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Coach Babers’s show this year show will be Thursday nights at 7PM except when the game is not on a Saturday.
I’ll be summarizing the comments directly related to the team and the next game (late) on the night of the broadcast and anything else interesting the next day, (if there is anything else that seems interesting). I’ll have a “first hour” and a “second hour” question.
They are doing the show on Zoom, not at any local restaurant.
You can also listen to the show live each week on the Syracuse IMG Sports Network and Cuse.com. Wednesday's show will be on 99.1 FM and 97.7 FM, as well. The show will regularly air on 99.5FM (Syracuse) 99.1 FM (Utica) and 1200 AM.”
You can also get it on: Home | Free Internet Radio | TuneIn
There hasn’t been any change in the phone numbers, which last year were 315-424-8599 (local) or 1-888-746-2873. You can call to ask questions or submit them via Twitter at: https://twitter.com/CuseIMG
#AskDino or through Cuse.com, (the SU Athletic website):
Submit a Question! - Syracuse University Athletics
You can (or could last year, anyway), listen to a podcast of the show, probably the next day, at: Search results for babers | Free Internet Radio | TuneIn
I’ve been asked to continue doing the summaries, even by people who listen to the podcasts. I may focus on the major points, rather than trying to record everything.
My Question(s) or Comments
Firstly, Coach, I’d like to thank you for your patient and thoughtful answers to our questions through a difficult season. I’ve noticed two tendencies: you won’t reveal anything that might be of interest to an opponent and you want both praise and blame to be shared by the team and not be about individuals or even groups. You are correct to point out that a player who made a bad play at the end of a game didn’t lose it all by himself. Even the results of a particular play can be impacted by things the fans never see involving other players. And if all the attention goes to one guy, your team becomes less of a team. You understand this and that’s why we respect you so much and want you to succeed here.
I’ll end my Errol Flynn binge with his most famous film, “The Adventures of Robin Hood”, still another story of the good guys triumphing over bad times and great odds to triumph in the end. I believe that there are players on this year’s team who will be on the next really good SU team. We should be proud of all of our teams but this season hasn’t been much fun and we aren’t a band of “merry men” right now but we will someday if we stick with it.
Hollywood’s greatest swordfight:
On this last show I’ll make my annual pitch for a two running back backfield. I grew up with Floyd Little pairing with first Jim Nance and then Larry Csonka with the bigger man doing most of the running between the tackles and the faster man running wide or catching passes and the defenses having to deal with both. We went with pocket passers and a single running back this year and it wasn’t enough. Sean Tucker seems like a special talent and you’ve got a high school recruit who runs like he’s Derrick Henry at that level and might do the same here. That would be a load for defenses to deal with, especially if they are geared to stop the spread. You could still bring in a slot guy on third down. Just something to think about.
Finally I’ll ask, with the transfer portal about to become a cornucopia, what role will it play in your plans to acquire talent for future years? We discussed last week how the best players don’t seem to stay for four years anymore. What percentage of your players are likely to be traditional high school recruits and what percent age are likely to be transfers in the future?
(Note: This week’s show will be on Wednesday because of the basketball game tomorrow. The first Jim Boeheim Show is not scheduled yet. The best the station could tell me was that it would be in ”mid-December”.)
The Show
(I sometimes re-arrange the comments so that statements made on the same subject are reported together, even if they came at different points of the show.)
Matt Park: “One more time up the hill…” Dino: “One more opportunity to play and get better. We like the challenge. If you don’t get these opportunities nobody will know your name. If somebody’s ringing the bell, we’ll answer the call. If we have to move guys around to do it, we will. “Matt said that it was “easier said than done to comeback from an injury in the same season. If you can do it like Dakota Davis, it allows you to get stronger elsewhere.” Dino: “If it would have killed an eligibility year, he would not have come back. But the NCAA granted everyone an extra year so that allowed him to come back this year. We want to give the kids a chance to fulfill their potential here.”
John in Baltimore beat me to the phone and basically asked my question about the transfer portal. He also wanted to know what would fix the running game. Dino: “We’re always trying to create the best team you can have. It all depends who is in the transfer portal and our availability of scholarships. We have to look at the positions of need and whether the right person is available. We’ve played a lot of young players who couldn’t lift or train as they normally would and they have to get used to this level of competition with their minds and their bodies. We could have declared every game a ‘no contest’ with our opt-outs and injuries but we wouldn’t have gotten any better.”
