By J.P. Girouard
You knew the handwriting was on the wall Saturday night, when Syracuse athletic director Daryl Gross made it clear he wasn’t taking any questions after the Orange’s 39-14 blowout loss to Connecticut. On Sunday, Gross made it official – Greg Robinson was out as head coach at the end of the season.
Quite often in major college athletics, an argument can be made that head coaches are dismissed too soon, or dismissed due to the unrealistic expectations of their fanbase. This is not one of those times. If anything, the opposite is true here – you could easily make the case that Robinson stayed a year too long.
After all, how many other head coaches at a BCS program not named Duke or Baylor would survive a three-year stretch where they went 7-28? How many other coaches would be given another year to prove themselves after turning a once highly-profitable football program into a money losing proposition?
This wasn’t a case where Syracuse was a perennially awful program that needed time to build itself up. Even towards the end of Paul Pasqualoni’s run, the Orange were still a decent-to-good Big East team, even sharing the Big East title and going to a bowl game in his last season. In three seasons, Robinson basically took that solid, if unspectacular foundation, and blew it up.
Gross was clearly trying to be patient with Robinson – heeding examples like Rutgers giving Greg Schiano a fifth year in 2005 when the fans and media had him all but gone. But the difference there was obvious momentum existed with the Rutgers program – the Scarlet Knights had been 3-20 in Schiano’s first two seasons, 9-14 in his next two. No such momentum existed at Syracuse.
All Gross did by giving Robinson a fourth year was further expose the warts that Syracuse football has right now - a dwindling fan base (2007’s average home attendance was a 21-year low) and an increasingly competitive recruiting environment in the Northeast. Getting players to come to Syracuse was always going to be a challenge, but now with the likes of Rutgers and Connecticut emerging as Big East powers, it becomes even more difficult. The program’s image is at an all-time low.
So with that, there’s immense pressure to find the right head coach. The prime target is Syracuse alum and current Connecticut head coach Randy Edsall, which would be a significant coup and quickly reinvigorate the fan base. But when push comes to shove, would Edsall really want to leave the program he’s built for the last ten years to take over an epic rebuilding job? Sure, he wanted the Syracuse job when Paul Pasqualoni got hired, but that was 17 years ago.
If Gross can’t lure Edsall away from UConn, the options become a bit more muddled. Would East Carolina’s Skip Holtz or Buffalo’s Turner Gill really get the Orange fans excited about the program again? Oregon offensive coordinator and former New Hampshire head coach Chip Kelly might be a great fit, but it would be a relatively unsexy hire.
The wildcard might be Lane Kiffin, the former Oakland Raiders head coach whose name is out there for every big-time college job and has ties to Gross through their years together at USC. While Kiffin would certainly bring name value, would he be able to recruit the Northeast at Syracuse the way he was able to with Southern Cal?
Syracuse athletics have struggled badly the last couple of seasons, so it may not be overstating the case to say that this could be the biggest hire in the tenure of Daryl Gross. And if it goes badly, it may end up being his last hire.
J.P. Girouard blogs about the Big East for CollegeFootballNews.com. You can email him here.
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Other Articles By J.P. Girouard:
Greg Robinson Fired As Syracuse Head Coach
Down The Stretch In The Big East
Nine Pivotal Days For The Big East
The Big East Expectations Game
Is This Going To Be Ben Mauk's Legacy?
WVU Runs Away In Big East Media Poll
Rutgers' Strange Stadium Bargain
The Coach Who Stayed
The Big East Manifesto