SWC75
Bored Historian
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2011
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(I'll be posting chapters of this twice a day: one early, one late.)
The Situation
One cannot talk about an individual school or team these days without discussing what’s going on in the world of college sports as it impacts all of them College sports pre-dates pro sports, radio, television, cable television and the internet. Its ’life blood’ – and the reason it’s survived all these things – is that it representments smaller communities, cities, states and TV markets, fans who want their local team to “put them on the map”. It’s what I call ‘existential rooting’ – we win; therefore we are. Fans in the big cities already know they are on the map. They want their teams to live up to the image their city already has: if it says “New York” on your uniform you are supposed to be in first place. If it says “Chicago”, you are supposed to hit hard. If it says “Los Angeles, you should be putting on a show, etc. etc.
I remember growing up that, whenever a national broadcaster mentioned Syracuse, it was always “Syracuse New York”, to distinguish us from Syracuse, Indiana, Syracuse, Kansas, Syracuse, Missouri, Syracuse, Nebraska, Syracuse, Ohio, Syracuse, Oregon, Syracuse, Utah or even the one in Sicily. But when we had Jim Brown, Ernie Davis, Floyd Little, Larry Csonka or Dave Bing playing for us, people knew which one we were. Later, when we had the confluence of Jim Boeheim, the Big East, ESPN and the Carrier Dome, we became “The Cuse”. Everybody knew who we were.
In recent years, we’ve slipped on all fronts. Our football team has been stuck in a rut since 2002, when, after 15 consecutive winning seasons, we’ve gone 107-161, just short of a .400 winning percentage, 105th best, (of 128) major college teams. The last ten years, the final polls of the basketball regular season have contained NO votes for Syracuse to be in the top 25. We’ve had four teams make the NCAA tournament in that time. One made the Final Four, (eight years ago), and two made the “Sweet 16”. The Final Four team was the worst team there and wound up ranked #10. One of the Sweet 16 teams was ranked #25. The other had the most votes of any team not in the top 25. In 2022, we completed our first losing season in 54 years. Even our top non-revenue sport, lacrosse, has declined. We went to 27 Final Fours from 1980-2013 and won 11 national championships. Since then, we haven’t made it past the quarterfinals and even had a losing record, (4-10) in 2022. It was the first school year in history where all those three teams had losing records. We have become irrelevant.
And it has become very important to be relevant. College sports used to be divided in a general impression of “big time” and “small time” teams. Then, in 1958, the NCAA formalized it as the “University Division” and “College Division”. In 1973 they split it into three divisions, I, II, and III, (or 1, 2 and 3). Many schools who belonged in II insisted on being included in I, so in 1978 they split Division I into 1A and 1AA so those teams could be in Division 1 but still have a championship they could win, but many teams wanted to be in division 1A, even though they essentially had no chance to win a title there. In 2006, the NCAA changed the names to the “Football Bowl Subdivision”, (FBS) and the “Football Championship Subdivision”, (FCS), which otherwise changed nothing. It’s unofficial but the conferences with schools that had a legitimate chance at a national title have come to be known as the “Power Conferences” and the five remaining conferences have been dubbed “The Group of 5”, (who really belong in FCS). Syracuse has been “big time”, University Division, Division I, Division 1A, FBS and “Power Conference”. We have not been an elite program, in the sense of a perennial national championship contender but we’ve been in whatever division was the top division. The feeling is strong here that that’s where we belong. “We are SU!”
But now the forces of change are creating a level of competition that has never existed before. The Big 10 and the SEC are in an arms race to build what are being called “Super Conferences”. The idea is to bring together schools who are either elite football programs or will bring in the nation’s largest TV markets. Each game would be clashes of football or media powerhouses and schools that were neither would be cut out of it and thus the big, delicious pie would not have to be shared with them. I call it the “college football rapture” in which the chosen schools will be transported to an economic and competitive heaven while the rest of us will be “left behind”.
