Cuse Country

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love Doug Marrone.

The year started promisingly for the Orange football team; a hard-fought overtime loss, a respect-earning trip to Happy Valley, and a thrilling win over a bowl-bound team had everyone excited about the change in the program’s direction. The excitement plateaued, though, as they beat Maine and Akron (though neither win was particularly dominant) and lost to USF and WVU (though neither loss was particularly terrible). One can expect this sort of reaction; the marked improvement shown early in the season was enough to drive fans’ expectations up above where they probably ought to have been. That’s OK, though. Nothing wrong with a little exuberance and optimism around here.

The last two games, the team has put forth the same fantastic effort but the results have been unimpressive. What boggles my mind is how disheartening these losses have been to much of the fanbase. There has been booing at the Dome, general malaise, whispers of a return to the sad results of the past four years. This is a bizarre reaction, totally out of touch with reality. What did you expect? This team, despite its significantly improved play, is not ready to challenge top-20 opponents. All they can do is compete, which they have been doing to the very best of their abilities. You can quibble with some of the decisions made by the coaches and players, but the reality is that every team makes mistakes during the course of the game. Syracuse is not yet good enough to overcome them. But how can you deny that they are on the way back to mattering again? They are far from the decrepitude of the Robinson Era; heck, to my view they are improved over the last couple of Pasqualoni years. Remember losing to Va Tech 51-7? Purdue 51-0? Georgia Tech 51-14? Ugh ugh and ugh. Now, they’ve played #5 and #14 on consecutive weeks, and acquitted themselves well in both games (particularly the first halves, before lack of depth catches up). They lost, but did not get utterly creamed. I’ll take these results over the aforementioned ones any day.

I admit it’s hard on the fans when you lose 4 out of 5, with only a win over feeble Akron in that span. There is a tendency to lose hope. But there’s something important that I think has been insufficiently recognized. The schedule this season shook out so that the Orange played their first four conference games against the four best teams in the conference. Consider: Cincy and Pitt are undefeated in conference; USF is 2-2 with losses to Cincy and Pitt; WVU is 3-1 with their loss to USF. The bottom half of the league (SU, RU, UL, Conn) is a combined 0-12 against the top half. So where is SU? In exactly the same position as these other three teams, which happen to be the three teams remaining on the schedule. To be fair, UConn has given legitimate scares to Cincy (lost by 2), WVU (lost by 4), and Pitt (lost by 3). So perhaps they don’t deserve to be lumped in with SU, RU, and UL. But the principle is sound. We knew, going into the season, that the Orange were not an ‘upper-echelon’ Big East team. Unfortunately, they had to face everyone who is first. It’s a front-loading that made it much more difficult to turn their improved play into better results in the W-L column.

So the true test of the first year of Doug Marrone’s tenure really comes in the next two weeks. I said this last week when talking about Mike Williams’ departure; in many ways the Louisville game is more important than the Pitt game. It’s the nature of fans to start to get tired of “moral victories” and hearing the opponent say “they played really hard, good for them”. We long for something to truly celebrate. But I can’t believe that people are crapping on the team like they are after Saturday’s game. Have some perspective, folks. Yes, the Orange got beat by a superior team. That is what is expected to happen (especially on the road). You can’t get that angry at it. Now, the next two weeks we match up against teams that are beatable. I don’t mean “beatable” as in “we should beat them and it’d be awful if we don’t” but rather as in “we could beat them, and it’ll be great if we do”, i.e. we have a legitimate shot to come away with a win or two. If the schedule had been different, and SU had played Louisville on Oct 3 and Rutgers on Oct 10, there is a real chance they could have been 4-2 going into the bye week.

Wins over UL and Rutgers the next two weekends would signal that the Orange are truly on the upswing, not just to the fans but to potential recruits. Even if they fall to one or both of these next two opponents, I won’t be too upset. But that is when I may start to feel let down, because it will seem like a regression from the promising early performances. Until that happens, though, I’m still firmly on board the bandwagon. Go Orange.