SWC75
Bored Historian
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- Aug 26, 2011
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From my Preseason SU Preview:
"I’m a veteran of the MacPherson Era back in the 1980’s when the SU football program rebuilt itself into a national power, (or at least a respected team), and I’ve read about and even written about the early Schwartzwalder Era in the 1950’s when Ben resurrected us from the ashes and turned us into national champions. So I know something about rebuilding eras. They tend, at least at a school like Syracuse, which isn’t one of the football factories, to come in stages. And fans get irritated when we spend too much time in one stage before going onto the next. Revolutions don’t come from despair: they come from optimism. They are fueled by impatience. SU fans need to understand the reality of the situation for ultimate success to be gained.
Ben Schwartzwalder took over a team that had gone 1-8 in 1948 and, with basically the same players, went 4-5 in 1949. Then he went 5-5, 5-4, (the first winning record in nine years), 7-3, (including losses to national champion Michigan State and national power Alabama in the Orange Bowl by a combined 13-109), 5-3-1, 4-4 and 5-3 before the real breakthrough occurred in Ben’s eighth season, (and Jim Brown’s senior year), going 7-1, (a 7-14 loss at Pitt) before facing Texas Christian- then as now a national power- in the Cotton Bowl and losing by a blocked extra point, 27-28. For a dozen years, 1956-1967, only six schools, Bowling Green, Mississippi, Arizona State, Dartmouth, Wyoming and Alabama had a better winning percentage than SU and only Mississippi and Alabama were considered “big time” schools. We were the best, (big time), football program in the East and one of the three best in the country over that time.
Dick MacPherson took over a team that had had a losing record since the end of Ben’s glory era, (61-79-1) and in the year before he took over, we went 5-6. Dick promptly went 4-6-1 and then 2-9. He opened his third season with a 6-17 loss at Temple to make his record 6-16-1. But we rallied to a 6-5 record, despite a 7-63 disaster at Nebraska. We went 6-5 again the next year, despite a 17-9 win over those same Cornhuskers in the Dome, (which was followed by three straight losses). The next year we were 7-3 and had accepted an invitation to the Cherry Bowl, (one of only 16 bowl games that season: this year there will be 34). We lost that night on a couple of long passes in the final minute to West Virginia, then got clobbered by Maryland in the bowl. We opened the 1986 season with four straight losses. We beat a terrible Missouri team to end the six game losing streak and then traveled to Penn State, (who we should have beaten the year before but fumbled the game away), and lost 3-42 to the eventual national champions. The Sack Mac pack was at the height of it’s power. Then we rallied to win 4 of 5 to end the year and went 11-0 the next season, including a 48-21 walloping of the Nittany Lions. It was Dick’s seventh season. It began a stretch of 15 straight winning seasons, something only Nebraska, Florida State and Michigan could match over that period.
I feel strongly that Doug Marrone will be able to produce that kind of success here. (Then the question will be: will we do what’s necessary to sustain that success or let it slip away again?) But I see no reason to think that the process will somehow be quicker that it was for Ben or Mac. We are still a mid-sized private school in an unglamorous, (if under-rated) location in a state that doesn’t produce as many Division One football prospects as other places do. Ben never recruited a significant player who wasn’t from New York or an adjacent state. George DeLeone owned New Jersey. The rise of Connecticut, Rutgers and Cincinnati make recruiting our normal areas more problematic. These things won’t prevent our success but creating it is probably more complicated than it was in prior eras.
People like to think, “Hey! We went 4-8 in Doug’s first year and 8-5 in his second year. We’ll go 10-3 this year and who, knows, maybe 12-0 next year!” I just don’t see it. I think at best the big breakthrough where we will be good every year will come in the middle or latter half of his decade. Doug began his tenure 60 years after Ben did. His seventh year will be 2015, his eighth 2016. At best, Doug is now recruiting the players that will be part of the real breakthrough. For the time being, we will likely hover around .500 as Ben and Mac did, alternating encouraging games and stretches with discouraging ones. Sports is all about hope and SU fans need to remain hopeful but also realistic, lest their optimism turn into rebellion and ruin the process."
With the defense having lost most of it's starters from 2010, including the excellent linebackers, Smith and Hogue, I felt that it was inevitable that we would fall back from our 8-5 record last year. That record included four Big East road wins, three of which could have gone either way. If anything our 2010 record was deceiving in terms of how far along we were in the rebuilding process. The idea was that since the offense had a bunch of guys back, they would carry the team the way the defense did last year. That seemed dubious for an offense that was 97th in the country in yards gained last year and 93rd in scoring. I felt that 6-6 and a minor bowl was probably this team's ceiling.
