Your Best and Worst Dome Memories

[SWC75]

Best: Beating the Florida Gators in '91 and who doesn't recall Kirby Dar Dar's opening kickoff return.

Worst: 1993 WVU 43 - 0 loss one week after losing to Miami 49 - 0. Was so PO'd in the stands that I consumed a dozen extra brews before I left.

Personal Experience on the Field including Archbold:

Best: Beating WVU in the Dome in the '81 finale w/Joe Morris running wild and Gary Anderson kicking the winner over a Peach Bowl bound Mountaineers.

Worst: Losing in '77 to NC State 38 - 0 in Archbold and having some CUSE fans spit at us as we walked thru the crumpling locker room tunnel. Then we had to listen to the dogs barking in the kennel above our locker room and Nick Saban's blasting the DE's all week. Funny, we beat the Washington Huskies and Warren Moon before 12k in rainy Archbold the following week.

Oh the Orange memories and the Wolfpack are going down on Saturday!
Cheers!

What was Nick's position on the staff at that time? I thought he was a linebacker coach.

 

[Jcuse_44]

Best: 1998 McNabb to Brominski vs Virginia Tech

RUNNER UP: FREENEY destroying Vick ( even though we lost )

2ND Runner up: 1991 Dar Dar Reverse vs Florida


Worst: 1992 Gedney (RIP) tackled at the 3 to end the game against Miami

Runner up 1998 Tennessee FG going thru the uprights

 

[Stevenson]

