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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 3506785, member: 289"] Aftermath Sometimes you’re the windshield and sometimes you’re the bug. The very next week after finally ending the Hoodoo Syracuse ran into a team of “Iron Dukes” who were on their way to the Rose Bowl and crushed the Orange, 0-21. Nobody scored a point on Duke that year- that is not until the last minute of play in the Rose Bowl when USC scored on a series of passes to beat them, 7-3. The Orange closed out the season with a one point win over Columbia and a record of 5 wins and 3 losses. But what a 5-3 season it had been! The next year, the final score of the Syracuse –Colgate game was 7-0 for the third straight year. And, for the second straight year, Syracuse won. Had we started a Hoodoo of our own? No, Andy Kerr’s squad came back for a 7-6 win in 1940. But for the only period in its long history, the Syracuse-Colgate series had become the truly competitive rivalry it should have been all along. Colgate won 12 of the first 17 games through 1914, with two ties and only 4 SU wins. Then the famous 38-0 trashing by the powerful 1915 Syracuse team started a 7-2 run for the Orange. Then came the 0-11-2 period of the Hoodoo. From 1938-1950, Colgate won 6 times, Syracuse 5 and there was one tie, (neither school fielded a team in 1943). That 1950 game, Colgate’s last victory in the series, (by 14-19) was the only time Ben Schwartwalder ever made the mistake of losing to the Red Raiders. He won the next 11 in a row. For the first five years of that period, the games themselves were still competitive: 9-0, 20-14, 34-18, 31-12 and 26-19. On November 17, 1956, my father took my older brother to see his first SU game. On that day, James Nathaniel Brown scored on runs of 1, 15, 50, 8, 19 and 1 yard(s) and “probably could have scored 10TDs without too much effort”. He carried the ball 22 times for 197 yards, (9.0 yards a carry). He also kicked 7 extra points and set an NCAA record of scoring 43 points that lasted for 34 years. I have a poster in my bedroom- an artist’s rendering of Big Jim crashing past Maroon clad tacklers with the Irving Avenue Arch in the background. Surrounding it are photos of all of Syracuse’s All-Americans but Jim’s place in the center of the poster illustrates that he and that game propelled Syracuse football into a new era of unprecedented success. Dad remembers looking up to the top of the stands after one of Brown’s scores, after hearing a bunch of older fans urging #44 to do it again and then again after that. One of the guys cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted “It was soooo looong!” Nobody had to ask what he meant. From there on in Syracuse’s old tormentor became their patsy. In 1957 it was Syracuse 34 Colgate 6. In ’58 it was 47-0. Then in 1959, Syracuse’s greatest team totally annihilated the Red Raiders, 71-0. There was the usual hand wringing over such a score. One sportswriter labeled the coach “Attila Schwartzwalder” for his “inhumane” treatment of the enemy. Colgate might have been more charitable but they could see the handwriting was on the wall for the series: the programs were simply going in opposite directions. It was agreed to end the series after two more games, which Syracuse won, 46-6 in 1960 and 51-8 in 1961. When the Carrier Dome was built in 1980, it was decided to bring Colgate to the Dome for a couple of games for old times' sake. The Orange picked up where it left off with a 49-15 win in 1982 and 52-6 in 1987, ironically a week after we broke the Penn State “Hoodoo”. This last game was 42-0 at halftime. In the second half things got ugly as frustrated Colgate players began taking cheap shots at SU players and the Orange responded. Ted Gregory who was making a run at the Outland trophy, got speared in the back of the knee in a pile-up, sustaining an injury that largely ended his season and spiked whatever chance he had at a pro career. Perhaps because of that, there have been no games since. It also hurts that SU gets no competitive credit for playing a team in a lower division and crowds for such games tend to be small by modern standards, although they would be comparable for what Syracuse would draw for the “biggest game of the year” back in the 30’s. We seem to have larger crowds these days but much less spirit that our predecessors showed. Even after a great victory, most of us just walk happily back to our cars and drive home or go to a sports bar to quaff beers and discuss the game. I’m not sure we need to do all the wild things people did in the old days but part of me envies such enthusiasm. A year ago when Miami and Virginia Tech suddenly left the Big East Conference and in so doing left two big holes in Syracuse’ schedule, (both were scheduled to come to the Dome), the university didn’t even consider filling one of those holes with Colgate, even though the Red Raiders had had their best season since Andy Kerr’s glory days, going undefeated until they lost in the Division 1AA national championship game to Delaware. Colgate might have given SU quite a ball game. Over the years, whenever SU has been at a low ebb after a bad loss or a poor season, my Dad has gruffly suggested that they “ought to go back to playing Colgate”. Maybe he’s right. Then again, remembering the Hoodoo, …maybe not! Some additional comments from 2020: We have played Colgate in two more games since I originally wrote ‘Who Knew The HooDoo?’ back in 2003: Doug Marrone’s second team beat them 42-7 in 2010 and Dino Babers, in his first game here, beat them 33-7 Both games were in the Dome for the same reason that all those games during the HooDoo were played at Archbold Stadium: the SU field was so much bigger that both school would make more money if the game was played here rather than in Hamilton. The last Syracuse Colgate game played there was in 1897. We were scheduled to play the Red Raiders again in the Dome this Saturday until the Covid19 pandemic caused a reshuffling of the schedule and the Colgate game was dropped. That’s unfortunate because SU, with Dino’s 2016 win, had finally tied the series at 31-31-5 and we had a chance to take the lead for the first time ever. I wish we were playing Colgate on October 17th instead of Liberty but the Patriot league canceled their season. Actually, I wish the series had never stopped.. We played Holy Cross annually until 1968, winning by the same kind of scores we had started to beat Colgate by: 42-6, 15-6, 34-6, 30-20, 48-0, 34-8, 32-6, 28-6, 41-7, 47-0. We played them again in 1971 and won 63-21. And, in the low ebb of Ben Schwartwalder’s last season, we managed to beat the Crusaders by the baseball score of 5-3 to end a 9 game losing streak. Why couldn’t those have been Colgate games? I know schools get tried of being beaten every year, especially by big scores but the Power Five teams all play FCS opponents who are glad to get the money they get for playing those games. And they occasionally pull off a memorable upset. Colgate has had some teams that might have done that over the years. Why play Wagner and Central Connecticut State when we could revive the annual series against the red Raiders? I’d like to see us open the season in the Dome every year against Colgate, then do a home and home every year with Army, (who should be regular rivals), then play a ‘Group of Five’ team, then a team from another power conference , then the 8 game ACC schedule. I see no reason that couldn’t be done, except that it makes too much sense. In the meantime, the story of the HooDoo, depressing as it may seem, was an illustration of the colorful nature of college football in that era, a depiction of what it is to have an actual rival, (a team that you want to beat more than any other who also wants to beat you more than any other), something we haven’t had in football in many years. it also shows that frustrating times, like the successful ones, come to an end. “This, too, shall pass….” [/QUOTE]

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