The offense improved this year to 89th in yards gained and 79th in scoring, (going into the Pitt game), hardly enough to carry a team. Meanwhile the defense fell from 7th in yards and 17th in points to 71st and 73rd, respectively. Add to that all of our special teams problems, our turnover problems in certain games and all the penalties and it's actually surprizing we wound up 5-7. When you consider how we flirted with defeat during that 5-2 start, you can see that we were a lot closer to having a terrible season than a good one.
If I'd been told at the beging of the year that we'd wind up 5-7 and now bowl I'd have been mildly disappointed but not really surprized. I'd figure Doug would simply have to get out and recruit some more good prospects and raise the talent, speed and depth levels of the team and with all the players we'd have coming back we'd be back in a bowl the next year. That would lead to another good recruiting class and eventually to the mid-decade breakthrough.
But the way things went this year certain gives cause for concern. It's not just that we went from 5-2 to 5-7 and no bowl. We really played well in one game all year. We may have been playing over our heads against West Virginia but we played poorly except in certian stretches all year, falling behind Wake Forest by 15 before rallying to win in OT, struggling past Rhode Island, getting blown out in the second half vs. USC, needing a referree's error to beat Toledo and barely beating a Tulane team that was one of the worst in the country. Then we played one great game and lost five dismal games in a row. We were never really a good team.
There was also no arc of improvement over the course of the season. You can have mediocre talent but you'd like to see the team at least get better as the season progresses. Doug Marrone's record in November is now 2-9, (the two wins are vs. Rutgers). That doesn't include losses to Louisville on 10/31/09 and 10/29/11 or today's game. Whatever problems we have, we have them all year. The first two years, having enough players was an issue: it wasn't supposed to be this year.
There are some strategical issues. I don't like using the same back to run inside and outside unless he ahs both size and speed. If different players have different qualities and give you diferent options. I's like to have them both out there at once. Trying to use the run to set up the pass hasn't worked all year: this offesne has run the best when we used the pass to spread out the defesne and ran in the gaps. But we didn't do that until we were behind. We were very conservative as to when we took chances. I'd think that a team trying to overcome a talent gap has to take more chances but Doug Marrone doesn't want to take a chance unless he can overcome the consequences of failure. But if he ahd the horses to do that, he wouldn't have to take chances. And we've had a total failure to augment our emager offensive output with special teams plays: blocks and returns. More often the offense has been trying to make up for speical teams blunders that put us in bad field position.
The offense, lacking in big-play ability, ahs to put together 10-12 play drives that cover most of the length of the field. To do that you've got to have disicpline and focus. We don't. penalties, drops, blown blocking assignment and turnovers continually stymie us. Even an offsides can ruin one of our drives. And this is problaby the biggest concern: the mental game. You can recruit size, speed and talent but without discipline and focus, you aren't going to get the most out of it. Doug Marrone clearly felt that his "leadership" and "life skills" programs would give us an edge there but we appear to have a deficit instead. And I think that's what really vexes him.
It's enough to drain my confidence that "we've got the right guy". I haven't decided we don't but by certainty that we do is gone.
Suggestions that he should be fired now are absurd. Greg Robinson was 7-28 and 2-10 in year three, (the worst team SU has every put on the field, IMO). Doug Marrone is 17-20 and this team would have beaten the 2007 team by several touchdowns. One of the absurd arguments is that G-Rob's players are better than Marrone's players. Marrone had half a recruiting season followed two full years. Marrone's guys are the 55 freshmen and sophomores on the team plus a small handful of JUCOs. G-Rob's guys are juniors and seniors. of course G-Rob's guys are better- right now. We can't evaluate Marrone's recruits- and Marrone's recruiting until his guys are juniros and seniors. And firing a coach for the third time in less than a decade is a recipe for disaster. Good players don't come to schools if they think the guy recruiting them might not be there when they get there.
I've said several times that we'll have so many guys coming back next year on all units that we'll basically be rooting for this team for two years. And the great thing about college players is that they improve. So will these guys. I expect to have a winning record and be in a bowl next year. That will silence the critics and probably get Doug the contract extension he'll need to keep recruiting the guys that will make us a consistently successful program again.