For reference: Syracuse Historical Scores

Notable ups:
9/20/80 SU 36 Miami U. 24 First game in Dome. A Red Hawk, (they were still the Redskins then) goes 88 for a score. Joe Morris takes the kickoff at the 5 and….
9/17/83 SU 35 Northwestern 0 (They had a mouthy QB named Sandy Schwab)
11/12/83 and 11/19/83 SU 21 BC 10, SU 27 W Va 16 Consecutive wins over 9-3 bowl teams to get a winning record.
9/29/84 SU 17 Nebraska 9 The only time we've ever beaten a #1 team.
11/3/84 SU 13 Pittsburgh 7 The end of an 0-11 stretch vs. the Panthers and the beginning of a 16-1-1 stretch for us.
11/16/85 SU 41 BC 21 The Eagles cover Scott Schwedes with a linebacker and he sets a record for receiving yards that lasted 31 years with 249. Afterward, we accept a bi to a bowl game for the first time in 6 years but the second time in 18 years. Mac used "bowl credibility" to recruit the Cherry Bowl class who, after a redshirt year, moved in in 1987 and turned everything around for us.
9/5/87 SU 25 Maryland 11 Our greatest Dome season begins with a long pass on the first play, which became a trademark of this team. This ends a 1-9-1 stretch vs. the Terps.
10/17/87 SU 48 Penn State 21 Starting with the 80 yarder to Rob Moore, we pound the defending national champs, building up a 41-0 lead. We send the reserves in too soon and suddenly it's 41-21 . Mac sends the starter back in and the close it out in style with a long scoring drive that chews up most of the remaining time.
11/21/87 SU 32 West Virginia 31 Michael Owens goes 65 with a screen pass. Moose Johnson goes through the whole state of West Virginia to score. Pat Kelly catches one in traffic from Donnie Mac, who then pitches to Owens for the winner while Jim Ridlon checks into Hutchings.
9/21/91 SU 38 Florida 21 We were used to winning now and it took something special to impress us. This was something special, from KDD's opening kickoff return off the reverse to the end, when we were about to score again. Steve Spurrier admitted his team had been 'whipped'. The gators had been coming off a 35-0 win over Alabama, who won all their other games and the national championship the next season. Florida, who had been ranked 5th, didn't lose again until Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl.
9/12/92 SU 31 Texas 21 Marvin Graves doesn't bring down the house but he does bring down the fence. Texas was only 6-5 that year but any victory of as blue blood is a good thing.
10/11/95 SU 22 West Virginia 0 A goal line stand followed by a 96-yard Donovan McNabb to Marvin Harrison pass, the longest pass play in SU history. I can still remember seeing the ball at the height of its arc, Marvin breaking away from his defender underneath it and I knew what was going to happen. Those are the most exciting plays - where you can see what will happen before it does.
9/28/96 SU 52 Virginia Tech 21 The rivalry with the Hokies was just warming up and we ran them out of the Dome.
11/16/96 SU 42 Army 17 The Cadets came in unbeaten and wanting to prove themselves by beating SU. But the forward pass had been invented.
11/14/98 SU 28 Virginia Tech 26 McNabb to Brominski on the last play. Ripley's Believe It or Not: In winning 28-26, we outgained the Hokies 420-152. In losing 0-62 in Blacksburg the next year, they outgained us 120-411.
11/28/98 SU 66 U of Miami 13 In a dream sequence of a game, we did this to the school that won five national championships from 1983-2001. It was Donovan McNabb's last game in the Dome and the last time two ranked football teams played each other in the Dome.
9/30/00 SU 42 Brigham Young 14 Yeah, they are still a mid-major, sort of a 4A team in baseball parlance and were only 6-6 that year but it's another score that looks good on the historical resume.
9/22/01 SU 31 Auburn 14 First game in the Dome since 9/11. And yeah, that was Auburn Dwight Freeney destroyed.
11/9/02 SU 50 Virginia Tech 42 in OT. The newspaper had a great shot taken from right behind the interception that ended it, with both the SU player and the Hokie receiver waiting for the ball to arrive. Our guy got it.
12/6/03 SU 38 Notre Dame 12 Walter Reyes x-rays for 5 touchdowns as the Orange destroy the most famous brand name in the sport. They haven't come back since - until this year!
11/21/09 SU 31 Rutgers 13 Mr. Marrone, your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to beat Rutgers, our former doormat who have enjoyed beating us 9-31, 7-38, 15-38 and 17-35 in the last four seasons.
10/21/11 SU 49 West Virginia 23 We blow out the #11 Mountaineers to go 5-2 and need just one more win to get to a bowl game, just like now.
11/10/12 SU 45 Louisville 26 We blow out the #11 Cardinals to go 5-5. But this time it's the first of four consecutive victories to end the season - and the Marrone Era - including another blow out of West Virginia, this time in the Pinstripe Bowl.
10/15/16 SU 31 Virginia Tech 17 Six years ago Dino got his first big win, over our old pals, the 17th ranked Hokies and got his first national press with the locker room celebration.
10/13/17 SU 27 Clemson 24 The modern version of "the Nebraska game" as we take down the #2 ranked tigers to go 4-3 and need only two more wins to make it to a bowl. As in 2011, we didn't get any but it was a foreshadowing of things to come.
9/15/18 SU 30 Florida State 7; 9/22/18 SU 51 Connecticut 21; 10/27 SU 51 NC State 41; 11/9 SU 54 Louisville 23. Our 2018 "revenge" tour.
11/30/19 SU 39 Wake Forest 30. Trill Williams runs to glory to cap off a weird, disappointing season.
9/3/22 SU 31 Louisville Another payback game against the Cardinals. Hey! these guys look pretty good.
9/17/22 SU 32 Purdue 29 We win a wild one against one of the better teams in the Big Ten.

"...The Cadets came in unbeaten and wanting to prove themselves by beating SU. But the forward pass had been invented..."

That's comedy gold right there!

 

[OrangeMon]

Best: 1987 West Virginia, going undefeated. Close second, 1991 Florida game.

Worst: 1994 Oklahoma. The Syracuse go ahead touchdown happened right in front of me. I thought game over, then...well you know.

 

[Orangejet]

What was Nick's position on the staff at that time? I thought he was a linebacker coach.

Saban was the DE/OLB coach and I remember him asking me first day of fall camp if I wanted to play TE or DE and I choose defense. Always knew that Coach Saban would be successful.

