It was ‘early as hell,’ Nico Scott recalled, on that March morning after a 6 a.m. agility workout. That’s when he saw fire engines in the parking lot and a blaze rising on the practice field.

About 120 yards from the football wing at Manley Field House assembled a circle of football players around the flames about to experience their first shoe burning, a once-forgotten page in a once illustrious Syracuse football history book.

‘We had no idea’ Scott, a senior cornerback said. ‘We knew somethin’ freaky was going on.’

And so newly crowned head coach Doug Marrone handed the first player a single cleat, with a set of simple instructions: Take your miseries, grievances and personal burdens of seasons past and transfer them to the shoe. Then, pass it on.

After each player willed the collective woes of a team in its worst stretch in program history, the man who employed the tradition when Marrone was a player – former SU head coach Dick MacPherson – turned his back to the flames and cast the shoe into the inferno. The metaphor was complete. Life was set to begin anew for this program.

‘It felt like a baptism by fire,’ junior center Jim McKenzie, said. ‘It was a really special time for us. We just got rid of all the frustration that had built up from all the previous seasons of the strife and hardship.’

With his return to Syracuse football – first as a player under MacPherson and now as a coach – Marrone is trying to do more than turn a team around. By readopting the traditions and attitude of past Syracuse teams, the coach has his sights set on cultural overhaul.

Gone are the days of Greg Robinson, the West Coast offense and the search for a new identity. Back are the ideals of ‘Coach Mac,’ the desire to play smash-mouth football and the quest to reclaim glory.

‘I think it’s my philosophy,’ Marrone said. ‘I’ve heard, ‘Ah, well the players these days, they don’t understand tradition, they don’t know tradition.’ Well, myself now as the head coach, it’s my responsibility to teach these players about the traditions of this school – it’s part of the process.’

Born in Old Town, Maine and fresh off a coaching gig with the Cleveland Browns, Dick MacPherson wasn’t exactly grounded in Syracuse tradition.

But after his predecessor, Frank Maloney, won just 32 games in seven seasons (1974-1980) and members of the school’s only national championship team called for his resignation, MacPherson didn’t have a choice – he needed to step in and win over his new city.

For added pressure, he had to fill a brand new 50,000-seat domed stadium with a team that had won just one bowl game in the last two decades, and his most feared offensive weapon was a 5-foot-11 South African kicker named Gary Anderson.

Needless to say, the fans that did show up during the early years didn’t have very high expectations, MacPherson remembers.

‘There were times when they’d come to the games when I was coaching, and they’d wear bags over their heads,’ MacPherson said. ‘I said I didn’t mind that so much, but they didn’t even cut out the eye holes so they could see the game! They just put the bags over their heads.’

In his corner though, he had the go-to source for Syracuse football tradition – Ben Schwartzwalder. Like Marrone has MacPherson, MacPherson had the legendary coach of the 1959 national championship team there to remind players exactly what they were working toward.

Sporting a well-cropped plot of gray hair and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, Schwartzwalder would visit with MacPherson’s players during practice. Though he insisted upon not staying long, he would come and recount stories of Ernie Davis, the old Archbold Stadium and the 1959 national championship team to the impressionable young Orangemen.

‘I started thinking about how I learned tradition,’ Marrone said. ‘And when it came to Syracuse University, I was fortunate enough to have a great coach in Dick MacPherson who taught us the tradition, and then he’d have Ben (Schwartzwalder) come back and tell us about the teams he had.’

Though the visits were short, it was easy to see the effect it had on the players. Because of Schwartzwalder, they had perspective. Because of MacPherson, they began to understand what it took to take their program to the next level.

By MacPherson’s third year at the helm, the Orangemen began to rise again.

In 1984, the team shocked the college football nation with a 17-9 win over top-ranked Nebraska in front of more than 47,000 at the Carrier Dome. A year later, it rattled off a five-game winning streak through October and part of November to earn a Cherry Bowl berth. And by 1987 – the year SU went undefeated and tied Auburn in the Sugar Bowl – it appeared as though MacPherson’s vision had been realized.

And through it all sat Marrone. Fighting through MacPherson’s practices with his scuffed up Bike football helmet, No. 78 green practice jersey and grimy practice pants with the hip pads jutting out the sides, he was living through the same overhaul he would one day have to emulate.

Then, his dreams were different. Ones of NFL glory. But now, as he’s taken his dream job, he can’t remember a more helpful source then the days of ‘Mac and Ben.’ He couldn’t find a better standard to abide by in his drive to bring back SU football.

‘I’ve been fortunate to have coach Mac,’ Marrone said. ‘To see the correlation within the programs from coach Schwartzwalder to coach Mac to coach P (Paul Pasqualoni), the relationship of the different types of programs that were run here during times when they’ve been successful, and that’s one of the things I’ve been studying quite a bit.’

After the flames were doused and the fire trucks drove away on that March morning, Manley Field House became a different place.

Per venerable tradition, it was once again like a place of business. Players dress differently: a clean-cut look with attire only suitable in a professional atmosphere, linebackers coach Dan Conley said.

No clothing with beer slogans or inappropriate sayings, no excessive facial hair, no earrings, no hats indoors and no long hair are allowed, Conley said. Player photos were taken in shirts and ties – the same outfits that they’ll wear boarding airplanes to away games from now on. Last season, their headshots were taken in uniform.

Just like during the days of Mac, Marrone and his coaches had a ‘cut your hair’ meeting the first day of camp in August.

‘I brought four people in after the first day of camp and said, ‘You have until 12 o’clock noon to get your hair cut,” Conley said.

Conley, who played two years under MacPherson and another four under his successor Pasqualoni before joining the staff under Robinson in 2008, has been tutored in Syracuse tradition for nearly his entire career and welcomed Marrone’s throwback philosophies.

‘I was a part of the staff (under Robinson), and I saw how the program had changed,’ Conley said. ‘And when they hired coach Marrone to come in, we sat down that Friday night and I can’t tell you how excited I was – not only to be retained – but to see his vision of the program going back to the way coach Mac and coach (Pasqualoni) ran the program.’

But the collective visions of ‘Mac and Ben’ aren’t just present in the locker room under the new Marrone regime. On the field, during spring ball and throughout summer camp, Syracuse tradition was upheld.

Just like when Marrone was in college, practices are a battleground. More contact, more competition and more conditioning.

‘It’s a lot more intense,’ junior tackle Andrew Lewis said. ‘There’s a lot more hitting. It reminds me a lot of high school when you really don’t have any limitations – a lot more physical. It’s more of what a camp should be and not that kind of NFL-type camp thing.’

In the spring and summer, packs of Orange football players lined the long blue Gilman pads that marked the lively ‘Syracuse drill,’ where a defensive and offensive player battle in a full-contact slugfest for supremacy.

After each bone-crushing hit, the surrounding players let out a battle cry, waiting to call out their next opponent.

‘Everything we do now, we have to do as hard as we can, and that’s expected out of us,’ McKenzie, the senior center, said. ‘Just like coach tells us, we’re not being punished. More is being demanded of us.’

Through it all, Marrone is watching his players in Manley and on the practice field to see how they’re fitting into his plan. He’s admitted that he has too much work to do to stop and absorb the significance of it all and how his Syracuse roots are affecting this downtrodden program.

But for the players, coaches and fans who have been waiting for the revival of Syracuse football, it couldn’t feel any better. Whether it’s the burning of the shoe or simply the way a player looks a coach in the eye and calls him ‘Sir,’ the days of old are back.

‘It feels like it used to,’ Conley said. ‘It feels like Syracuse again.’

ctorr@syr.edu

Published on September 2, 2009 at 12:00 pm