I'm just not as sure about the happy ending as I used to be.
"I’m a veteran of the MacPherson Era back in the 1980’s when the SU football program rebuilt itself into a national power, (or at least a respected team), and I’ve read about and even written about the early Schwartzwalder Era in the 1950’s when Ben resurrected us from the ashes and turned us into national champions. So I know something about rebuilding eras. They tend, at least at a school like Syracuse, which isn’t one of the football factories, to come in stages. And fans get irritated when we spend too much time in one stage before going onto the next. Revolutions don’t come from despair: they come from optimism. They are fueled by impatience. SU fans need to understand the reality of the situation for ultimate success to be gained.
Ben Schwartzwalder took over a team that had gone 1-8 in 1948 and, with basically the same players, went 4-5 in 1949. Then he went 5-5, 5-4, (the first winning record in nine years), 7-3, (including losses to national champion Michigan State and national power Alabama in the Orange Bowl by a combined 13-109), 5-3-1, 4-4 and 5-3 before the real breakthrough occurred in Ben’s eighth season, (and Jim Brown’s senior year), going 7-1, (a 7-14 loss at Pitt) before facing Texas Christian- then as now a national power- in the Cotton Bowl and losing by a blocked extra point, 27-28. For a dozen years, 1956-1967, only six schools, Bowling Green, Mississippi, Arizona State, Dartmouth, Wyoming and Alabama had a better winning percentage than SU and only Mississippi and Alabama were considered “big time” schools. We were the best, (big time), football program in the East and one of the three best in the country over that time.
Dick MacPherson took over a team that had had a losing record since the end of Ben’s glory era, (61-79-1) and in the year before he took over, we went 5-6. Dick promptly went 4-6-1 and then 2-9. He opened his third season with a 6-17 loss at Temple to make his record 6-16-1. But we rallied to a 6-5 record, despite a 7-63 disaster at Nebraska. We went 6-5 again the next year, despite a 17-9 win over those same Cornhuskers in the Dome, (which was followed by three straight losses). The next year we were 7-3 and had accepted an invitation to the Cherry Bowl, (one of only 16 bowl games that season: this year there will be 34). We lost that night on a couple of long passes in the final minute to West Virginia, then got clobbered by Maryland in the bowl. We opened the 1986 season with four straight losses. We beat a terrible Missouri team to end the six game losing streak and then traveled to Penn State, (who we should have beaten the year before but fumbled the game away), and lost 3-42 to the eventual national champions. The Sack Mac pack was at the height of it’s power. Then we rallied to win 4 of 5 to end the year and went 11-0 the next season, including a 48-21 walloping of the Nittany Lions. It was Dick’s seventh season. It began a stretch of 15 straight winning seasons, something only Nebraska, Florida State and Michigan could match over that period.
I feel strongly that Doug Marrone will be able to produce that kind of success here. (Then the question will be: will we do what’s necessary to sustain that success or let it slip away again?) But I see no reason to think that the process will somehow be quicker that it was for Ben or Mac. We are still a mid-sized private school in an unglamorous, (if under-rated) location in a state that doesn’t produce as many Division One football prospects as other places do. Ben never recruited a significant player who wasn’t from New York or an adjacent state. George DeLeone owned New Jersey. The rise of Connecticut, Rutgers and Cincinnati make recruiting our normal areas more problematic. These things won’t prevent our success but creating it is probably more complicated than it was in prior eras.
People like to think, “Hey! We went 4-8 in Doug’s first year and 8-5 in his second year. We’ll go 10-3 this year and who, knows, maybe 12-0 next year!” I just don’t see it. I think at best the big breakthrough where we will be good every year will come in the middle or latter half of his decade. Doug began his tenure 60 years after Ben did. His seventh year will be 2015, his eighth 2016. At best, Doug is now recruiting the players that will be part of the real breakthrough. For the time being, we will likely hover around .500 as Ben and Mac did, alternating encouraging games and stretches with discouraging ones. Sports is all about hope and SU fans need to remain hopeful but also realistic, lest their optimism turn into rebellion and ruin the process."
With the defense having lost most of it's starters from 2010, including the excellent linebackers, Smith and Hogue, I felt that it was inevitable that we would fall back from our 8-5 record last year. That record included four Big East road wins, three of which could have gone either way. If anything our 2010 record was deceiving in terms of how far along we were in the rebuilding process. The idea was that since the offense had a bunch of guys back, they would carry the team the way the defense did last year. That seemed dubious for an offense that was 97th in the country in yards gained last year and 93rd in scoring. I felt that 6-6 and a minor bowl was probably this team's ceiling.