Matt asked about the quality of the practices. (I missed part of the answer talking to the producer who was setting up my call.) “We can’t travel 105 players like some schools. Some private schools have high tuitions and can’t have all the walk-ons. Some don’t and can. Some of them have 120 players on their roster. We don’t get close to 100. (actually there are 103 names on our roster: https://cuse.com/sports/football/roster
The average number of players who actually play in a game is 52.)
“I understood those things coming in and we went 10-3 and were a couple of passes away from 12-1. Aaron Hackett caught the pass against Clemson and Cody Conway was a half yard downfield and the refs sure had good eyes. But we don’t have the walk-ons to deal with opt outs and major injuries.”
Matt talked about Notre Dame and how they used to be the powerhouse program in college football but in recent decades they’ve been in ‘second gear’. “Now it’s clicked in and they have experienced players at every position.” Dino: “they are on top of a cresting wave and will drop back down to build back up.” (Kelly at Notre Dame has win 8, 8, 12, 9, 8, 10, 4, 10, 12 and 11 games. This brings up a point I’ve made the last couple of years: SU had 22 straight winning seasons form 1914-35, 22 straight non-losing seasons from 1950-71 and 15 straight winning seasons from 1987-2001. People thought after the 2018 season that “We’re back!”. But we are unlikely to have a streak like that in this division of this conference. Instead we have the capability to have a year like 2018 but we’re going to have build back up to it. If that’s what Notre Dame has to do, obviously that’s what Syracuse has to do – and it will be harder for us.)
Matt suggested that the Irish might consider joining the conference for football full time. Dino: “it’s very difficult not to be in a conference. You have to perform extremely well to get into the playoff. But the ACC has done pretty well without them, winning 3 of the last 6, (actually 7) national championships. We’re doing great things without them.”
I finally go on and did my tribute to the coach and the intro for the Flynn film. Coach congratulated me for my questions which he said showed “great insight- and I love Errol Flynn”. Matt said that all his movies seemed to be swashbucklers. (I’ve made reference to the Dawn Patrol about World War I, the Charge of the Light Brigade about India and the Crimean War, They Died With Boots on about the Indian wars, Desperate Journey and Objective Burma about World War II and finally the only two swashbucklers on the list, The Sea Hawk and The Adventures of Robin Hood.) Dino praised Flynn’s “good swordsmanship”. Maybe that’s what the running game needs. I made my plea for two running backs but it seemed to fall on deaf ears, as it always does.
Matt: “Notre Dame hasn’t allowed anybody to run on them. How do you run it enough against them to keep them honest for the passing game?” Dino: 25 of 75 snaps against NC State were running plays. NC State was being very hard-headed about not letting us run the ball. We were able to throw it with extreme efficiency until those last two plays. (We were only 23 for 45 but Rex through for 254 yards with no official turnovers, although that spike was surely one.) Matt noted that “the long runs haven’t bene there so you’ve had to go with downfield shots”. Dino: “We’ve had some long gainers. To me offense is runs whether you gain yardage on them or not and completed passes. A running play is like a body shot in boxing. They add up over the course of a game. People complain that a coach will run the ball up the missile all the time but there’s a purpose to it.” (Sorry coach, but in this game we ran the ball 11 times on first down and gained 10 yards, never more than 2 at a shot. I don’t think that wear them down. Good plays are set up by good plays that the defense has to adjust to.) “You can’t throw deep all the time. Short passes turn 3rd downs into 1st downs.” (Coach wants his team to be consistently good, not occasionally great. The problem is our offense is occasionally great. Consistently good means getting first downs. We have 130 of them. The other guys have 256.)
Matt didn’t want to talk about the end of the game but wondered if something like that had to be addressed with the team. Dino: “They are amateurs, but they are amateurs in the highest esteem. They know what they have to do. They even got lined up right on that last play. I think Taj was the last one to do it but we might have had another shot at the end zone. There are 145-150 plays in a game. If you do a better job on the others, you get to relax on the final play.” Matt noted we had to settle for a field goal after an interception. Dino: “We didn’t settle for that field goal. We have a receiver position himself perfectly with a foot in bounds and the ball went off his hands. Chances are, he’s the best guy we have to make that catch. It was just a happening based on who the receiver is.” (I think this is a reference to a pass to Anthony Queeley after an interception early in the second quarter. If that’s correct it indicates the esteem Queeley has gained in the eyes of the coach).
