Two questions into his press conference at the beginning of camp on Aug. 4, Greg Robinson mentioned the R-word.

A member of the local media asked the Syracuse head coach, now entering his third season at the helm, what the most difficult part of getting his team back to a perennial winner was.

‘There is no magic dust or magic wand,’ Robinson said. Prophetic, at best.

But then it came.

‘I think a great example is Rutgers,’ Robinson said. ‘They went four straight years of losing seasons and all of a sudden they turned the corner and then the next season really turned the corner. You don’t know when it’s going to happen. It will happen here.’

Somewhere along the way – maybe due to the fact the Orange has all of five wins in the past two seasons – Syracuse became what former bottom-feeder Rutgers once was. What a great joke that would have been four years ago.

Now I’m not saying this reversal of fates is a terrible thing. But it can be, if Syracuse ignores the Rutgers example by firing Greg Robinson after this season.

Sure, the campaign against him is mounting and the numbers are hard to forget: Five wins in two years. One Big East win. Overseer of the 110th-ranked offense and 107th-ranked defense in 2006.

So now what?

Unless Syracuse goes 0-12 (and that would include losing a home game to Buffalo), Robinson should keep his job. Two wins, five wins, 10 wins, I don’t care. Sans an absolute disaster and embarrassment, Robinson should be afforded the opportunity of a fourth year even if the third is nothing special.

There’s no foolproof way to fix a football program, but Rutgers is one model. Surely everyone knows the story by now: Rutgers stuck with its head coach, Greg Schiano through four seasons of a combined 12-34 record. He turned it around with a 7-5 season in 2005 and of course, the 11-2 result last year, including a win at the Texas Bowl.

But it’s hard to compare Syracuse to Rutgers historically. In fact, you can’t. That bowl win against Kansas State? It was the first in Rutgers history. SU is 12-9-1 all-time in bowl games. Syracuse has a winning history, Rutgers is known for playing host to the first college football game ever. That’s about it.

If Schiano were at Syracuse and put up those kinds of records, he undoubtedly would have been fired. But that was the old Syracuse.

Instead, SU Director of Athletics Daryl Gross can learn a little from Rutgers. Scary, isn’t it?

Schiano was a few notches below Robinson after his first two seasons in Piscataway, N.J. He was 3-20 and without a win in the Big East, without any hope in sight. In his third year, Rutgers went a respectable 5-7, including two wins in the Big East, against (yes) Syracuse and Temple. Nothing special.

But that’s what Syracuse fans need to accept for 2007: nothing special. Try marketing that motto. Even if four or five wins are nothing special, it’s improvement.

‘Winning does breed winning,’ Robinson said. (And can’t you just picture him saying it before he even did?) ‘That’s why it’s important to get winning.’

And there’s no way around it. But Robinson finally has a starting quarterback that was recruited to play in his offensive schemes and the program is slowly being infused with his own players. So maybe there’s hope.

That’s what a transition in college football is all about. It isn’t pretty. Generally speaking, it’s not successful in the beginning. It takes time. And while you will hear that again and again this year (as we did after 1-10 and 4-8), if Gross fires Robinson after a mediocre 2007 season, you’ll hear it all over again – for another three years when the transition process starts all over again.

Rutgers stuck with Schiano because it believed in his vision. While the Scarlet Knights had less to lose and much, much smaller expectations, Gross needs to take a page out of their book. Keep Robinson even when the Orange misses a bowl game for the third year in a row in 2007.

‘We wanted someone special,’ Gross said when he hired Robinson in Jan. 2005. ‘This is going to be a lot of fun, and we’re going to have a blast doing this together.’

Now we’ll see if Gross sticks with his guy. Even when this season’s nothing special.

Matt Gelb is the Sports Editor at The Daily Orange, where his columns appear occasionally. He can be reached at magelb@gmail.com.

Published on August 30, 2007 at 12:00 pm