The other thing, besides representing small markets, that has fueled interest in college sports, in natural rivalries. Long before people even cared who the national champion was, teams wanted to beat their closest rivals. And hopefully, they had one big rival they wanted to beat more than anyone else and who wanted to beat them more than anyone else. It could make your whole season – or theirs. Conferences gave your team and their best rivals something tangible to play for. Fans could go not only to home games but to road games easily. Players who played with or against each other in high school would continue to do so in college. And the conferences as well as the teams had personalities. They represented various parts of the country and got most of their players from there. Sports Illustrated once described it this way: “In the East, football is a cultural event. In the North, it’s a battle of gladiators. In the West, it’s a fiesta. In the South, it’s a religion. In Texas, it’s a way of life.”
The people, (mostly TV) people trying to create the super-conferences, have taken a buzzsaw to all that. It started years ago, (1983) when SU’s biggest rival, (to us, anyway), Penn State left Eastern football and rivalries that dated back to early in the 20th century for the Big Ten. That at least made some sense: they were a state University adjacent to the Big Ten, which is mostly state universities. In 1992, Arkansas jumped from the SWC to the SEC. This also make some sense as they were the only Southwestern Conference team not in Texas and they were adjacent to the Southeastern Conference. In 1994, the Big 12 conference was created. It consisted of the entirety of the old Big 8 conference plus four teams from, the SWC, (my favorite conference), leaving out Rice, Southern Methodist, Texas Christian and Houston, leaving them to wander the college football landscape in search of a new home. Eastern football, which had finally formed the Big East Football Conference in 1991, came apart, first when U of Miami, Boston College and Virginia Tech left for the ACC in 2004 and then when Syracuse, Pittsburgh and Notre Dame, (on a provisional basis), followed in 2013, only to see Maryland leave the ACC for the Big 10, which also added Rutgers in 2014, after having lured Nebraska in 2011. The SEC pulled in Missouri and Texas A&M in 2012. The Big 12 replaced them with former SWC school Texas Chrisitan and traditionally eastern school West Viriginia. But the big moves were this year: The SEC pulled in Texas and Oklahoma while the Big 12 tried to replace them with another former SWC school, Houston, Brigham Young, Central Florida and Cincinnati. Then the gravitational forces pulled apart the Pac12: Southern California, UCLA, Oregon and Washington joined the Big 10. The Big 12 grabbed Arizona, Arizona State, former Big 8/12 team Colorado and Utah. But the most bizarre move, geographically was the ACC, amid rumors that Clemson and Florida State were trying to leave, brought in Southern Methodist, Stanford and California. They should call the new group the “Coast Conference” vs. the “Atlantic Coast Conference”. The ‘Big 12’ now has 16 teams and the ‘Big 10’ has 18. The SEC has 16. Southern California vs. Rutgers is now a conference game, as is Syracuse vs. Stanford. Does that make sense?
It's more than just the numbers: It’s the star quality. Looking at last year’s Top 25, (the writer’s poll), 9 of the top 10 teams will be in the Big 10 or the SEC this year, and 14 of the 25. These two conferences are looking to totally dominate college football in the future and have all the big games be games in their super-conference or in a game against the other super-conference. All eyes will be on them and nobody else and the national championship will be a battle between their teams.
Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) - Godzilla vs. Kong Scene (2/10) | Movieclips
They can leave the NCAA and create their own organization featuring the only games anyone cares about and not have to share it with all those small-market, non-football factory, irrelevant left behind teams!
Years ago I wrote a letter to Syracuse Athletic Director Jake Crouthamel. I don’t even recall what it was about but I recall his terse response: “College sports is about one thing: MONEY!”, and whatever I was suggesting was ever going to happen because it wouldn’t produce as much money. I wondered why college sports would be about one thing. Shouldn’t it be about the students and their development as human beings? If you are going to charge admission, shouldn’t it be about the fans, just a little bit? The school? The community? The sport?