 

[44cuse]

Best: `87 Section 3 Football Finals
Worst: Rutgers GROB (RIP)

44cuse

 

[SUfanNC]

Best: '87 Penn State. The most perfect October weather I've ever seen. Mid-70's temperature with a zephyr-like breeze and big puffy white cloud moving across the sky. I knew that on a day like this, nothing could go wrong and nothing did as we beat them for the first time in 17 years.

Worst: '97 NC State. Dreams of a national championship and Heisman trophy after blowing out Wisconsin the Kickoff Classic. We lose in OT to a team that had been bad but was now mediocre. We could have won it in regulation with a chip shot FG but Dee Brown decided to play 'hero ball' and stick the pigskin over the goal line, It got knocked out of his hands and recovered by the Wolfpack to set up their turn.

Funny you mention the weather for Penn st. I was 10 and we went to Skaneateles for the day. I remember people talking about it and the first play. I recall how nice of a day it was.

 

[OttoMets]

...
10/11/95 SU 22 West Virginia 0 A goal line stand followed by a 96-yard Donovan McNabb to Marvin Harrison pass, the longest pass play in SU history. I can still remember seeing the ball at the height of its arc, Marvin breaking away from his defender underneath it and I knew what was going to happen. Those are the most exciting plays - where you can see what will happen before it does.
...

This would be a dark-horse pick for me. Great game. Very rainy day.

 

[Dmcnabbrules]

Best is a tie, sorry. Florida game in 91, McNabbs last game in Dome against Miami and the Clemson win.
Worst Tennessee in 98

 

[Chris02M]

best- clemson in 2017
worst- worst we got outscored like 42-3 in the second half vs bc

 

[SUFan44]

Best FB - Miami ‘98… Thanksgiving weekend and we would always go to Binghamton for the holiday. Once I saw it on the schedule, I was asking everyone and anyone on the old Syracuse.com forum if they had two extras so my dad and I could go. I don’t think my dad really thought I even had found tickets, with him not understanding the Internet. But I found the generous person up near the old ESF lot, and headed into the Dome. What I witnessed was the culmination of the best Syracuse football career I ever saw. McNabb was everything to those teams, and to see him single-handedly destroy our arch rival at the time, who had so often done the same to us, was magical. The moment when he got up on the bench and waved the towel to a standing ovation is one that still brings a smile.

Honorable mention - WVU 2011 (WE WERE BACK!), VT 2000 (Freeney 4.5 sack game), NW 2012

Worst FB - Michigan ‘99 - Now a freshman at SU, this was so close to being a big win for a team looking for an identity. Brutal loss and it didn’t get much better during my four years, save a year of Dwight Freeney dominance. Honorable mention goes to the BC game later that year. What a disaster that one was.

 

[Sherman20]

I gotta stop checking the ticketmaster map.

This threads simple. Share your best memory at the dome, and your worst. This is for football, no basketball.

Right nows a time to be excited and proud, so lets think about the journey along the way.

My best memory: Vtech win 2016. Nobody expected us to win. It showed me Dino was the real deal and likely the right fit for Cuse. We dominated the Hokies and had the most electric post game atmosphere in memory. It felt like pride and culture were returning to the hill and little did I know at the time we’d beat Clemson a year later.

Worst: The Lamar Jackson hurdle game. Stayed the entire game. Took it on the chin. Sat in nachos by mistake too. Awful. Honestly felt like that was rock bottom. Now I look back on it as my memory of witnessing greatness. But at the time it felt like there werent enough dome foams in the world to sit through another low point like that

Best: Donnie McPherson pitching to Michael Owens on the option for the 2-pt conversion against WVU at the end to seal that perfect 11-0 season in 1987. The only time I’ve ever been more ecstatic and emotional was winning the national title in 2003. (Runners up: 1987 blowout of Penn State and 1991 win against a top 10 Florida team.)

Worst: That heartbreaking 1992 loss to Miami in the Dome. Season opening Tennessee loss in 1998. We went on to beat Michigan in the Big House the following week, which helped alleviate the pain of the UT loss a bit. But what a special season that should have been (it was good but could have been great). Getting boatraced by Bobby Bowden and Florida State in the early 90s.

