Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="Cusefan95, post: 5694332, member: 173"] I'd quibble with a bunch of the underlying thoughts here, but don't think your grades are crazy. I think in order to "roll over" on a decision, you need to have some other viable option. JW didn't have that with Red, he played that hand about as well as he could since he had to expend most of his political capital gently easing JB to the door. I'm also going to give him an A on the hiring of Fran regardless - for Syracuse to have any success in football they will need to make some outside the box decisions. Those are by definition high risk. Even if Fran doesn't work out long term, we need an AD willing to push for those types of decisions in an organization which tends to be very risk averse. I think a C+ underestimates the challenges of being AD at Syracuse due to the messed up politics involved - while colleges athletics are political everywhere, there's more focus on winning normally. That there wasn't an internal chorus of people telling JB it was time years ago, but instead he had all kinds of backers as he ran the program into the ditch is evidence personal friendships and loyalty trump on field results at Syracuse. That is something every AD since Jake has had to deal with. There's also enough strikeouts on Wildhack's scorecard that A- is probably too generous. I'd say B but wouldn't argue with B+ or B- either. I don't think Syverud accomplished anything he'd had as stated goals, and managing to not get fired is a very low bar for a B-. I give him a lot of credit for being able to talk a great game and create the appearance of a vision. My suspicion is that he's very smart, has lofty goals for organizations, but doesn't recognize constraints well. Instead of accepting a small ball approach and hitting singles, he tries to hit grand slam home runs with the bases empty. It negatively impacts his effectiveness. He was better than recent chancellors..but that's also damning with faint praise. B- would be generous in my opinion, I'm closer to C. The biggest thing I think I've realized during their tenures is that Syracuse University is a bigger clustershow than I realized, and that its been a mess for ages. I was hard on Jake for a lot of the decisions during his tenure as AD, but I now think he did a solid job considering the internal factors he had to deal with. That I realized how tough Syracuse is partly because Kent and John did a decent job navigating through the nonsense is points in their favor. If I was in either of those roles, I think I would have pulled a Coyle and bounced after a year - both clearly have diplomatic and interpersonal skills I both lack and admire. [/QUOTE]

Verification: What is a Syracuse fan's favorite color?