And where does the money come from? Whether it’s buying tickets, parking, concessions, sitting through TV and radio commercials, subscribing to steaming videos or filling the coffers of NIL, (Name, Image and Likeness) funds? Where does that money come from? Doesn’t it come from the fans? Is there a fan anywhere who wrote to an AD, as I did, sent a letter to an editor, called into a radio show, posted an opinion online or answered a poll by saying that he wanted Southern Cal and Rutgers or Syracuse and Stanford to be in the same conference?
No. It was done by TV, (and internet), executives who think that bringing together ‘name’ teams and big markets will increase the amount of money they and the schools will make. But will it? Are football fans going to pay more for something they don’t want and something their team isn’t a part of? College sports are notoriously low on the totem poll in the big cities these days. Rutgers certainly does give the Big 10 New York City and Northwestern doesn’t give them Chicago. USC and UCLA generate more interest in LA but I’m not sure it compares to the Rams and the Chargers. Or the Dodgers and the Lakers. It certainly won’t now. By leaving behind the “irrelevants”, they are cutting themselves off from the fan bases of dozens of teams that had been competing with them for conference and national titles. They will now be following their own teams to see what titles they can win in whatever conferences or divisions they will be in now.
I’m thinking they may actually be better off as the “left behind” schools will be free to organize themselves into conferences that make geographical sense and will be full of traditional rivals who also didn’t ‘make the cut’ for the super-conferences. I also think that the football factories would miss the schools they left behind. They used to go 12-0 is a good year and 10-2 in a bad year. What if they start going 8-4 in a good year and 4-8 in a bad one because they are facing other powerhouses on a regular basis. The ‘left behinds’ would have a tough time competing in a super conference against those powerhouses. If Syracuse became part of, say, an eastern division of the Big Ten, we might have to play Penn State this week, Ohio State next week, then the Michigan schools, then Notre Dame. We could wind up being bottom feeders every year.
But we could be in a “left behind’ conference with Army, Navy, Boston College, Connecticut, Rutgers, Temple, Pittsburgh, West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia and Virginia Tech. That’s a conference a good Syracuse team could win. And being in a division full of such teams could produce a national championship. That’s our level. It always has been. Schools like North Dakota State and Mount Union have had a lot of fun winning national titles at other than the top division. Now that a division is being created that has never existed before, I’m inclined to let them go and stay where we are. Even that division isn’t the top: the NFL is.
That’s not a popular view here and it’s clearly not the view of our current AD, John Wildhack, an alum, (and former member of the Syracusefan.com board) and former ESPN executive. He’s clearly shoveling as much coal into the boiler as he can to get SU going again. If we were what we were at the beginning of this century, we could be a strong candidate for a role in a super-conference. We’d had a 15 year streak of winning seasons from 1987-2001, during which we had the 10th best record in the country:
I-A Winning Percentage 1987-2001
…and beat teams that will surely be in the super conferences, such as Penn State, Louisiana State, Georgia, Florida, Ohio State, U of Miami and Michigan. Our basketball team was in the midst of their
long streak of winning seasons. In those 15 years they wound up in the Top 25 thirteen times, in the Top 10 five times and played for the national title twice, (and won it two years later). The lacrosse team was in the final four every one of those years and won 6 national titles, (and 4 more before the decade is out). Wildhack remembers that era and wants us to return to that level. He’s changed the head coach in all three sports in this decade. The quality of our recruiting classes has gone up with each coaching change, which is both a credit to the new staff and is also evidence that our ability to raise and spend NIL money has suddenly increased. Meanwhile the Dome, (now the JMA Wireless Dome -they were willing to pay more money), is getting a facelift. We are making a desperate bid to prove we belong in the super-conferences.
