Pasqualoni’s Revenge

UConn came from behind yesterday to beat the Orange. It was the second road loss in a row, Cuse having fallen to Louisville last week. Now all of that sounds like it might have happened in the thick of the Big East hoops schedule, but the problem was that it was a football story. The Orange are rebuilding their football program, after it was demolished, not merely disassembled, but razed, destroyed, leveled, by the John Robinson era. Last year, a plus five hundred season led to a bowl invitation – the Pinstripe Bowl in Yankee Stadium, and SU topped K-State, who by the way carries a top-20 ranking this year, and narrowly lost to number three ranked Oklahoma State yesterday.

Anyway, after starting 5-2 this year, the Orange seemed destined to move up a notch, improve their ranking, and play in a more established bowl game. After all, they had decisively beaten then ranked West Virginia, in what was seen as the biggest home win for the program in half a dozen years. Only it turned out that neither West Virginia, nor the Orange were as good as reported, because both have struggled since then. After WVU, SU lost badly to Louisville; they couldn’t muster a touchdown until late in the game, when things were out of reach. And yesterday, they carried a seven point lead into the fourth quarter, but could not hold that lead.

I was surprised that ESPN downplayed the story, but UConn’s win brought a measure of revenge for its coach, Paul Pasqualoni. Remember when we thought Pasqualoni’s perennial 6-5 records were not good enough? Of course we were then unhappy because Pasqualoni had inherited a top-20 team from Coach Mac, and then had mediocritized that team. In the early nineties we went to a major bowl almost every year, winning six bowl games in a row at one point; but a decade later were struggling to play above five hundred. Still, we didn’t know how good we had it then; or rather, we didn’t really know how bad it could get.

For four years, SU was on average, the worst team in what used to be called Division I-A. (Today it’s FBS, meaning that anyone with a better than five hundred record gets to play in a bowl. That puts last year’s invite in prespective.) Now we’re no longer the worst, but by any major statistical measure, we’re bad, worse than more than half the teams in the country. We’re struggling for wins in a weak conference, and will be lucky if we end up in another low grade bowl game after the season.

Not to make any of my many readers feel bad, but I can recall when we were playing and beating the likes of Florida (Kirby DarDar returned the opening kickoff for a TD, and the Orange never looked back); a Kordell Stewart led Colorado in the Fiesta Bowl; Michigan, in their house; Texas; and even a then-number-one ranked Nebraska, the win that announced Syracuse’s return to big time college football in the eighties. Hard to imagine even playing any of those teams today. Forget about winning. How about even keeping it respectable?

Good thing the hoops season has begun. The Orange are over-ranked, but should be good nonetheless. And if they can get some decent play in the middle, and if someone can step up and shoot the ball with any consistency, well then maybe they’ll have a chance at road wins when they go to UConn and Louisville. Those will be ranked teams for sure, UConn being the defending national champ. So those road wins would count heavily when the RPI wizards are trying to figure out tournament bids and seeding. But losing to UConn and Louisville on consecutive weeks in the football season? It’s only a measure of how far the program has fallen.