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Message: [QUOTE="A Clockwork Orange, post: 4896494, member: 16"] I disagree. Syracuse was still relevant when GRob tanked the program. The arms race of college football wasn't at its peak yet. I believed SU could make a new hire and turn it around in pretty quick order. They were still a name in college football. Doug Marrone did that. Since then, this program has been peripherally relevant, and that loss to BC was a nail in the coffin of a coach who was a great leader of men but not a great head football coach. In that decade since Marrone left, the college football landscape had shifted in ways that it had not since two-platoon football debuted. We are now in a place where the only thing that matters is money, money, money. Something SU has always been short of. Even in the '90s heyday, they did it on a shoestring, but they weren't so far away from the top of the sport because it hadn't yet become a semi-professional league. The next hire for the program was pretty much it. Get it wrong, and in 3-5 years, the NCAA, ESPN, and the powers of college football plan to move FBS to two tiers. If SU continues to be mediocre, there's a better-than-even chance they'll be in that lower tier. That's why I think it was the lowest of the low. I didn't see a way to hire the type of coach we would need to make us relevant again. 2008-2009, we needed someone to keep us clinging to relevance. The fact that GameDay did a HUGE story on SU football in 2008 about how far we'd fallen proved SU was still relevant enough. We are teetering on the brink right now and need this kind of electricity in the program. If Coach Fran can pull this off and string together a few 8 and 9-win seasons, it will be a reclamation project that potentially changes the course of big-time college athletics at SU. I really don't believe I'm overstating that based on where college football is now and where it will go in the next 5-10 years. [/QUOTE]

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