Two days after Syracuse’s 35-0 blowout loss at Iowa, dropping the Orange to 0-2 for the second season in a row, the team is still picking up the pieces in preparation for this Saturday’s game against Illinois. Syracuse Director of Athletics Daryl Gross made the trip to Iowa to take in the game and watched SU head coach Greg Robinson’s postgame press conference with an attentive eye.

On Monday, two days after Robinson fell to 5-20 in his first 25 games, The Daily Orange sat down with Gross for his evaluation on the state of the program.

The Daily Orange: What observations do you take away from Syracuse’s loss, 35-0, last weekend to Iowa and 42-12 loss to Washington two weeks ago?

Daryl Gross: Things aren’t always linear in progress. Sometimes you take three steps back before you move forward. The thing I do know is these kids worked so hard in the offseason, as hard as any team in the country. I’ve been around teams and I see how they work, and these guys work really hard. The whole program deserves better. I think there are better days ahead. Everybody gets a pie in the face in life. There are probably more negatives than positives in that game. But you have to look at the positives and jump on it.

D.O.: Wide receiver Mike Williams said, ‘Maybe this is a reality check. Maybe they’re just that much better than us. We’ve got a young team. People have to wait. It might not be our year.’ Is that an accurate assessment?

Gross: Sometimes reporters catch people at times where he may not mean exactly what he says. At the same time, maybe he feels that. To be honest, I don’t know what he means by it. I know he’s worked hard and that the team has worked hard enough where maybe they can parlay it into some success. That’s what I’m hoping for.

D.O.: Do you agree with the spirit of Mike’s answer that this is going to take some time?

Gross: I think what he’s trying to say there is we’re working and trying to eliminate all the mistakes we have so we have a chance to (win). But you just need to be patient with it.

D.O.: Do you endorse, at least in theory, that the third year is the defining year for the head coach?

Gross: I see it as a fluid thing. It’s amazing how there’s people who told me from the day I got here and before I hired a coach, ‘Football is going to take five years. It’ll take you five because the program is down right now.’ Sometimes it does. Look at Greg Schiano at Rutgers. Do you think people weren’t happy with him in year three? That thing didn’t look like it was going to work. We have to remember that story where Greg Schiano was and now, all of a sudden, his program looks pretty good. Let’s not forget that these things don’t always go linear. Sometimes the stock drops a little bit, and then it goes back up. All you can do is look at the next game and see what happens. I have to think that we’re going to play better against Illinois. But they’re a lot better than last year because they have a quarterback who is pretty good. The key for us is to keep our confidence. If something goes wrong, we can go down.

D.O.: What can you point to since Robinson’s tenure that suggests it will get better?

Gross: The first year we won one game. We played pretty good defense that year. We were in games. The next year we won four games. You can draw a line from one to four, and that’s a good line. The fact we went on the road and beat a good Big Ten team last year is a good thing. We did what talent could give us that year. This year I’d expect us to be better than we were last year. We haven’t shown that yet. Hopefully we do. We don’t want to go backwards. We want to get this thing right and move forward and try to get to a bowl game.

D.O.: How would you evaluate Robinson’s recruiting?

Gross: It’s hard because he has two-and-a-half classes. The oldest player you can possibly have is a sophomore. There’s not a lot of sophomores who are winning national championships. You really don’t know. I know he likes his two classes he’s brought in. But the real tell of them is when they become juniors or seniors. Then we’ll see what’s going on there.

D.O: What is it about Robinson’s vision and the direction he wants to take that assures you that, despite these setbacks in the past two games, his program is going in the right direction?

Gross: I can’t predict the future. I don’t know how many games we’ll win. I wish I did know. We started off with some concepts. My thing is, let’s do the concepts we said we were going to do. We’re going to be solid defensively, and the offense will evolve. I’m always looking for those two things to happen. If the offense picks up and we shut people out, we’ll win every game. That’s what I’m looking for. That’s what the deal is and I don’t try to make it complex. At the same time, I know we need more time to get more players and do all those things. I want to see progress and be competitive every single game. I want the teams who leave, win or lose, to say they had to fight us to win.

I look back at the West Virginia game (in 2005). It was a close game. The Virginia game (in 2005) we were right in the games. Now it’s time to get over that hump. We’ll see what happens. We didn’t have the start we wanted. Hopefully we can get this motor started and get out there.

Published on September 10, 2007 at 12:00 pm