Losing isn’t the kind of legacy a football player envisions leaving behind at college. But for Syracuse’s 19 seniors, including 12 starters, the group’s legacy will be more about what those seniors didn’t accomplish during the past four years.

Syracuse holds Senior Day when it hosts South Florida on Saturday at 1:30 p.m. in the Carrier Dome. Syracuse will also retire jersey No. 44, made famous by former standouts Jim Brown, Ernie Davis and Floyd Little.

Those that wore No. 44 carved a storied legacy with spectacular play. Syracuse’s seniors have done the exact opposite, winning 17 games compared to 27 losses. Syracuse is destined for its fourth-straight non-winning season, marking the first time in 31 years that a group of graduating seniors did not experience at least one winning season in four years.

‘Obviously it’s tough to be remembered when you have so many losses and things like that,’ senior cornerback Steve Gregory said. ‘Hopefully people will remember us as a bunch of guys that loved to play the game.’

If SU fails to beat South Florida and then loses road games to Notre Dame and Louisville, the seniors will end their careers with a 1-10 record. Such a mark would be the first time in the program’s history a team lost that many games.

Syracuse has four nine-loss seasons, the last occurring in 1982 during Dick MacPherson’s second year coaching. A 1-10 mark would also make Syracuse 17-30 against the past fours, a dismal 36 percent winning percentage.

‘It’s been a little bit disappointing,’ senior safety Anthony Smith said, ‘but you’ve got to make the best out of it. You just take it in stride and try not to do too much. You’ve just got to work hard.’

Syracuse went 10-3 five years ago, beating Kansas State 26-3 in the Insight.com Bowl and ended the year ranked No. 14. A few of this year’s graduating seniors redshirted that year. The incoming recruits who came the following fall, like Smith and tailback Damien Rhodes, expected the winning to continue.

It turns out that year of redshirting for seniors like tight end Joe Kowalewski and defensive end Ryan LaCasse was the closest they’d ever get to a winning year.

Instead Syracuse struggled in the group’s first year, going 4-8 with an embarrassing road loss to Temple. The following years continued the mediocrity with a pair of 6-6 records. Syracuse lost to Rutgers in 2003 and Temple in 2004. Syracuse lost 51-0 to Purdue on national television to begin last year and then ended the season with a 51-14 loss to Georgia Tech in the Champs Sports Bowl.

That loss prompted new Director of Athletics Daryl Gross to fire former head coach Paul Pasqualoni and hire Greg Robinson.

A new coaching staff meant this group of seniors had to learn an entire new system of playing after three or four seasons under Pasqualoni. The 19 seniors spent time learning and adapting for just one year of playing time, a dismal first season under Robinson. The situation has deteriorated so much that South Florida, in its first season in the Big East, is an 8.5-point favorite on the road.

This final season can come with a positive footnote, with these seniors starting the program’s turnaround under Robinson with a win Saturday. Or it can just as easily be negative and fans will remember these seniors as the group that started the demise of SU football.

Gregory said fans should remember these seniors by the effort, despite the results.

‘They’re going to remember us by our effort, by our hard play on the field,’ Gregory said. ‘We’re a good group of guys. Things haven’t gone our way, but we still went out and fought.’

SU’s season-ending 38-12 victory against Notre Dame in 2003 and 2002’s 50-42 triple-overtime win against Virginia Tech are a few of the memorable upsets SU pulled off in the past four years. Syracuse has three games left to pull off another one and Smith said that his favorite game will be Saturday when SU wins.

‘I’m not going to think about it too much,’ Smith said. ‘We’re just going to try and go out and get a win. We want to leave the Dome on a good note.’

Rhodes nodded his head quickly when someone asked if the offense will succeed and did the same when questioned about the overall future of the program. The tailback from nearby Manlius grew up watching SU football. He just never imagined he’d be part of one of the worst modern stretches in the program’s history.

‘It’s definitely something no one ever thought about,’ Rhodes said. ‘If someone had told me that we would be 1-7, I would have laughed in their face.’

Rhodes said it’s only a matter of time before Syracuse returns to its glory days, when backs like Brown, Little and Floyd ran wild. Brown and Floyd will be attendance Saturday and these seniors hope to begin a new chapter in SU football by positively closing another.

‘It’s the last time. It’s kind of bugging me out,’ Rhodes said. ‘I’m just going to kind of sit there and reminisce on the good we had. Things haven’t gone the way we wanted them to. But it’ll always be a part of my life that I’ll always remember.’

Published on November 10, 2005 at 12:00 pm