The offense improved this year to 89th in yards gained and 79th in scoring, (going into the Pitt game), hardly enough to carry a team. Meanwhile the defense fell from 7th in yards and 17th in points to 71st and 73rd, respectively. Add to that all of our special teams problems, our turnover problems in certain games and all the penalties and it's actually surprizing we wound up 5-7. When you consider how we flirted with defeat during that 5-2 start, you can see that we were a lot closer to having a terrible season than a good one.
If I'd been told at the beging of the year that we'd wind up 5-7 and now bowl I'd have been mildly disappointed but not really surprized. I'd figure Doug would simply have to get out and recruit some more good prospects and raise the talent, speed and depth levels of the team and with all the players we'd have coming back we'd be back in a bowl the next year. That would lead to another good recruiting class and eventually to the mid-decade breakthrough.
But the way things went this year certain gives cause for concern. It's not just that we went from 5-2 to 5-7 and no bowl. We really played well in one game all year. We may have been playing over our heads against West Virginia but we played poorly except in certian stretches all year, falling behind Wake Forest by 15 before rallying to win in OT, struggling past Rhode Island, getting blown out in the second half vs. USC, needing a referree's error to beat Toledo and barely beating a Tulane team that was one of the worst in the country. Then we played one great game and lost five dismal games in a row. We were never really a good team.
There was also no arc of improvement over the course of the season. You can have mediocre talent but you'd like to see the team at least get better as the season progresses. Doug Marrone's record in November is now 2-9, (the two wins are vs. Rutgers). That doesn't include losses to Louisville on 10/31/09 and 10/29/11 or today's game. Whatever problems we have, we have them all year. The first two years, having enough players was an issue: it wasn't supposed to be this year.
There are some strategical issues. I don't like using the same back to run inside and outside unless he ahs both size and speed. If different players have different qualities and give you diferent options. I's like to have them both out there at once. Trying to use the run to set up the pass hasn't worked all year: this offesne has run the best when we used the pass to spread out the defesne and ran in the gaps. But we didn't do that until we were behind. We were very conservative as to when we took chances. I'd think that a team trying to overcome a talent gap has to take more chances but Doug Marrone doesn't want to take a chance unless he can overcome the consequences of failure. But if he ahd the horses to do that, he wouldn't have to take chances. And we've had a total failure to augment our emager offensive output with special teams plays: blocks and returns. More often the offense has been trying to make up for speical teams blunders that put us in bad field position.
The offense, lacking in big-play ability, ahs to put together 10-12 play drives that cover most of the length of the field. To do that you've got to have disicpline and focus. We don't. penalties, drops, blown blocking assignment and turnovers continually stymie us. Even an offsides can ruin one of our drives. And this is problaby the biggest concern: the mental game. You can recruit size, speed and talent but without discipline and focus, you aren't going to get the most out of it. Doug Marrone clearly felt that his "leadership" and "life skills" programs would give us an edge there but we appear to have a deficit instead. And I think that's what really vexes him.
It's enough to drain my confidence that "we've got the right guy". I haven't decided we don't but by certainty that we do is gone.
Suggestions that he should be fired now are absurd. Greg Robinson was 7-28 and 2-10 in year three, (the worst team SU has every put on the field, IMO). Doug Marrone is 17-20 and this team would have beaten the 2007 team by several touchdowns. One of the absurd arguments is that G-Rob's players are better than Marrone's players. Marrone had half a recruiting season followed two full years. Marrone's guys are the 55 freshmen and sophomores on the team plus a small handful of JUCOs. G-Rob's guys are juniors and seniors. of course G-Rob's guys are better- right now. We can't evaluate Marrone's recruits- and Marrone's recruiting until his guys are juniros and seniors. And firing a coach for the third time in less than a decade is a recipe for disaster. Good players don't come to schools if they think the guy recruiting them might not be there when they get there.
I've said several times that we'll have so many guys coming back next year on all units that we'll basically be rooting for this team for two years. And the great thing about college players is that they improve. So will these guys. I expect to have a winning record and be in a bowl next year. That will silence the critics and probably get Doug the contract extension he'll need to keep recruiting the guys that will make us a consistently successful program again.
I'm just not as sure about the happy ending as I used to be.