This is also not a popular opinion around here, but I don’t think we’ll be chosen. We represent a small market and even if we have a few good years in our major sports, it would take a decade or more of consistent success to really make a case for inclusion. But we could have a good time trying and I don’t think it will be a disaster if we don’t make it: it might be one if we did.
www.youtube.com
The Situation
One cannot talk about an individual school or team these days without discussing what’s going on in the world of college sports as it impacts all of them College sports pre-dates pro sports, radio, television, cable television and the internet. Its ’life blood’ – and the reason it’s survived all these things – is that it representments smaller communities, cities, states and TV markets, fans who want their local team to “put them on the map”. It’s what I call ‘existential rooting’ – we win; therefore we are. Fans in the big cities already know they are on the map. They want their teams to live up to the image their city already has: if it says “New York” on your uniform you are supposed to be in first place. If it says “Chicago”, you are supposed to hit hard. If it says “Los Angeles, you should be putting on a show, etc. etc.
I remember growing up that, whenever a national broadcaster mentioned Syracuse, it was always “Syracuse New York”, to distinguish us from Syracuse, Indiana, Syracuse, Kansas, Syracuse, Missouri, Syracuse, Nebraska, Syracuse, Ohio, Syracuse, Oregon, Syracuse, Utah or even the one in Sicily. But when we had Jim Brown, Ernie Davis, Floyd Little, Larry Csonka or Dave Bing playing for us, people knew which one we were. Later, when we had the confluence of Jim Boeheim, the Big East, ESPN and the Carrier Dome, we became “The Cuse”. Everybody knew who we were.
In recent years, we’ve slipped on all fronts. Our football team has been stuck in a rut since 2002, when, after 15 consecutive winning seasons, we’ve gone 107-161, just short of a .400 winning percentage, 105th best, (of 128) major college teams. The last ten years, the final polls of the basketball regular season have contained NO votes for Syracuse to be in the top 25. We’ve had four teams make the NCAA tournament in that time. One made the Final Four, (eight years ago), and two made the “Sweet 16”. The Final Four team was the worst team there and wound up ranked #10. One of the Sweet 16 teams was ranked #25. The other had the most votes of any team not in the top 25. In 2022, we completed our first losing season in 54 years. Even our top non-revenue sport, lacrosse, has declined. We went to 27 Final Fours from 1980-2013 and won 11 national championships. Since then, we haven’t made it past the quarterfinals and even had a losing record, (4-10) in 2022. It was the first school year in history where all those three teams had losing records. We have become irrelevant.
And it has become very important to be relevant. College sports used to be divided in a general impression of “big time” and “small time” teams. Then, in 1958, the NCAA formalized it as the “University Division” and “College Division”. In 1973 they split it into three divisions, I, II, and III, (or 1, 2 and 3). Many schools who belonged in II insisted on being included in I, so in 1978 they split Division I into 1A and 1AA so those teams could be in Division 1 but still have a championship they could win, but many teams wanted to be in division 1A, even though they essentially had no chance to win a title there. In 2006, the NCAA changed the names to the “Football Bowl Subdivision”, (FBS) and the “Football Championship Subdivision”, (FCS), which otherwise changed nothing. It’s unofficial but the conferences with schools that had a legitimate chance at a national title have come to be known as the “Power Conferences” and the five remaining conferences have been dubbed “The Group of 5”, (who really belong in FCS). Syracuse has been “big time”, University Division, Division I, Division 1A, FBS and “Power Conference”. We have not been an elite program, in the sense of a perennial national championship contender but we’ve been in whatever division was the top division. The feeling is strong here that that’s where we belong. “We are SU!”
But now the forces of change are creating a level of competition that has never existed before. The Big 10 and the SEC are in an arms race to build what are being called “Super Conferences”. The idea is to bring together schools who are either elite football programs or will bring in the nation’s largest TV markets. Each game would be clashes of football or media powerhouses and schools that were neither would be cut out of it and thus the big, delicious pie would not have to be shared with them. I call it the “college football rapture” in which the chosen schools will be transported to an economic and competitive heaven while the rest of us will be “left behind”.