On Taj’s thirteen catches: “We caught them by surprise, (with the short passes to our deep threat) and waited for them to adjust to it but they didn’t, (we finally got the long pass to Nucky Johnson). “I see a difference between plays and concepts. You can pull a concept out of your back pocket to take advent age of a specific situation. It’s more about getting people on the same page. You know if a player is going to turn right or left. We could do that if hadn’t lost the summer to train for it.”
Matt made a reference to game in Yankee Stadium two years ago, the one time that year we really got whipped, (3-36). Dino: “Our young guys were looking up in awe at Yankee Stadium and didn’t handle the big game festivities well.”
Ian Book “Is an improvisor of such quality that you say ‘Oh, My God’. He has 12TDs and just one interception. He’s had 200 attempts without an interception. It’s not that he’s throwing the ball away to avoid them. He’s got big wide receivers and tight ends – guys he can trust to win match-ups. I’ll have to go back and look at the film of his interception. I’ll bet it went off a wide receiver’s hands.“
Matt said that Notre Dame’s defense is full of “big dudes who can get to the football”. Dino: “Their defense is the strongest part of their team. Their defensive backs are big and physical. And their line backs…Whooeee! They have 9 seniors on defense and their youngest player- a safety – is an all-American sophomore, (Kyle Hamilton).”
Matt asked about our two cornerbacks, both of whom gave up their first touchdown passes against the Wolfpack, losing end zone battles for the ball. Dino: “If you are striking out everybody someday the ball is going to wind up bouncing off a clock. They had two big physical receivers having great days. They got their tickets punched but they have a chance to come back this week.”
The assistant coach of the week was Nick Monroe, who coaches our safeties and nickel backs and is a big part of the recruiting effort for Syracuse. Matt asked about dealing with having two top players- Andre Cisco and Trill Williams leave the team. Monroe said he’d also had to deal with the absence of Eric Coley, who was to play the other safety position. (Monroe did not say that Coley had left the team as Williams and Cisco did – he has been injured.) “there’s no substitute experience. When these guys get a full cycle in the weight room and spring practice you’ll see a noticeable difference.” (But will they get a full weight room cycle and spring practice?)
On recruiting: “We’re selling the future, telling them to have faith and look at what we have bene able to accomplish here. Also a lot of true freshmen have been able to play here. 40% of our tackles this season have been made by freshmen.”
I’ll be summarizing the comments directly related to the team and the next game (late) on the night of the broadcast and anything else interesting the next day, (if there is anything else that seems interesting). I’ll have a “first hour” and a “second hour” question.
They are doing the show on Zoom, not at any local restaurant.
You can also listen to the show live each week on the Syracuse IMG Sports Network and Cuse.com. Wednesday's show will be on 99.1 FM and 97.7 FM, as well. The show will regularly air on 99.5FM (Syracuse) 99.1 FM (Utica) and 1200 AM.”
You can also get it on: Home | Free Internet Radio | TuneIn
There hasn’t been any change in the phone numbers, which last year were 315-424-8599 (local) or 1-888-746-2873. You can call to ask questions or submit them via Twitter at: https://twitter.com/CuseIMG
#AskDino or through Cuse.com, (the SU Athletic website):
Submit a Question! - Syracuse University Athletics
You can (or could last year, anyway), listen to a podcast of the show, probably the next day, at: Search results for babers | Free Internet Radio | TuneIn
I’ve been asked to continue doing the summaries, even by people who listen to the podcasts. I may focus on the major points, rather than trying to record everything.
My Question(s) or Comments
Firstly, Coach, I’d like to thank you for your patient and thoughtful answers to our questions through a difficult season. I’ve noticed two tendencies: you won’t reveal anything that might be of interest to an opponent and you want both praise and blame to be shared by the team and not be about individuals or even groups. You are correct to point out that a player who made a bad play at the end of a game didn’t lose it all by himself. Even the results of a particular play can be impacted by things the fans never see involving other players. And if all the attention goes to one guy, your team becomes less of a team. You understand this and that’s why we respect you so much and want you to succeed here.
I’ll end my Errol Flynn binge with his most famous film, “The Adventures of Robin Hood”, still another story of the good guys triumphing over bad times and great odds to triumph in the end. I believe that there are players on this year’s team who will be on the next really good SU team. We should be proud of all of our teams but this season hasn’t been much fun and we aren’t a band of “merry men” right now but we will someday if we stick with it.
