When it was announced earlier this year that Yankee Stadium would host a college football bowl game in December, second-year Syracuse University coach and Bronx native Doug Marrone had another goal to reach. And as we’ve seen so far, Marrone has a pretty good track record when he sets his mind to something.
“My thoughts were, if you’re not playing for the national championship or a BCS {Bowl Championship Series} game, personally how great would it be to play in Yankee Stadium?” Marrone said. “How many football coaches have the ability to play in the stadium in their back yard?” Marrone will realize that dream Thursday, Dec. 30, at 3:30 p.m., when he leads the Orange against Kansas State in the inaugural New Era Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium. To purchase tickets and book travel packages, visit www.suathletics.com/bowlcentral, or call (866) 832-6746.
Marrone was a three-year starter as an offensive lineman at SU from 1983 to 1985, and he played professionally in the NFL and Europe. Throughout a 17-year career as an assistant coach in college and the NFL, Marrone said he made every move with the idea that he would one day become the head coach at his alma mater.
When he was hired, Marrone said his goal was to make the Orange a national title contender. But he didn’t have much to work with: SU had gone 10-37 in the previous four years under Coach Greg Robinson. After finishing 4-8 last season, the Orange went 7-5 this year for its first winning season since 2001 and its first bowl appearance since 2004. As a reward for SU’s remarkable turnaround, Marrone was named the American Football Coaches Association Region I Coach of the Year, and is a finalist for the Liberty Mutual Coach of the Year Award, to be announced Jan. 10.
Marrone, 46, recently sat down with The New Times to discuss his memories of the Bronx and Yankee Stadium, how he changed the culture of SU’s program, and what he had to do to get his players to buy in.
Q: I understand you grew up nine miles from Yankee Stadium. What was that like and how often did you get to the ballpark?
A: My grandfather worked at Yankee Stadium 15 to 20 years as an usher, so I always try to explain to people that I was literally born a Yankees fan. He was my mom’s dad, so we had a couple of baseball bats from the Yankees and a lot of signed baseballs that were put in a box that rotted, which right now could have probably been our retirement fund.
My first sports memory was when Chris Chambliss hit the home run to beat the Kansas City Royals {for the Yankees in the 1976 American League Championship Series}. I remember we were all watching it on TV and when he hit the home run we were jumping up and down. All of a sudden, everyone was leaving their homes and the whole neighborhood was outside. At that young age {12} it was the closest thing to New Year’s Eve that I had seen. That’s really my first sports moment, when I realized the impact that sports can have on a community.
Q: That was quite an era in Yankees history, with the so-called Bronx Zoo and all that.
A: I didn’t really watch a lot of The Bronx is Burning (the ESPN series on the 1977 Yankees), but when I was flicking through it, I remember all of that. All of the stuff with Reggie Jackson and Thurman Munson. I remember where I was when we heard the news that Munson passed away {from a plane crash in 1979}. It was devastating. It really was.
And growing up, I always wanted to be {Yankees third baseman} Graig Nettles. I played a little third base and growing up as a kid, we could imitate every single player on his demeanor coming up to the plate. From Mickey Rivers, Thurman Munson to all the players. It’s a lot of history personally.
Q: You mentioned your grandfather being an usher. Did he have any stories?
A: My grandfather passed away when I was 4 or 5. My mother basically was raised in Yankee Stadium, with him having been an usher. My mom was the one who was around Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle as a young kid growing up. So she’s the one who had the signed baseballs. We had a bunch of the memorabilia. I have the 1967 Mother’s Day pin that the Yankees would hand out and it’s awesome. It’s amazing when I look at it, because they don’t hand things out like that anymore. It’s truly a nice thing. So I have a couple of collectibles from the stadium and the history of the Yankees--but I’m not looking to sell.
Note: The Yankees gave out the pin to fans on May 14, 1967, the day Mickey Mantle clobbered his 500th career home run.
Q: Let’s talk some football. You’ve said many times how much you wanted this job and to be at Syracuse; is it everything you thought it would be?
A: It’s close to almost a miracle how fast we’ve been
able to turn it around. Because the first year, you’re going in and
you’re trying to recruit the high school coach and the school to tell
them what you’re doing because they really don’t know. And they don’t
know where you’re at with it: Is it going to be like it was in the past,
or is it going to be like it was the last four years? So you have to
overcome that as well as now you have to overcome the battles of
recruiting with the student-athlete.
We’re at a point now where we’re able to go out and recruit the student-athletes, because the assistant coaches have done such a good job of really presenting our program, and our players have done such a good job of representing this program. The infrastructure is there as far as recruiting numbers, academics, accountability, how you want to run the program, those are the things you have to go through. I’ve said this before: We were winning a lot of battles on a daily basis of changing that type of culture.
