged 48,177. We had 40,973 for last year’s Clemson game in the Dome and averaged 36,868. Those were tickets sold. A lot of fans came wearing chrome, (which is what the Dome’s benches were made of). The renovation of the Dome will reduce available seating capacity to about 42,000. Why have more seats when they will be empty? The consistently successful schools have stadiums with 70-100,000 capacity and fill them consistently. Basically, we’ve had the football program we deserve, based on the support we’ve given it.
Enter Fran Brown. Still another guy we had never heard of when he became our head coach. Several names we knew were rumored to be in the mix for the job and we wind up with an ‘owl’ (Who?) Well, this owl was voted the #1 recruiter in college football for 2023. Of course it might be easier to win that if you are recruiting for Georgia, the school that had won two national championships in a row and might have won a third if they’d been included in the 2023 playoffs (as they should have been).But Georgia competed with the top football factories in the country for 5 star guys and it was the assessment of recruiting ‘experts’ that the Bulldogs won that battle.
Brown was still another career assistant who got his first head coaching job here. He had been a star quarterback at Camden, NJ high school but wound up as a defensive back at Western Carolina, playing under Matt Ruhle. After failing to make the Cincinnati Bengals roster, he went into high school coaching and then became an assistant at Temple under Steve Addazio and then Ruhle, rising to “associate head coach” by his 6th year there. He was regarded as the top recruiter in the American Conference. (Temple, once the dregs of the old Big East conference, had 8 winning records in 11 years from 2009-19. We had 4.) When Ruhle went to Baylor, Brown followed him there, (another Baylor guy, though this one was post-Art Briles Baylor, which Ruhle brought back to success after the scandals: they were 1-11 his first year and 11-3 two years later). Brown was Ruhle’s top recruiter there, as well. Brown interviewed for the head coaching job at Temple in 2018 but lost out to Manny Diaz but was kept on as defensive coordinator. In 2019, when Greg Schiano returned to Rutgers, Fran moved to his staff as a secondary coach. Georgia hired him in the same capacity for the 2022 and won their second national championship. Then Fran pulled in the best recruiting class in the country and was named the country’s best recruiter. He was hired here based on that reputation and his extensive contacts in the Northeast, especially in the New Jersey and Philadelphia area, which produce a lot of talent. His success in recruiting since he was hired is also an indication that John Wildhack is determined to jack this program up and is providing the financial support necessary to do so. I wonder what Pasqualoni, Marrone, Shafer and Babers think of that? (Robinson is deceased.)
Fran Brown carries tough love, loss, and lessons from Camden as he builds his SU football program
Brown had two jobs: assemble a staff and start being the best recruiter of 2024. He went after them simultaneously, with one announcement following another. I’ll cover the players later but the combined impact was to create a level of excitement greater than we’d had probably since the opening of the Carrier Dome, well beyond the confident optimism G-Rob exuded, the dreamy return of Marrone, the determined speech of Shafer and the wonderful statistics of Babers. Most of the new people had prior relationships with him or came from his hometown recruiting area.
His first, (almost instantaneous) coaching hire was Elijah Robinson, a childhood friend from Camden who was the 2022 recruiter of the year, (giving us the last two winners), at Texas A&M, where he recruited “the greatest class of all time” according to one source. He will be the defensive coordinator and “assistant head coach”. Both men have coached under coaches who have won national championships, (Kriby Smart and Jimbo Fisher). Elijah was a “co-defensive coordinator and defensive line coach at A&M. Cuse.com doesn’t list a ‘defensive line coach’ so I assume he’ll be coaching the defensive tackles. He was an interim head coach at A&M last year after Fisher was fired.
The ”edge” coach, (defensive ends and outside linebackers) is Nick Williams, who was defensive line coach and…you guessed it… top recruiter for Deon Sanders at Colorado last season. Before that, he was at…you also guessed this…. Texas A&M and Georgia, where he landed the nation’s #1 class in 2018 and 2020 but was only #2 in 2019. Those are the guys that won those national championships. These guys could sell refrigerators to Eskimos and now they’ve got to sell Syracuse to recruits.
The new offensive coordinator is Jeff Nixon. Jeff was a co-offensive coordinator under Ruhle at Baylor from 2017-2019 but has otherwise been an NFL guy since 2007, coaching offense and special teams with the Eagles, running backs with the Dolphins, tight ends with the 49ers, running backs and offensive coordinator with the Panthers and “assistant head coach – offense” with the Giants. Before that, he was with…Temple! He’s played running back with West Virginia, then Penn State. He’s from the Pittsburgh area and there’s plenty of good recruiting there. But his best recruit may be his son, Will, who rushed for 301 yards at 6.1 a crack for Washington last year and played in the national championship game. He’s transferred to Syracuse to be coached by his father and will add some much-needed depth to our running back room.
