You’re forgiven if you thought Syracuse’s football season had finished. Don’t worry, you’re probably not the only one who forgot about Perry, Damien, Joe and the fellas.

Now that Gerry McNamara and Co. have blessed SU with their presence once again, Syracuse has shifted back to a basketball school that happens to have a football team.

Yes, SU football is still playing. Let me remind you about the boys in pads in case they escaped your memory: SU is 1-7, winless in two months and well on its way to one of the worst Syracuse football season of all time, outdimmed only by the 0-8-1 Orange of 1892.

Syracuse hosts South Florida on Saturday in its final home game this year, and if SU loses that, it may very well go 1-10 with trips to Notre Dame and Louisville finishing the season.

So if you’ve forgotten about SU football, it’s OK. They can’t blame you.

‘Not really; you hate to watch a losing team, but I think we’re a very exciting team to watch,’ senior safety Anthony Smith said. ‘I don’t blame them, but I wish we could have more loyal fans.’

It’s not like these players haven’t dealt with this before. This SU group has fought with Carmelo Anthony, Hakim Warrick and McNamara for attention all their careers, so it’s nothing new. Still, this year is different – it’s worse.

Surely, a bye week right before basketball opening night helps escort football from the public eye. Losing six straight games doesn’t help, either. Truth is, unless Syracuse football stands at 8-0, it gives way to basketball around this time every year.

Just don’t expect them to accept that.

‘It’s always gonna be a football school,’ Smith said. ‘Basketball will always be second. (Football’s) just gotta get this thing going back in the right direction and it’ll be all right.’

Unfortunately, boys, the truth is a hard light from which to find shade.

The campus has grown apathetic to football. Fans are numb; they just don’t care like they did before the season, when a new coach, flashy uniforms and promises of change had SU fans dreaming of the days when Donovan McNabb and John Wallace ran this campus together.

Once football justifiably fell short of its tremendous hype, the hardwood offered an easy fix for a non-caring campus. So maybe blame the expectations.

‘They expected us to win just like any new (administration) would,’ senior defensive end Ryan LaCasse said. ‘That’s what they’re there for. They put money into the team and they expect you to win just like the coaches do.’

It’s interesting listening to quarterbacks coach Major Applewhite’s take on all this. He played at Texas, of course, where football is the homecoming queen and basketball is the study buddy, no matter how successful the respective teams may be.

This idea of roundball preference over pigskin must be new to Applewhite, but he doesn’t see that lasting long.

‘We want to get it where it’s across the board,’ Applewhite said, ‘where we can continue in the tradition this football program has had in the past and match that with the success of Syracuse basketball and reach that level as well.’

Well, Coach, I’m sorry.

They’ll retire the No. 44 at halftime on Saturday, which on the surface looks like a celebration of SU’s strong and storied football past. But it’s really a funeral.

Once that ’44’ sits in the Carrier Dome rafters, it’ll symbolize a football glory buried in the past, quite possibly unattainable ever again. Seasons like this one only throw more dirt on the grave.

It’s a harsh truth, but a basketball national championship and longtime football mediocrity have made Syracuse a basketball school.

In case you forgot.

Published on November 9, 2005 at 12:00 pm