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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 741080, member: 289"] THE BIG BREAK THROUGH 1956 was the break-through year of the Schwartzwalder Era. Ben had taken over a 1-8 team from 1948 and gone 4-5 in his first year in 1949. They improved to 5-5, then 5-4 before the apparent breakthrough in 1952, when we went 7-2 losing only to a service team and national champion Michigan State and winning the Lambert Trophy as the best team in the east. But it was a down year of the east with perennial power Army laid low by the cribbing scandal. The Michigan State loss was a huge blow-out, 7-48 and the Orange Bowl was even worse, a 6-61humilation vs. Alabama. Everybody concluded that Syracuse wasn’t much of a team, despite their mild success. 5-3-1, 4-4 and 5-3 seasons followed. We were still pretty much irrelevant. But there were signs for those who looked for them. Wins over Army, (which was back on its feet) and West Virginia, who had become a power under Pappy Lewis were impressive. Schwartzwalder had been building up the talent in the program. And one of his players would become the greatest running back in the game’s history. The glory era for Ben was 1956-67. The Orange went 89-31-1(.740), the 7th best major college record in the country during that stretch: [url]http://football.stassen.com/cgi-bin/records/calc-wp.pl?start=1956&end=1967&rpct=30&min=5&se=on&by=Win+Pct[/url] Four of the teams ahead of us were what would be called “mid-majors” now. Bowling Green was actually a small college team until 1962. Dartmouth dominated the Ivy League in that era. It hadn’t been a formal conference until 1956 and in that year the member schools de-emphasized football. They are now FCS schools, of course. Arizona State was in something called the Border Conference and Wyoming in the Skyline Conference before becoming charter members of the Western Athletic Conference in 1962. The Sun Devils didn’t really make it big until the 1970’s when they became the Boise State of that era and then joined what became the Pac 10. Wyoming never made that move. The only teams ahead of Syracuse in the period that would now be considered “BCS teams” would be Mississippi and Alabama, both of whom neither used nor played anyone who used black players. In this period of a dozen years, Syracuse out-performed Texas, Arkansas, Ohio State, LSU, Oklahoma, Auburn, Penn State, (against who we were 8-4), Florida, Southern California, Tennessee, Nebraska, Notre Dame, Miami, Florida State and Michigan. It was helpful that one-platoon, limited substitution football prevailed through most of this period. That required far fewer players: even the kickers were not specialists: they were the best kickers among the position players. Traveling squads were often less than 40 players. There isn’t a single key player form that period that wasn’t from New York State or an adjacent state: Jim Brown, (Manhasset), Jim Ridlon, (Nyack), Ron Luciano, (Endicott), Maury Youmans,(Mattydale), Roger Davis, (Ohio), Art Baker, John Brown, (New Jersey), Fred Mautino, (Pennsylvania), Al Bemiller, (Pennsylvania), Ernie Davis, (Elmira), Dick Easterly, (Syracuse), John Mackey, (Freeport), Walt Sweeney, (Massachusetts), Dave Meggyesy, (Ohio), Jim Nance, (Pennsylvania), Wally Mahle, (Pennsylvania), Pat Killorin, (Watertown), Floyd Little, (Connecticut), Gary Bugenhagen, (Clarence), Larry Csonka, (Ohio), Jim Cheyunski, (Massachusetts), Tony Kyasky, (Connecticut), Art Thoms, (New Jersey), etc. These players grew up as fans of the program- or at least they had Syracuse on their short list from early on. It made them easier to recruit. An ageing stadium and lack of other facilities didn’t matter nearly as much as they do today. With two platoon, (unlimited substitution) football, you needed to fill a two deep on both sides of the ball and have situational players and specialists. Teams sometimes now have 100 or more players on their rosters, including walk-ons. They have to recruit from all over the country to fill those rosters. Most of the players have barely heard of the school and hardly cared about it until serious recruiting began. When they come here, we need to dazzle them with the stadium and facilities to get them interested. Back then all you needed was a coach who knew what he was doing. And we had one. [/QUOTE]

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