Hollywood’s greatest swordfight:
On this last show I’ll make my annual pitch for a two running back backfield. I grew up with Floyd Little pairing with first Jim Nance and then Larry Csonka with the bigger man doing most of the running between the tackles and the faster man running wide or catching passes and the defenses having to deal with both. We went with pocket passers and a single running back this year and it wasn’t enough. Sean Tucker seems like a special talent and you’ve got a high school recruit who runs like he’s Derrick Henry at that level and might do the same here. That would be a load for defenses to deal with, especially if they are geared to stop the spread. You could still bring in a slot guy on third down. Just something to think about.
Finally I’ll ask, with the transfer portal about to become a cornucopia, what role will it play in your plans to acquire talent for future years? We discussed last week how the best players don’t seem to stay for four years anymore. What percentage of your players are likely to be traditional high school recruits and what percent age are likely to be transfers in the future?
(Note: This week’s show will be on Wednesday because of the basketball game tomorrow. The first Jim Boeheim Show is not scheduled yet. The best the station could tell me was that it would be in ”mid-December”.)
The Show
(I sometimes re-arrange the comments so that statements made on the same subject are reported together, even if they came at different points of the show.)
Matt Park: “One more time up the hill…” Dino: “One more opportunity to play and get better. We like the challenge. If you don’t get these opportunities nobody will know your name. If somebody’s ringing the bell, we’ll answer the call. If we have to move guys around to do it, we will. “Matt said that it was “easier said than done to comeback from an injury in the same season. If you can do it like Dakota Davis, it allows you to get stronger elsewhere.” Dino: “If it would have killed an eligibility year, he would not have come back. But the NCAA granted everyone an extra year so that allowed him to come back this year. We want to give the kids a chance to fulfill their potential here.”
John in Baltimore beat me to the phone and basically asked my question about the transfer portal. He also wanted to know what would fix the running game. Dino: “We’re always trying to create the best team you can have. It all depends who is in the transfer portal and our availability of scholarships. We have to look at the positions of need and whether the right person is available. We’ve played a lot of young players who couldn’t lift or train as they normally would and they have to get used to this level of competition with their minds and their bodies. We could have declared every game a ‘no contest’ with our opt-outs and injuries but we wouldn’t have gotten any better.”
Matt asked about the quality of the practices. (I missed part of the answer talking to the producer who was setting up my call.) “We can’t travel 105 players like some schools. Some private schools have high tuitions and can’t have all the walk-ons. Some don’t and can. Some of them have 120 players on their roster. We don’t get close to 100. (actually there are 103 names on our roster: https://cuse.com/sports/football/roster
The average number of players who actually play in a game is 52.)
“I understood those things coming in and we went 10-3 and were a couple of passes away from 12-1. Aaron Hackett caught the pass against Clemson and Cody Conway was a half yard downfield and the refs sure had good eyes. But we don’t have the walk-ons to deal with opt outs and major injuries.”
Matt talked about Notre Dame and how they used to be the powerhouse program in college football but in recent decades they’ve been in ‘second gear’. “Now it’s clicked in and they have experienced players at every position.” Dino: “they are on top of a cresting wave and will drop back down to build back up.” (Kelly at Notre Dame has win 8, 8, 12, 9, 8, 10, 4, 10, 12 and 11 games. This brings up a point I’ve made the last couple of years: SU had 22 straight winning seasons form 1914-35, 22 straight non-losing seasons from 1950-71 and 15 straight winning seasons from 1987-2001. People thought after the 2018 season that “We’re back!”. But we are unlikely to have a streak like that in this division of this conference. Instead we have the capability to have a year like 2018 but we’re going to have build back up to it. If that’s what Notre Dame has to do, obviously that’s what Syracuse has to do – and it will be harder for us.)
Matt suggested that the Irish might consider joining the conference for football full time. Dino: “it’s very difficult not to be in a conference. You have to perform extremely well to get into the playoff. But the ACC has done pretty well without them, winning 3 of the last 6, (actually 7) national championships. We’re doing great things without them.”
I finally go on and did my tribute to the coach and the intro for the Flynn film. Coach congratulated me for my questions which he said showed “great insight- and I love Errol Flynn”. Matt said that all his movies seemed to be swashbucklers. (I’ve made reference to the Dawn Patrol about World War I, the Charge of the Light Brigade about India and the Crimean War, They Died With Boots on about the Indian wars, Desperate Journey and Objective Burma about World War II and finally the only two swashbucklers on the list, The Sea Hawk and The Adventures of Robin Hood.) Dino praised Flynn’s “good swordsmanship”. Maybe that’s what the running game needs. I made my plea for two running backs but it seemed to fall on deaf ears, as it always does.
