After the worst start to a Syracuse football season in 16 years, fans are panicking, attendance has started to wane and money might soon become a problem.

But Jake Crouthamel, SU’s director of athletics, doesn’t seem overly concerned.

In fact, he has a formula for dealing with situations like this: sit back, tough it out and don’t make any major changes — and it’s worked in the past.

Crouthamel last enacted that strategy in 1986, when Syracuse sputtered to a 1-5 start. Crouthamel trusted then-head coach Dick MacPherson to turn the season around — and he did, as Syracuse finished 5-6 and then 11-0-1 a year later.

This season, the Orangemen are 1-4 and quite possibly could finish .500 or worse for the first time since that 1986 season. Syracuse would have to close the season 5-2 with a win over Miami, Virginia Tech or Boston College to be eligible for a bowl. But true to his philosophy, Crouthamel says he will trust head coach Paul Pasqualoni to provide a quick change of fortune.

“Not for a second, a second, have we thought about changing coaches,” Crouthamel said. “That’s absolutely not on the table.

“We’re in a similar situation this year as we were in ‘86. We had very young players in several key positions. You could see they had the ability and the potential. It was a matter of developing that potential. That’s the same case — maybe to a slightly lesser extent — this year.”

Yet in both this season and ‘86, losing put pressure on Crouthamel.

In ‘86, fans grumbled that MacPherson should be fired as football coach and take over as director of athletics, leaving Crouthamel out on the curb.

The director of athletics said he gets plenty of nasty e-mails this year. During Saturday’s embarrassing, 48-24 loss at the Carrier Dome, Crouthamel said he was verbally accosted.

“Losing doesn’t make my job more difficult, but it makes it a lot less fun,” Crouthamel said. “But I’m confident we have the ability and personnel in place to turn it around.”

“When you’re at the level of Syracuse and you’re losing games, everybody’s going to be upset,” MacPherson said. “We started (the ‘86 season) 0-4 because we let our guard down. We made sure that wouldn’t happen again.”

After losing four games by nine points or less to open the season, MacPherson demanded every practice be perfect.

“When he told us that, we really decided that we wanted to be 100 percent committed,” said Craig Stoeppel the starting left tackle on the ‘86 team. “We started thinking positively, thinking that good things would happen.

“When you start losing, it’s a snowball effect. One bad thing happens, and you think, ‘What disaster is waiting for us next?’ Once you stop thinking like that, then you can focus on football.”

The ‘86 team did, winning five of its last seven games to finish 5-6, narrowly missing a bowl.

A year later, with many of the same players, a Sugar Bowl tie with Auburn cost SU a shot at the national championship.

“In a lot of ways, the exactness of ‘87 was caused by the 0-4 of ‘86,” MacPherson said. “We learned that if you let your guard down, they’ll hit you. So we didn’t let our guard down anymore. I think that kind of turnaround could happen now.

“Jake (Crouthamel) was supportive during the whole time. He gave us the space to turn it around. That’s his style, and, in our case, it worked.”

But Syracuse seems a long way from a turnaround right now.

During Saturday’s loss to Pittsburgh, fans booed and some students threw T-shirts on the field.

Syracuse’s defense caved in, allowing 48 consecutive points. The offense — sputtering with quarterbacks R.J. Anderson and Troy Nunes — had only one first down in the first quarter and didn’t score a touchdown until the second half.

“It’s definitely a different feeling losing games,” defensive end Josh Thomas said. “You feel like you don’t deserve to crack jokes or have fun on campus. None of the players here have been in this situation before.”

But Crouthamel has — and he thinks he knows the answer. He’ll sit back and see if his strategy can work again.

“We’ve had a tough schedule, two awfully long road trips and a terribly rough start,” Crouthamel said. “But there’s a lot of football to play. It’s a young team. We don’t need to do anything drastic to turn it around.”

Published on October 7, 2002 at 12:00 pm