FWIW, I think your AD was in a no-win situation. Extend a head coach with a losing record for two out of his three years; you probably lose even more of your fan base. Then the coach makes certain questionable decisions and mouths off to the press about the current state of his contract. Coach Shafer didnt do himself any favors. Also, from the outside looking in, your head coach may have been a good DC, but he was not a good head coach. He could get his team to compete hard with Clemson & LSU but they can't compete with teams like NCST, Louisville, USF? If these three games had been close, even had he lost those games, I think he would have been retained. I look at Syracuse's division within the ACC and I don't see a lot of wins there for you guys:

Clemson - L
FSU - L
Louisville - L
NCST - W/L
BC - W/L
Wake - W

Then your permanent cross-over is Pitt, another L. I don't mean to be disrespectful at all to your program, but I think the Syracuse AD needs to invest more money into football. From what I hear, Shafer wanted more money for his assistants but the AD said no. Not a good sign.

(11-26-2015 02:18 PM)JAE_VT Wrote:  FWIW, I think your AD was in a no-win situation. Extend a head coach with a losing record for two out of his three years; you probably lose even more of your fan base. Then the coach makes certain questionable decisions and mouths off to the press about the current state of his contract. Coach Shafer didnt do himself any favors. Also, from the outside looking in, your head coach may have been a good DC, but he was not a good head coach. He could get his team to compete hard with Clemson & LSU but they can't compete with teams like NCST, Louisville, USF? If these three games had been close, even had he lost those games, I think he would have been retained. I look at Syracuse's division within the ACC and I don't see a lot of wins there for you guys:

Clemson - L
FSU - L
Louisville - L
NCST - W/L
BC - W/L
Wake - W

Then your permanent cross-over is Pitt, another L. I don't mean to be disrespectful at all to your program, but I think the Syracuse AD needs to invest more money into football. From what I hear, Shafer wanted more money for his assistants but the AD said no. Not a good sign.

UL and Pitt are winnable. We haven't won against them a lot lately, but they aren't hopeless losses, either. We held our own against UL in the big east. They probably have a winning record, but the games were competitive and we did get some wins. As for Pitt, we're always competitive and the programs trade off being good v being bad.

(11-26-2015 02:53 PM)nzmorange Wrote:  UL and Pitt are winnable. We haven't won against them a lot lately, but they aren't hopeless losses, either. We held our own against UL in the big east. They probably have a winning record, but the games were competitive and we did get some wins.

This isn't to disagree with anything you shared. UofL and Syracuse split their first four in Big East play. Then since 2009 UofL has won 5 of 6, by an average of 14 points. The lone Syracuse win was also a large margin.

Don't get it twisted, a good coach can absolutely win at Syracuse. Syracuse has a better football history than about 90% of ACC schools. That didn't just happen, they've earned their legacy.

Their problem, at least as I see it, is the looming dome renovation. It has to happen for that program to move forward. However, it is going to require that they barnstorm for a few years and that is going to be positively brutal.

There is no way I would agree to walk into that if I were an up and coming young coach. I would simply wait on another job or I would wait on that job until after the renovations were completed and take the place of the guy who is dumb enough to take it this time around.

(11-26-2015 10:44 PM)Dr. Isaly von Yinzer Wrote:  Don't get it twisted, a good coach can absolutely win at Syracuse. Syracuse has a better football history than about 90% of ACC schools. That didn't just happen, they've earned their legacy.

Their problem, at least as I see it, is the looming dome renovation. It has to happen for that program to move forward. However, it is going to require that they barnstorm for a few years and that is going to be positively brutal.

There is no way I would agree to walk into that if I were an up and coming young coach. I would simply wait on another job or I would wait on that job until after the renovations were completed and take the place of the guy who is dumb enough to take it this time around.

There is a proposal to do the renovation without losing home games. They would essentially build a huge exoskeleton first then remodel inside.

Even if they lost a year like they did in 1979, I don't think it presents a long term problem for Syracuse. But Coyle needs to get this hire right and the BOT needs to fund the coaches salaries so SU can be competitive.

(11-24-2015 05:54 PM)lumberpack4 Wrote:  Syracuse has to be one of the toughest football recruiting spots in the P-5. Penn State, Ohio State, and ND will pick over their talent. Selling the city can't be easy. It has no college town appeal like Charlottesville, Chapel Hill, Duke, WF, Clemson, BC or VT. It has no big city appeal like Miami, GT, BC, or Pittsburgh. In many ways Syracuse is like a run-down version of Louisville or Raleigh. And it's cold as hell as opposed to Miami, FSU, Clemson, and GT. Lack of in state competition is the only plus I can think of regarding Syracuse, but that means less in the NE than it does in the South.

On top of that Cornell is down the road so you don't have the ability to claim an Ivy League type degree value as Duke, UVa, NW, Vandy, Stanford, and Rice can claim or the small private top degree that WF, Emory, Case Western, Williams College, etc.

As superficial as it is, in addition to the f-bomb, the ubiquitous rust layer due to salt and ferterlizer to combat snow, makes Syracuse look like a better version of Newark NJ, or Toledo Ohio.

Look at this troll

I will share my opinion later but I can't get over some of these trolls on this site bashing everything