In a results based industry, Dino Babers didn't prove his process was strong enough to weather the storm at Syracuse
Dino Babers was allegedly fired because he couldn't get to 7 wins this season against a very winnable schedule. Why that happened is a microcosm of his Syracuse struggles.
Earlier this week, I wrote about the Syracuse Orange football coaching vacancy in terms of who I thought John Wildhack should be targeting to fill the role. I purposefully waited to write about why the role came open because I’m not sure there was much to say beyond “Dino didn’t win enough games.”
Then Wildhack spoke to the media and said that the firing came because after the Orange’s 4-3 start, he and Dino had shared expectations for 7-5 to finish out the season. Yet another late season collapse happened, and Babers was shown the door after 7-5 was no longer attainable.
I don’t think anyone is surprised that Babers was fired; the guys over at Split Zone Duo have had Dino on the hot seat for weeks. What I do think is surprising is that Wildhack seems to have approached this situation with both realistic and unrealistic feelings about this job. After the Orange’s 4-3 start, I was one of the many touting how easy the rest of the schedule was the ceiling for the Syracuse season. It appears as if Wildhack wanted to at least see that Babers could deliver a similar result to last season (7 regular season wins) before any extension talk, which is entirely reasonable considering Babers needed an extension to avoid being a lame duck coach going into next year. (Allegedly, since we still don’t know exactly how long was left on Babers’ deal.)
In a scenario where Babers knew he was coaching for his job, he didn’t use the bye week to install his new system of offense (he waited until two games later), he had a starting quarterback play hurt, then not play hurt, then play hurt again, and continued to bemoan the lack of depth on the roster that he and his staff built. It wasn’t a good look for the coach. But I’m not saying Babers is entirely at fault here; he was coaching in a role where expectations and reality don’t always line up.
But yet, Wildhack wants Syracuse to be level with it’s “peer schools” who he calls Virginia Tech, Virginia, Boston College, Georgia Tech, Wake Forest, Rutgers and Maryland. Those schools are all going to finish this year somewhere between 5-7 and 7-5 this season, just like Syracuse. Wildhack says that he believes that Syracuse’s resourcing and facilities are as good as 80% of their peers. Dino Babers, to an extent, disagreed. The players on the team felt this way as well, and the alumni backed the sentiment as well. It’s enough of an open secret that Matt Rhule, who was hired via the search firm Eastman & Beaudine that Syracuse is now using for their coaching search, spent a good deal of his time pumping up Tony White by also calling out schools “without resourcing.”
One of the reasons this job opening continues to be at the bottom of desirability lists of college football is because the lack of resourcing doesn’t line up with year to year expectations; Syracuse wants to be something it doesn’t want to pay market rate for, so the coaching staff needs to be able to win marginal victories consistently to make that happen. This isn’t a bug, this is a feature.
Syracuse.com’s Chris Carlson had a look back on the Dino Babers era that I think summed up the challenges with Babers, especially in the post 2020 part of the era. Babers was defensive, guarded, and more than happy to meet you on his terms. But with a team that’s really the only show in town, there needs to be more if you want your performance to be judged on more than X’s and O’s. It’s clear Babers was successful building relationships with players and their families once they committed to Syracuse, and Wildhack praised Babers for his handling of the COVID pandemic circus thrust upon the team. But we as fans never really saw that charm when the team wasn’t winning.
Multiple times Babers was challenged on how his staff handled strength, conditioning, and nutrition. Multiple times this concern was handwaved away. Yet every year, the November swoon could be deflected with injury talk, and as mentioned above, it took current player intervention to get even the bare bones nutrition program set up for the football team. Syracuse went a full calendar year with a head of football operations, something unheard of at any other Power 5 program. While these are all things controlled by Athletics at large, the football coach is the most powerful (or in the case of most of Babers’ era, second most powerful) person in the department. If there were struggles in filling those roles, Dino didn’t vocalize them, and so the blame fell to him.
What I’m trying to show here is that Syracuse is a Moneyball job. It requires a coach and staff who are comfortable with the challenges of being a small program playing against giants, and have a holistic approach to running a program that understands they need to win every single second of the 40 hours allotted to the team per week if they’re going to have a chance to win during the 60 minutes on the field. The way Dino Babers handled the end of his era made it appear as if he and his staff were burnt out from that kind of run. It happens. But then it was absolutely time to move on, because college football is about to shift dramatically in an expanded playoff, NIL, transfer portal world, and Syracuse can’t be left behind.