Matt: “Notre Dame hasn’t allowed anybody to run on them. How do you run it enough against them to keep them honest for the passing game?” Dino: 25 of 75 snaps against NC State were running plays. NC State was being very hard-headed about not letting us run the ball. We were able to throw it with extreme efficiency until those last two plays. (We were only 23 for 45 but Rex through for 254 yards with no official turnovers, although that spike was surely one.) Matt noted that “the long runs haven’t bene there so you’ve had to go with downfield shots”. Dino: “We’ve had some long gainers. To me offense is runs whether you gain yardage on them or not and completed passes. A running play is like a body shot in boxing. They add up over the course of a game. People complain that a coach will run the ball up the missile all the time but there’s a purpose to it.” (Sorry coach, but in this game we ran the ball 11 times on first down and gained 10 yards, never more than 2 at a shot. I don’t think that wear them down. Good plays are set up by good plays that the defense has to adjust to.) “You can’t throw deep all the time. Short passes turn 3rd downs into 1st downs.” (Coach wants his team to be consistently good, not occasionally great. The problem is our offense is occasionally great. Consistently good means getting first downs. We have 130 of them. The other guys have 256.)
Matt didn’t want to talk about the end of the game but wondered if something like that had to be addressed with the team. Dino: “They are amateurs, but they are amateurs in the highest esteem. They know what they have to do. They even got lined up right on that last play. I think Taj was the last one to do it but we might have had another shot at the end zone. There are 145-150 plays in a game. If you do a better job on the others, you get to relax on the final play.” Matt noted we had to settle for a field goal after an interception. Dino: “We didn’t settle for that field goal. We have a receiver position himself perfectly with a foot in bounds and the ball went off his hands. Chances are, he’s the best guy we have to make that catch. It was just a happening based on who the receiver is.” (I think this is a reference to a pass to Anthony Queeley after an interception early in the second quarter. If that’s correct it indicates the esteem Queeley has gained in the eyes of the coach).
On Taj’s thirteen catches: “We caught them by surprise, (with the short passes to our deep threat) and waited for them to adjust to it but they didn’t, (we finally got the long pass to Nucky Johnson). “I see a difference between plays and concepts. You can pull a concept out of your back pocket to take advent age of a specific situation. It’s more about getting people on the same page. You know if a player is going to turn right or left. We could do that if hadn’t lost the summer to train for it.”
Matt made a reference to game in Yankee Stadium two years ago, the one time that year we really got whipped, (3-36). Dino: “Our young guys were looking up in awe at Yankee Stadium and didn’t handle the big game festivities well.”
Ian Book “Is an improvisor of such quality that you say ‘Oh, My God’. He has 12TDs and just one interception. He’s had 200 attempts without an interception. It’s not that he’s throwing the ball away to avoid them. He’s got big wide receivers and tight ends – guys he can trust to win match-ups. I’ll have to go back and look at the film of his interception. I’ll bet it went off a wide receiver’s hands.“
Matt said that Notre Dame’s defense is full of “big dudes who can get to the football”. Dino: “Their defense is the strongest part of their team. Their defensive backs are big and physical. And their line backs…Whooeee! They have 9 seniors on defense and their youngest player- a safety – is an all-American sophomore, (Kyle Hamilton).”
Matt asked about our two cornerbacks, both of whom gave up their first touchdown passes against the Wolfpack, losing end zone battles for the ball. Dino: “If you are striking out everybody someday the ball is going to wind up bouncing off a clock. They had two big physical receivers having great days. They got their tickets punched but they have a chance to come back this week.”
The assistant coach of the week was Nick Monroe, who coaches our safeties and nickel backs and is a big part of the recruiting effort for Syracuse. Matt asked about dealing with having two top players- Andre Cisco and Trill Williams leave the team. Monroe said he’d also had to deal with the absence of Eric Coley, who was to play the other safety position. (Monroe did not say that Coley had left the team as Williams and Cisco did – he has been injured.) “there’s no substitute experience. When these guys get a full cycle in the weight room and spring practice you’ll see a noticeable difference.” (But will they get a full weight room cycle and spring practice?)
On recruiting: “We’re selling the future, telling them to have faith and look at what we have bene able to accomplish here. Also a lot of true freshmen have been able to play here. 40% of our tackles this season have been made by freshmen.”