The last thing that was going to happen was changing the wins and losses on the field. We went into this season with the goal of a winning season and we wanted to go to a bowl game. They were pretty hefty goals for a team that had not been to a bowl since 2004, and a team that hasn’t had a winning record since 2001. We all signed on, we were able to accomplish it. The foundation is being set, and really we’ve just scratched the surface. But if you stop and think about it, or you pat yourself on the back, you’ve lost. We have to keep pushing, because we’re not where we want to be.
Q: How did you get the players to believe in what you were doing?
A: You have to create a trust. And there are a lot of ways to do that. That’s the one thing that takes time. You have to build the relationship; you have to build that type of trust. We have a lot of programs in place with life skills and leadership, and they’re not {window dressing} programs where you say, “Hey, look what we’re doing, we feel good about ourselves.” They’re programs that are in place because they’re the right thing to do. Through these programs, with the philosophy I’ve always had that you develop the person first before you develop the student-athlete, the player understands that you really do care about his future outside of football.
Once
those players realize that, then you have the ability to get 110
percent of what they have as far as being the athlete. As you’re
developing this relationship, you’re developing a trust. Therefore, when
you lay everything out for the players you say, “If we can do this and
we can become accountable to each other and we can be accountable in
everything we do and we can have the balance of faith, family,
academics, football and social life, if we can do those things and do
them the right way, it will give us the ability to go out and win
football games.”
A lot of people will say, “It’s easy to buy in because what they were doing before wasn’t working.” But they bought into that before and it didn’t work, so what makes them want to buy into what you’re doing to make it work? You have to have faith in what’s going on. In other words, why are we doing this? Why are we working so hard? Why do I have to pick up that piece of paper when no one’s looking and develop my character? Why do we have to do X, Y and Z? Why don’t we just train football and get better on the football field?
Well, that’s not the philosophy of our program. Our philosophy is building that character and building that accountability and having faith in one another. We’re able to do that to a point that obtained our goals for us this year. I credit the players for believing in the system. You can’t force something down someone’s throat.
Q: The players who left the program {including most recently tailback Averin Collier, who sat out the 2010 season for academic reasons, and linebacker Malcolm Cater, who was dismissed from the team after being accused of burglarizing three campus apartments}, was that a matter of those guys not buying in?
A: When I took over the program, I never really thought anyone was going to leave. Maybe I’m naïve to the situation. I believed what we were doing was so far beyond just the game of football. That we were going to be able to develop our players to be leaders in life. And I try to convey this to the players all the time that life is much, much tougher than a football game. It’s much tougher than what you have to experience here as a student-athlete. And we were going to give them all the tools that they needed throughout their career here, four to five years or one or two or whatever they had left, to make sure that they were successful. So for me, why would anyone want to leave?
I think 20-something people left the program, and there are a lot of different reasons for it. I understood that they might not have signed on for this, and we say it in recruiting all the time, there is a lot of structure, there is a lot of discipline in this program. It might not be the best program for you. I want to make sure that the players that we do bring in here understand the work ethic and the character that you need to have to be successful. And I wish all the players who left the best; I hope they have achieved what they wanted to. At the end of the day, would I have liked them to stay and feel this way? I do, not because of the gratification of turning a program around or obtaining your goals like we have, but I wish they stayed because I knew they’d be successful in life.
Q: Was there a particular moment, or a game, or a situation where you realized that what you were doing was working?
A: When I first took over {in January 2009}, there wasn’t a lot of interaction among the players. The first social experience you have with your players is when they eat. And I remember early on when I first went into the cafeteria and thinking, “Wow, this is different. There’s not a lot of communication going on among the players.”
And we started implementing a couple of programs. We had {Syracuse University’s} multicultural affairs come down and do some exercises with our players. We started with the life skills and leadership. And that room, where it’s not football and it’s not academics, it’s just a bunch of young men joining for a meal, all of a sudden the interaction and the conversations that were going on were quite different.
That’s where I started to see the difference that, you know what, these kids are learning about each other. They are becoming more accountable to each other, which leads to a trust for one another. And there was more communication between coaches and players. When you start seeing the communication rise, then you know the trust is rising also. It doesn’t guarantee you success, but it gives you a chance.
Q: How do you think you’ll feel taking your alma mater to a bowl game and walking on the field at Yankee Stadium with your childhood home nine miles away?
A: It’s funny, because I’ve been conditioned this way and it probably goes back to Coach Mac {former SU coach Dick MacPherson}. I grew up playing on fields that were rocks and pebbles and not a lot of grass. When I came to Syracuse University, Coach Mac would always say, “We’re playing a football game. It doesn’t matter if we’re playing in this stadium, or that stadium, or if we’re playing in a cornfield somewhere where no one’s around.” I look at the game of football as the business side. So for me, when I come on that field, I will not be thinking that we’re in the Bronx, or the surroundings or it’s Yankee Stadium. I’ll be more concerned