Bonus Best away game memory: 1998 win in the Big House vs Michigan!

 

[ECE '76]

For games I saw in person in the Dome (I saw almost all the games mentioned here on TV), I say this was the worst:

Notable Downs:
11/1/80 SU 6 Pittsburgh 43 Maybe the best team we ever played. Marino on one side and Hugh Green on the other. We were no match for them.

But I've seen even worse games than that on the road - at WV 1972 (43-12) (Danny Buggs!) and at Temple 1979 (49-17).

The strangest game at the Dome was 1980 vs Temple.
Quarterback Dave Warner threw for one touchdown and ran for another Saturday, leading Syracuse to a 31-7 triumph over Temple in a game marked by a five-minute delay due to a fourth-quarter fight. Temple's Colin McCarty was removed from the game after getting into an argument with fans who were jeering him. McCarty made an obscene gesture at the crowd of 36,485 as he left the field.
The fact is, the entire Temple team left the field and it wasn't clear if the game was going to be called off at that point. Eventually they came out of the locker room to a chorus of boos and finished out the game. Very ugly.

The best was Purdue 2022. All that scoring and lead changes in the 4th quarter, frankly is up there with the 1984 BC-Miami game, albeit the score after 3 quarters was 10-9 in this one... but it was basketball game-like ending.

 

[Sherman20]

Best : WVU ‘87, people my age will remember before ‘87 it wasn’t much different than the current state of the program over the past 20 years. ‘87 was special, there weren’t any bad performances up until that point (I think SU fell down early to BC but stormed back by halftime.). This was the chance to go undefeated and BAM Major Harris slaps all of us in the face, sitting and watching I was a sophomore in HS and I was like this is the dud we have all come to expect. Lucy is gonna pull that football and all of us Charlie Browns are gonna fall on our backs. But it didn’t happen and the regular season triumph was complete. It was pandemonium in that place and now at 51 I can still feel the energy.

Runner up…Florida my sophomore year. Cuse kicked their Arse from the opening kickoff. It was complete domination over mighty SEC. Florida didn’t look like the belonged on the same field.

Worst. I still haven’t gotten over Chris Gedney (RIP) tackled at the 3. I can will feel the awful feeling in the pit of my stomach. The U was the U then and there was no doubt about it. It probably was the loudest game ever. I can still remember my ears ringing two days after.

Same. PANDEMONIUM is the perfect way to describe that West Virginia game at the end. Absolute bedlam. They may be couch burning inbreds, but I want that rivalry back.

 

[SWC75]

For games I saw in person in the Dome (I saw almost all the games mentioned here on TV), I say this was the worst:

But I've seen even worse games than that on the road - at WV 1972 (43-12) (Danny Buggs!) and at Temple 1979 (49-17).

The strangest game at the Dome was 1980 vs Temple.
Quarterback Dave Warner threw for one touchdown and ran for another Saturday, leading Syracuse to a 31-7 triumph over Temple in a game marked by a five-minute delay due to a fourth-quarter fight. Temple's Colin McCarty was removed from the game after getting into an argument with fans who were jeering him. McCarty made an obscene gesture at the crowd of 36,485 as he left the field.
The fact is, the entire Temple team left the field and it wasn't clear if the game was going to be called off at that point. Eventually they came out of the locker room to a chorus of boos and finished out the game. Very ugly.

The best was Purdue 2022. All that scoring and lead changes in the 4th quarter, frankly is up there with the 1984 BC-Miami game, albeit the score after 3 quarters was 10-9 in this one... but it was basketball game-like ending.

Some Temple players picked up a bench and hurled it into the stands. I thought we were going to have a riot.

 

[BrooklynCuse]

The Florida game in ‘91. That and Van Halen Diver Down tour 1982

 

[elimunelson]

Best and worst is Oklahoma 94.

First game in the dome. First and last time changing fandom from the eagles to the Orangemen.

Weird feeling but as soon as Harrison ran for the td I never looked back.

Losing made it very hard though. Rough end.

