There they were again Sunday, members of the ’72 Dolphins — Csonka, Griese and Shula — gathered on Qualcomm Stadium’s grass before the Super Bowl to be honored for their 17-0 marker, still the only undefeated season in NFL history.

Remember anything about who they beat in Super Bowl VII in Los Angeles 30 years ago this month?

‘We were a surprise,’ recalls George Burman, the long snapper for the Washington Redskins in a 14-7 loss on Jan. 14, 1973. ‘Certainly, if you had looked at the odds at the beginning of the season, we were off the charts.’

Washington was, after all, ‘The Over the Hill Gang.’ That moniker is inscribed in the 1972 NFC Championship ring that Burman, 60, removes and studies the morning after Super Bowl XXXVII while sitting in his office, the dean’s office, Room 200D of the School of Management.

The office will be Burman’s through June 30, when he ‘retires’ after 13 years. After one year of recharging, he’ll return to teach. In January 2005, he and all of Syracuse should enjoy the fruits of his labor if the new home of the School of Management — three times the size of the current building — opens as scheduled. Ground-breaking at the current site of the Marshall Lot begins in late April.

‘The future is now,’ Burman says.

He is, of course, talking not about the school but quoting Hall of Fame coach George Allen, who traded for the 6-foot-3, 240-pound Burman in 1971. Upon arriving in Washington that year, Allen made a number of personnel decisions that raised eyebrows across the league, trading draft choices for established veterans.

‘The (other) coaches valued draft choices like they were gold,’ Burman says.

Burman, who had completed an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago while playing for the Bears and Los Angeles Rams, was only 28. He was already four off-seasons into a six-year doctoral program and had informed the Rams he was calling it quits.

‘But the Redskins were having trouble with the long snap,’ says Burman. ‘They had a rookie long-snapping, a nice guy, but he was whistling them over the punter’s head.’

Allen, who’d swapped two draft picks with Los Angeles for Burman, talked him out of retirement.

‘The interesting thing about that,’ Burman recalls, ‘was one of the many stories about George Allen. When I got there all over the papers was the fact that he was getting fined because he’d traded a draft choice he didn’t have. Let’s say it was a fourth-round draft choice undesignated. And George’s answer to that was easy. He said: ‘You know, I got until next year to pick up a fourth-round draft choice. Why are they fining me now?’ ‘

The trade stood up and so did the Redskins, making their first playoff appearance in 26 years. The next year provided for Burman the highlight of his career. On a balmy New Year’s Eve 1972 – Burman recalls temperatures in the 70s – the no-respect Redskins pounded archrival Dallas, 26-3. That Washington team would send one player to the Hall of Fame (Charley Taylor) compared to six for Dallas (Roger Staubach, Lance Alworth, Bob Lilly, Mike Ditka, Herb Adderley and coach Tom Landry).

‘That was our first championship, the first time Washington had been to the Super Bowl, and Dallas had been very successful with Staubach,’ Burman says, ‘so that made it particularly satisfying to beat them to go to the Super Bowl.’

Think Oakland struggled on offense last Sunday? The Redskins crossed midfield only once in the first half of Super Bowl VII and scored their only touchdown on a botched field goal and subsequent pass attempt by Garo Yepremian, the balding, 5-foot-8 Cyprusian Dolphin.

‘The offense stunk up the joint, basically,’ Burman says. ‘We couldn’t get anything done.’

That game would be Burman’s last in pro football. Following the Super Bowl, he underwent one of three operations to repair nerve damage to his right elbow, the result of direct snapping to the quarterback. (In addition, he has undergone two right-knee surgeries and a right-hip replacement.)

That summer, at age 30, he defended his dissertation on the economics of employment discrimination. Dr. Burman spent 1973 on injured reserve, then retired.

‘I was as shocked as anybody (that I even made the NFL),’ says Burman, an academic All-American as a tight end and defensive end at Northwestern before the Bears selected him in the final round in 1963. ‘And it’s almost like I was shocked every year thereafter that I hung around.’

Burman made no more than $35,000 in any one NFL season and less than $10,000 his rookie season, when he started three games on the offensive line for the Bears.

Following football, he worked for the NFL Players Association, at Carnegie Mellon as an assistant dean, in management at Gulf Oil and Chevron and as president of American Gilsonite, a Chevron subsidiary.

Burman arrived at Syracuse in 1990 with the School of Management lacking accreditation. That came in 2000. In 2001, U.S. News and World Report ranked the school 44th among undergraduate business schools. This year, it’s tied for 38th.

The school’s new five-story home will cost more than $35 million and feature classrooms, a 200-seat auditorium, administrative offices, student-support facilities, break-out and seminar rooms, two floors of faculty office space, a caf and a glass atrium facing University Avenue.

‘It will be very transparent, very dynamic,’ says Bruce Fowle, who graduated SU in 1960 and headed the design project. ‘George has been very supportive of the use of contemporary architecture. His input is extremely valuable.’

So is his fundraising knack.

‘It is his hard work that will get that building up,’ says David Rubin, dean of Newhouse. ‘He has worked like a dog to raise that money.’

Seemingly, Burman could remain and bask in the glory of the new building and corral the credit. But the long snapper in him knows better.

‘It’s the right time,’ he says. ‘They can move into the new school with a new dean.’

Then, he will have to prove himself to his new boss.

‘After 13 years of evaluating people,’ he says, ‘I can’t go into a classroom and not do well.’

He will have a full year to think about that, to celebrate his silver anniversary with his wife, Janet, and to spend time with his three children. All of that begins June 30.

If you’re here that day, peer out at the corner of South Crouse and Waverly and look for the ’94 Harley Fatboy pointed toward James Street.

That will be George Burman headed home, perhaps thinking: The future is now.

Chris Snow is a staff writer for The Daily Orange, where his column appears on Thursdays. E-mail him at [email protected].

Published on January 29, 2003 at 12:00 pm