Why the 2023 football season is era defining for the Syracuse Orange, Dino Babers, and John Wildhack
Why the 2023 football season is era defining for the Syracuse Orange, Dino Babers, and John Wildhack
The situation on campus and beyond has created a fulcrum point for the program and athletics as a whole.
But first…
The Disloyal Idiots podcast is back in stride, and this week we dove into the projected Syracuse football depth chart as compiled by Emily Leiker ($) for Syracuse.com.
New for this season, the Fans First Sports Nation will be doing college football shows on a national level, and I’ll be part of two shows: an ACC Preview show and a football scheme show, both dropping Wednesdays during the season. I’ll add them to the roundup when they are live, and would love feedback/reviews as we get the shows off the ground.
The 2023 season was always going to be a fork in the road for Syracuse football. Coming off a return to the postseason for the first time since the 2018 wonder season, maintaining was always going to determine if Dino Babers would stick around longer than the end of the season. The coach’s confirmed extension in 2018 is rumored to run through the 2024 season, and no coach can effectively recruit as a lame duck. 2023 was always going to be the year Babers was either extended, fired, or moved into a different role around athletics.
What wasn’t known months ago was the changes in collegiate athletics that would speed up the doomsday clock on the sport as we know it. Conference realignment has all but built the two conference model in college between the B1G Ten and the SEC, and Syracuse is left out in the ACC, ranked fourth in the sport in both football talent and television revenue. While the ACC and it’s member schools are secure thanks to the Grant of Rights, Syracuse, and every school not in one of the two premier conferences, have to ask themselves if they want to over-prioritize football in a way that ensures their athletics program is thought of as “premier.”
While it’s unfair to hinge the entire Athletics Department on one sport, Stanford has been the most successful department in the country for almost a decade, and is now faced with the real question of continuing to downsize athletics via football. Fair has nothing to do with anything; football drives revenues for the entire department, as it unlocks the tens of millions of annual television revenue.
Enter John Wildhack. Faced with yet another tough decision, there is certainly a large section of the fanbase who would feel quite content with moving football independent in some capacity and basketball back to a northeast metropolitan based conference. The problem with that plan? You’d be saying goodbye to around $20-$28 million in annual revenue, with that number heavily dependent on team success each year*.
It feels silly to have to say, but it’s John Wildhack’s job to find a way for Syracuse to gain an invite to the future College Football upper tier in some capacity purely to stave off any conversations of reducing the size and scope of the athletics department. But how can he do this?
Simply put, the football team needs to have more consistent fans and be better consistently. The value a school brings to a new conference is the viewership that comes with them from network A to network B, and Syracuse doesn’t move that needle. The New York Market experiment failed miserably with Rutgers, and won’t hold water a second time with Syracuse unless more people watch the games more consistently.
The apathy that seems to exist around this program right now is a twofold problem: the University continues to half measure marketing and communications outside of their bubble, but also, Babers’ message isn’t reaching the fans. Is it because of the 2019-21 seasons after the promise of 2018? Or is it because SU isn’t helping that message reach alumni and fans?
This is just the foundation of the iceberg of a problem Wildhack has to solve in the next couple of months: If Syracuse is going to survive with the top tier of collegiate athletics, it needs football to be better and watched by more people in New York. Is Dino Babers capable of being that face of the program? Is 7-5 this season enough to keep the faith of the fanbase? Is it proof that there’s finally a foundation or just the natural ceiling of the coaching staff? If you were to move on, what are you going to do to differentiate from this same situation replaying?
None of this is easy to answer. None of this has a right answer that’s obvious at the moment. But it all has to be answered in some capacity in 2023. Not what I expected coming into this season, but hey, I didn’t expect to be watching the final season of the Pac-12 either.
*While not an exact science, UConn saw that travel, salaries, and general operations of football cost $18 million as an independent, with a revenue of just over $4.5 million. The Big East basketball contract currently pays out around $3.5 million per school, but is being renegotiated before it’s expiration in 2024.