The other thing, besides representing small markets, that has fueled interest in college sports, in natural rivalries. Long before people even cared who the national champion was, teams wanted to beat their closest rivals. And hopefully, they had one big rival they wanted to beat more than anyone else and who wanted to beat them more than anyone else. It could make your whole season – or theirs. Conferences gave your team and their best rivals something tangible to play for. Fans could go not only to home games but to road games easily. Players who played with or against each other in high school would continue to do so in college. And the conferences as well as the teams had personalities. They represented various parts of the country and got most of their players from there. Sports Illustrated once described it this way: “In the East, football is a cultural event. In the North, it’s a battle of gladiators. In the West, it’s a fiesta. In the South, it’s a religion. In Texas, it’s a way of life.”
The people, (mostly TV) people trying to create the super-conferences, have taken a buzzsaw to all that. It started years ago, (1983) when SU’s biggest rival, (to us, anyway), Penn State left Eastern football and rivalries that dated back to early in the 20th century for the Big Ten. That at least made some sense: they were a state University adjacent to the Big Ten, which is mostly state universities. In 1992, Arkansas jumped from the SWC to the SEC. This also make some sense as they were the only Southwestern Conference team not in Texas and they were adjacent to the Southeastern Conference. In 1994, the Big 12 conference was created. It consisted of the entirety of the old Big 8 conference plus four teams from, the SWC, (my favorite conference), leaving out Rice, Southern Methodist, Texas Christian and Houston, leaving them to wander the college football landscape in search of a new home. Eastern football, which had finally formed the Big East Football Conference in 1991, came apart, first when U of Miami, Boston College and Virginia Tech left for the ACC in 2004 and then when Syracuse, Pittsburgh and Notre Dame, (on a provisional basis), followed in 2013, only to see Maryland leave the ACC for the Big 10, which also added Rutgers in 2014, after having lured Nebraska in 2011. The SEC pulled in Missouri and Texas A&M in 2012. The Big 12 replaced them with former SWC school Texas Chrisitan and traditionally eastern school West Viriginia. But the big moves were this year: The SEC pulled in Texas and Oklahoma while the Big 12 tried to replace them with another former SWC school, Houston, Brigham Young, Central Florida and Cincinnati. Then the gravitational forces pulled apart the Pac12: Southern California, UCLA, Oregon and Washington joined the Big 10. The Big 12 grabbed Arizona, Arizona State, former Big 8/12 team Colorado and Utah. But the most bizarre move, geographically was the ACC, amid rumors that Clemson and Florida State were trying to leave, brought in Southern Methodist, Stanford and California. They should call the new group the “Coast Conference” vs. the “Atlantic Coast Conference”. The ‘Big 12’ now has 16 teams and the ‘Big 10’ has 18. The SEC has 16. Southern California vs. Rutgers is now a conference game, as is Syracuse vs. Stanford. Does that make sense?
It's more than just the numbers: It’s the star quality. Looking at last year’s Top 25, (the writer’s poll), 9 of the top 10 teams will be in the Big 10 or the SEC this year, and 14 of the 25. These two conferences are looking to totally dominate college football in the future and have all the big games be games in their super-conference or in a game against the other super-conference. All eyes will be on them and nobody else and the national championship will be a battle between their teams.
Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) - Godzilla vs. Kong Scene (2/10) | Movieclips
They can leave the NCAA and create their own organization featuring the only games anyone cares about and not have to share it with all those small-market, non-football factory, irrelevant left behind teams!
Years ago I wrote a letter to Syracuse Athletic Director Jake Crouthamel. I don’t even recall what it was about but I recall his terse response: “College sports is about one thing: MONEY!”, and whatever I was suggesting was ever going to happen because it wouldn’t produce as much money. I wondered why college sports would be about one thing. Shouldn’t it be about the students and their development as human beings? If you are going to charge admission, shouldn’t it be about the fans, just a little bit? The school? The community? The sport?
