This isn’t a vote of confidence for this year’s team. It’s not a testament to Greg Robinson’s coaching. It’s about nothing that’s appeared on the field.

Syracuse will return to prominence in the next decade, but not because any of the reasons above. The Orange will become a factor again because it plays in a top-heavy Big East, which has an automatic bid into the Bowl Championship Series. By virtue of playing in the BCS, a team can be considered among the most prominent in college football, and is by designation a national title contender.

Syracuse can return to the top of the conference, for a reason as simple as this: There aren’t that many good teams SU has to eclipse to reach the top, like there are in the Southeastern Conference if Vanderbilt tried reaching the top or the Big Ten if Northwestern tried reaching the top.

From the looks of it, the Big East will have a representative in the national championship game, most likely Louisville. If not Louisville, it could be Rutgers.

Read those last two sentences again. Louisville or Rutgers has a conceivable case to play for the national championship. Not exactly Notre Dame or Michigan of lore.

This pertains to Syracuse because the two programs are in the apex of a rebuilding effort that didn’t start too long ago. It was based upon the notion that an executed vision in the Big East conference can lead to a conference champion, which can lead to the BCS.

Here’s the interesting thing about it – neither program has more tradition than Syracuse. Neither program carries better name recognition than Syracuse. Neither team, under normal circumstances, would be on television more than Syracuse.

An average high school recruit who watches the NFL on Sunday can tell you Donovan McNabb or Marvin Harrison went to Syracuse, but they don’t know that Deion Branch and Elvis Dumervil went to Louisville or L.J. Smith and Mike McMahon went to Rutgers. And if you want to throw West Virginia out there, their NFL claim to fame right now is Chris Henry, who will be starring in the real-life adaptation of ‘The Longest Yard.’

The jury is out on the long-term sustainability of those programs. Though West Virginia, who entered the season as the top team in the conference, has some history of success, head coach Rich Rodriguez has such a unique system that many players go for the system and not the program. It means if he leaves – and Rodriguez’s name comes up for every high-profile opening – so, too, might the success.

Syracuse, though, is in a lull. Yet recruits are still drawn to the name, even if the program is in a slumber. It’s happened worse to other schools which were able to rebound.

Look at Penn State. While it’s tough to compare the schools – Penn State is a large, state-supported school with a rabid fan base that fills a stadium with more than 100,000 people, while Syracuse is a private school in a metropolitan area that can barely fill the lower bowl of a 49,250-seat dome – the programs are at least comparable. Both have rich traditions and both recruit from the same general area – east of the Mississippi River and north of the Mason-Dixon line.

From 2000-2004, Penn State finished a combined 17-33. It made only one bowl during that span. Critics were saying Penn State fell from the elite, citing only one Big Ten championship since it joined the conference in 1994.

The program never lost its name recognition, though. And eventually the recruiting picked up, the program was able to recover from the difficult stretch, capture some prized recruits and finished 11-1 last season. The talk of Penn State’s decline dissipated.

SU isn’t at the national prominence of Penn State, but it’s not too far away. And under head coach Greg Robinson, it has shown an ability to recruit high-caliber players despite a poor record. Former head coach Paul Pasqualoni’s recruiting tailed off toward the end of his regime, and no matter how good a coach is, it’s hard to win without players.

Coaching is a factor, too, and Robinson’s 4-16 record isn’t encouraging. But it’s too early for anyone to properly evaluate Robinson two years into a rebuilding effort, one that included a philosophical change on both sides of the football.

So right now, it’s important to judge him based on what Pasqualoni’s downfall was – recruiting. Robinson’s at least shown the foundation to recruit. Call it a vision without the execution. If executed correctly, the gap between the Big East cellar and BCS isn’t large.

When that gap is closed, SU will again reach national prominence.