Poliquin: Paul Pasqualoni, the ol' Syracuse football coach, is returning to the Carrier Dome on Friday
Bud Poliquin, Post-Standard columnist By Bud Poliquin, Post-Standard columnist
on October 18, 2012 at 8:00 AM, updated October 18, 2012 at 9:15 AM
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Syracuse, N.Y. -- On that December day in 2004 when Daryl Gross, freshly arrived in our town from southern California, placed Paul Pasqualoni out on the curb, wiped his hands and declared that it was “just a logical time for us to go in a different direction,” the clock began to tick on re-boot of the Syracuse University football program.
“There’s some restlessness in the community,” Daryl told us back then. “You want to have some hope. . . . My belief is that we can win the national championship here one day. We have to build it and we have to have a vision with it. And we’re starting now.”
That was 90 games ago. That was 61 losses ago. That was more than a half-million empty Carrier Dome seats ago.
And, funny thing, the restlessness remains.
It will be mixed on Friday night, however, with more than a little intrigue because Pasqualoni, perceived by Gross -- and a whole lot of other folks back in ’04 -- to be more problem than solution, will return to the Dome for the first time in nearly eight years.
Now the head coach of the wobbling Connecticut Huskies, who could beat neither Western Michigan nor Temple in these past few weeks, Pasqualoni must be privately delighting in this thought: Should his unremarkable UConn bunch upset the Orange in the Dome, SU’s record would drop to 2-5 and its season would likely be tossed into Onondaga Lake.
No wonder, then, that Doug Marrone -- never mind his boss, Gross -- has been left to shake his head.
“We don’t have time,” he said after his outfit dropped that 23-15 gift basket into Rutgers’ lap last weekend, “to feel sorry for ourselves.”
Nobody, of course, was supposed to ever see this day.
Dismissed by Gross, Pasqualoni, then 55 and now 63, was simply going to fade away, serving out his time as another graying assistant somewhere. Meanwhile, Greg Robinson, with a Super Bowl ring on his finger and a copy of “The Little Engine That Could” in his cubby, was going to lead Syracuse back to greatness. And when that idea was exposed as folly, Marrone, the proud alum, was imported from the NFL’s New Orleans Saints to do what GRob could not.
And, well, all of that shifting from A to B to C has amounted to little more than the re-arranging of deck chairs.
Pasqualoni was dumped because the Orange had slipped into mediocrity on his stubborn, predictable watch . . . and as SU went 34-32 in his last 66 games, that was true. But Robinson, the poor man, came in from Texas and proceeded in his tizzy to inter the Syracuse program in a kind of football burial ground.
And now, Marrone, whose program has lost nine of 11 contests from one October to the next -- and all, with that stunning 49-23 victory over No. 11 West Virginia as a launching pad . . . a certifiable oddity, that -- has some serious work ahead of him just to get to that point which got Pasqualoni fired.
Why, if Doug’s club ran the table beginning on Friday and continuing right through the bowl affair it would play, he’d sit at 26-24 (.520) across his first four seasons. Pasqualoni’s last four (of 14) campaigns among us? He went 26-23 (.531). Robinson? Though he had a whole lot of “want-to,” Greg was 10-37 (.213) during his four-year stumble to Orange notoriety.
On balance, then, the scoreboard would suggest that we’ve been slogging in place, more or less, since that December day in 2004 when Daryl Gross cleared his throat. And this presupposes that Marrone guys will knock off Connecticut, South Florida, Cincinnati, Louisville, Missouri, Temple and their postseason foe all in a row.
Those who believe that will happen? They could probably ride down Salina Street on the same unicycle.
“The expectations at Syracuse are very high,” Gross said back on the occasion of Pasqualoni’s removal from the Syracuse football throne. “It’s a very, very proud place. A very prestigious place. A very sophisticated place. Obviously, there’s been some success here. As of late, it’s hasn’t been on a consistent basis. In looking back on the past few seasons, there are some inconsistencies in there. We hope to do great things with the new head coach.”
Nearly eight years later, the old head coach is coming back to town . . . and he won’t need to ask how things have gone since he left. Who'd blame him, though, if he did?
(Bud Poliquin’s columns, "To The Point" observations and "Morning Orange" reports appear virtually every day on syracuse.com. His work can also be regularly found on the pages of The Post-Standard newspaper. Additionally, Poliquin can be heard weekday mornings between 10 a.m.-12 noon on the sports-talk radio show, "Bud & The Manchild," on The Score 1260-AM. Poliquin can be reached at
[email protected])