And where does the money come from? Whether it’s buying tickets, parking, concessions, sitting through TV and radio commercials, subscribing to steaming videos or filling the coffers of NIL, (Name, Image and Likeness) funds? Where does that money come from? Doesn’t it come from the fans? Is there a fan anywhere who wrote to an AD, as I did, sent a letter to an editor, called into a radio show, posted an opinion online or answered a poll by saying that he wanted Southern Cal and Rutgers or Syracuse and Stanford to be in the same conference?
No. It was done by TV, (and internet), executives who think that bringing together ‘name’ teams and big markets will increase the amount of money they and the schools will make. But will it? Are football fans going to pay more for something they don’t want and something their team isn’t a part of? College sports are notoriously low on the totem poll in the big cities these days. Rutgers certainly does give the Big 10 New York City and Northwestern doesn’t give them Chicago. USC and UCLA generate more interest in LA but I’m not sure it compares to the Rams and the Chargers. Or the Dodgers and the Lakers. It certainly won’t now. By leaving behind the “irrelevants”, they are cutting themselves off from the fan bases of dozens of teams that had been competing with them for conference and national titles. They will now be following their own teams to see what titles they can win in whatever conferences or divisions they will be in now.
I’m thinking they may actually be better off as the “left behind” schools will be free to organize themselves into conferences that make geographical sense and will be full of traditional rivals who also didn’t ‘make the cut’ for the super-conferences. I also think that the football factories would miss the schools they left behind. They used to go 12-0 is a good year and 10-2 in a bad year. What if they start going 8-4 in a good year and 4-8 in a bad one because they are facing other powerhouses on a regular basis. The ‘left behinds’ would have a tough time competing in a super conference against those powerhouses. If Syracuse became part of, say, an eastern division of the Big Ten, we might have to play Penn State this week, Ohio State next week, then the Michigan schools, then Notre Dame. We could wind up being bottom feeders every year.
But we could be in a “left behind’ conference with Army, Navy, Boston College, Connecticut, Rutgers, Temple, Pittsburgh, West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia and Virginia Tech. That’s a conference a good Syracuse team could win. And being in a division full of such teams could produce a national championship. That’s our level. It always has been. Schools like North Dakota State and Mount Union have had a lot of fun winning national titles at other than the top division. Now that a division is being created that has never existed before, I’m inclined to let them go and stay where we are. Even that division isn’t the top: the NFL is.
That’s not a popular view here and it’s clearly not the view of our current AD, John Wildhack, an alum, (and former member of the Syracusefan.com board) and former ESPN executive. He’s clearly shoveling as much coal into the boiler as he can to get SU going again. If we were what we were at the beginning of this century, we could be a strong candidate for a role in a super-conference. We’d had a 15 year streak of winning seasons from 1987-2001, during which we had the 10th best record in the country:
I-A Winning Percentage 1987-2001
…and beat teams that will surely be in the super conferences, such as Penn State, Louisiana State, Georgia, Florida, Ohio State, U of Miami and Michigan. Our basketball team was in the midst of their
long streak of winning seasons. In those 15 years they wound up in the Top 25 thirteen times, in the Top 10 five times and played for the national title twice, (and won it two years later). The lacrosse team was in the final four every one of those years and won 6 national titles, (and 4 more before the decade is out). Wildhack remembers that era and wants us to return to that level. He’s changed the head coach in all three sports in this decade. The quality of our recruiting classes has gone up with each coaching change, which is both a credit to the new staff and is also evidence that our ability to raise and spend NIL money has suddenly increased. Meanwhile the Dome, (now the JMA Wireless Dome -they were willing to pay more money), is getting a facelift. We are making a desperate bid to prove we belong in the super-conferences.
This is also not a popular opinion around here, but I don’t think we’ll be chosen. We represent a small market and even if we have a few good years in our major sports, it would take a decade or more of consistent success to really make a case for inclusion. But we could have a good time trying and I don’t think it will be a disaster if we don’t make it: it might be one if we did.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture - Spock Enters V'ger
www.youtube.com
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