James Vollono is our new special teams coach. He’s ben at Colorado and Georgia before but spent the last three seasons at Troy – no, not USC. The one in Alabama. This past season, kicker Scott Taylor Renfroe made 19-of-24 field goal attempts, the second-most makes in program history. Punter Robert Cole turned in the ninth-best season in school history, averaging 42.27 yards per punt. His coverage and return units were also strong in his time in Troy. In 2023, his punt unit ranked 36th nationally in punt return defense, surrendering just 5.64 yards per return. The year prior, Troy allowed just one punt return of more than 20 yards (23), and the kickoff team tied for eighth nationally in allowing just one kickoff return of more than 30 yards (36).” (Cuse.com) “Vollono has strong recruiting ties in the DMV (DC, Maryland, Virginia) area, where Syracuse would like to recruit heavily.” (Syracuse.com)
Robert Wright will coach our linebackers. He’s also our “co-defensive coordinator”. (How can you coordinate a defense when another guy is also coordinating it?) He’s a U of Miami grad and a former Texas A&M guy who should be able to recruit in both states. “Seven defensive players off A&M’s defenses have been drafted that were on the teams Wright worked with, including Justin Madubuike (Ravens), Bobby Brown III (Rams), Buddy Johnson (Steelers), DeMarvin Leal (Steelers), Michael Clemons (Jets), Antonio Johnson (Jaguars) and Jaylon Jones (Colts).” (Cuse.com)
Joe Schaefer is our new defensive backs coach. He came here from... Texas A&M! He was a linebackers coach there. “Schaefer started his tenure in College Station ahead of the 2022 season and spent this past year coaching outside linebackers. Texas A&M ranked sixth in the SEC and finished the regular season 21st nationally in passing yards allowed, giving up 188.3 per game over the 12-game slate in 2023. Overall, the Aggies finished third in the conference and 19th nationally in total defense (316.2 ypg.). The A&M defense was consistent in the backfield this season as well. The Aggies led the SEC and finished seventh nationally in sacks this season (3.23 per game) and were fifth nationally in tackles for loss (7.6 per game).” (Cuse.com) He’s from Ohio, another excellent recruiting area and went to Bowling Green.
Our new offensive line coach is Dale Williams, who has 25 years experience in that job, most recently at Louisville, who played in their first ever ACC championship game. Before that, he was at Purdue, where they led the Big Ten in passing, and Western Kentucky, where they put up Babers stats in passing and scoring. In 2014 Brandon Doughty passed for 4,830 yards, 49TDs, 10 picks. Leon Allen ran for 1,542 yards and caught 51 passes. They scored 44 points a game. The next year, Doughty had 5,055/48/9, Taywan Taylor caught 86 passes for 1,467 yards and 17TDs while Anhtony Wales ran for 1,091 yards at 7 yards a pop. They again scored 44 points/game. In 2016 Mike White threw for 4,363/37/7, Taylor had 98/1730/17 and Nick Norris had 76/1318/14 while Wales ran for 1,627 (6.8) and 27TDs. They scored 45.5. Dino’s teams failed to put up numbers like that largely due to the failure to put together a strong offensive line. Dale Williams IS an offensive line coach. He ought to be able to get it done.
Ross Douglas, most recently a wide receivers coach with the Patriots, now has that position with Syracuse. He’s also our “passing game coordinator”. I’m glad it will be coordinated this year. A native of Akron who went to Michigan, (the Wolverines get much of their talent from “that state down there”) and who was on the Rutgers staff when Fran was there. “He helped five Rutgers defensive backs to All-Big Ten honors in his tenure, including Tre Avery, Saquan Hampton (twice), Christian Izien, Brandon White and Avery Young.” (Cuse.com) I hope he doesn’t help any defensive backs to All-ACC honors.
Fran kept two guys from Dino’s staff. One was Nunzio Campanile, who had been a legend in the New jersey High School coaching ranks who was Dino’s tight ends coach, (meaning he helped to develop Oronde Gadsden and Dan Villari) and who took over as our interim coach after Dino was fired, something he’d also done at Rutgers back in 2019, (when he was on the same staff with Fran). That gives us two guys who have coached college football games on an interim basis. He is no Fran’s “Offensive Associate Head Coach/Quarterbacks Coach”. He’ll have to coordinate with the Offensive Coordinator, (Nixon), the Co-Offensive Coordinator, (Michael Johnson) and the Passing Game Coordinator (Douglas). They’ll figure it out.
Michael Johnson was the other hold-over. He’s now the tight ends coach and the “Co-Offensive Coordinator”. A native of LA, (another potentially import recruiting connection now that we have two California teams in the conference), who went to Arizona State and then transferred to Akron, where he set some school quarterback records. He’s coached at Oregon State, with the San Diego Chargers, where he coached Drew Brees and Doug Flutie, then the Falcons, where he coached Michael Vick, then the Ravens and the 49ers. Then he returned to college ball as the OC/WR coach at UCLA, where, he, like Robinson and Campanile filled in as an interim head coach. He then was a head coach in the Southern California high school ranks. Then he went to Oregon, Mississippi State, Florida Atlantic and Syracuse in 2022, so he’s had a long and varied career, mostly as a QB or WR coach. He gives three different coaches who have been, (interim), head coaches in college football games, which may be helpful for a new head coach who hasn’t. Michael also, like Jeff Nixon, had his son, Michael Johnson Jr., on the roster. He gives us some depth in the quarterback room.
This coaching staff was obviously brought together based on past relationships but I think they’ve also been chosen for their experience and the recruiting areas they know well. I think these guys know what they are doing. As the old saying goes, if they can’t do it, no one can. But can anyone do it? My first question on his first coach’s show will be whether this program presently is giving him all the tools he’ll need to succeed or is something missing. I’ll grant him that we need fannies in those new seats and they need to be loud fannies. (I may have to word that differently.)
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