Bonus best is The Rolling Stones 94 w my future wife

 

[buffalorange]

Worst memory, Tulane 1990. SU lost to a Tulane team with a losing record, 24-26.

Many contenders for best memory. WVU in '87 was a thriller as was the VA Tech game in 1998.
But the best memory is SU's defeat of #1 Nebraska a year after they put up 63 points on SU.
Unranked SU was given no chance against the mighty Cornhuskers, but the team would not quit.

 

[buffalorange]

Some Temple players picked up a bench and hurled it into the stands. I thought we were going to have a riot.

One of the Temple defenders got thrown out of the game for a bad personal foul. The Temple coach didn't control the kid on the sidelines. The kid threw a cup of water into the stands. Bad mistake. The fans responded by deluging the Temple team with dome foam and soda.
As the Temple team was leaving the field some players were swinging their helmets at fans.

SU won. We did get a bad write-up in Sports Illustrated. I wrote to them with a correction and, of course, got lip service back. I did not renew my subscription.

 

[David332]

Updated best Dome experience, watching us dominate #15 NC State when we were ranked #18 and becoming bowl eligible at 6-0 to a sold out, near maximum capacity crowd that was louder than I knew was even possible.

 

[SWC75]

Updated best Dome experience, watching us dominate #15 NC State when we were ranked #18 and becoming bowl eligible at 6-0 to a sold out, near maximum capacity crowd that was louder than I knew was even possible.

And my brother who has lived in Hawaii since 1983, came to visit. I got him a ticket and it was his first game in the Dome.

 

[NoFullHouse]

Best 1984 Nebraska, so surreal running from the Endzone where my sister & I sat to 302 where my parents sat with a couple minutes to go and there was NO ONE in the hallways.

Worst, probably SU at Miami in 2001 I got on Gameday (from the night before at the Clevelander) with a question for Corso about why we used the Full house Backfield on 3rd or 4th & 1 instead of spreading it out & doing the same thing or sneaking it against fewer people. Sure as they did that before the game got out of hand, fumbled & it turned into a blowout. Similar in '93 went to Miami with a buddy watched #23 SU lose to #6 Miami 49-0 we stormed the field anyway (2 of us)

 

[MGDCuse]

Best 1984 Nebraska, so surreal running from the Endzone where my sister & I sat to 302 where my parents sat with a couple minutes to go and there was NO ONE in the hallways.

Worst, probably SU at Miami in 2001 I got on Gameday (from the night before at the Clevelander) with a question for Corso about why we used the Full house Backfield on 3rd or 4th & 1 instead of spreading it out & doing the same thing or sneaking it against fewer people. Sure as they did that before the game got out of hand, fumbled & it turned into a blowout. Similar in '93 went to Miami with a buddy watched #23 SU lose to #6 Miami 49-0 we stormed the field anyway (2 of us)

Was that 2001 Miami game the Freeney vs. Mount McKinney game?

 

[NoFullHouse]

Was that 2001 Miami game the Freeney vs. Mount McKinney game?

Great memory! For some reason I think Freeney was dinged up coming into the game Hurricanes offensive line has height, weight advantage over undersized SU defensive front

 

[NoFullHouse]

Best 1984 Nebraska, so surreal running from the Endzone where my sister & I sat to 302 where my parents sat with a couple minutes to go and there was NO ONE in the hallways.

Worst, probably SU at Miami in 2001 I got on Gameday (from the night before at the Clevelander) with a question for Corso about why we used the Full house Backfield on 3rd or 4th & 1 instead of spreading it out & doing the same thing or sneaking it against fewer people. Sure as they did that before the game got out of hand, fumbled & it turned into a blowout. Similar in '93 went to Miami with a buddy watched #23 SU lose to #6 Miami 49-0 we stormed the field anyway (2 of us)

Glad I just re-found this site, another fun memory was going down to Wake Forrest when I used to post on the old Syracuse.com football Forum & said I'd be wearing my Orange Corduroy's. Walking thru the parking lot before the game a guy looks at me, says, "Orange Cords...this guy's on the Forum!" So funny.