The Daily Orange is a nonprofit newsroom that receives no funding from Syracuse University. Consider donating today to support our mission.

Head coach Dino Babers’ job is safe in 2021, and any current talks of his job being in danger are incorrect, Syracuse Director of Athletics John Wildhack said Friday.

“The proverbial hot seat, you can delete it,” Wildhack said in a press conference. “He doesn’t enter 2021 on any kind of hot seat or anything like that. Dino’s going to be our coach in 2021, and I hope he’s going to be our coach for a long time.”

Wildhack discussed possible scheduling changes, testing protocols and SU’s basketball teams staying in Syracuse through the holidays during his Friday press conference.

Here are three takeaways:

The state of the football program, offseason testing

Wildhack met with Babers after the season ended for about a two-hour conversation about the current state of the program. The record was disappointing, Wildhack said, but he was pleased that the Orange’s football team managed to stay COVID-19 free since July 2, with over 7,000 tests performed.

“We know where we struggled,” Wildhack said. “If those are corrected, I think we can get this thing turned around and turned around in short order.”

The Orange are finalizing testing protocols for athletes ahead of the winter conditioning period. The current plan is to test out-of-season athletes once a week, but that plan has not yet been solidified. Spring practice is expected to proceed as scheduled, but there’s still uncertainty about what it could look like.

Wildhack wants to see more development from the younger Orange roster in 2021, and that starts with a normal year of strength and conditioning in the offseason, he said.

The Orange, who added 19 signees on Tuesday, still have some 2021 scholarship spots available and will be looking through the transfer portal to add potential names to next year’s roster going forward.

Wildhack defends decision against allowing athletes to return home over holidays

In recent weeks, multiple college football teams in the Atlantic Coast Conference have opted out of playing a bowl game so players can return home to families. While the Orange’s football season has already concluded, Syracuse basketball’s seasons are just getting underway, and the players will not be able to return home to their families over the holiday break due to risk of COVID-19 exposure.

Duke’s program is canceling all of its remaining nonconference games so that the players can go home for the holidays, head coach Mike Krzyzewski said. He emphasized that it’s for players’ mental and physical health.

The risk of exposure is too high, Wildhack said. Men’s basketball head coach Jim Boeheim said during a postgame press conference Dec. 12 that his players are fine.

“The risk of sending them home for a 72-hour period and then bringing them back, we saw what happened with the post-Thanksgiving surge,” Wildhack said.

SU Athletics has two people on staff to provide athletes with support for emotional and mental health, Wildhack said. Any athlete who wants to opt-out at any time would have their scholarship honored, he said.

Wildhack discusses potential scheduling changes

The addition of Notre Dame into the ACC for the 2020 football season was one of many changes to the league schedule this fall. The division system was temporarily scrapped, and the conference schedule was extended to 10 games for one year. Going forward, the ACC is having conversations about either expanding the schedule to include more conference games and changing the division system to allow schools to play other teams more often.

As of now, the ACC schedule is built around eight games in conference, where the Orange play the six other teams each season in their own Atlantic division (Clemson, Florida State, Wake Forest, Louisville, Boston College and North Carolina State). Syracuse also plays Pittsburgh from the Coastal division yearly and one other rotating opponent from the Coastal in six-year cycles.

Wildhack said he’d like to see the schedule changed so the Orange play Coastal schools such as North Carolina, Miami, Duke, Georgia Tech, Virginia or Virginia Tech more than once every six years. Those schools, under the current system, only make one trip to the Carrier Dome every 12 years.

“I think we need to figure out ways we can play each other a little more frequently,” Wildhack said of other division opponents.

While he expressed his opinion to change the conference scheduling process, he said there’s little current support to expand the ACC schedule beyond the current eight-game set-up. Wildhack cited other schools with intra-state rivalries, such as Clemson and South Carolina,  as a reason that the eight-game schedule is unlikely to change for now.

Published on December 18, 2020 at 12:24 pm

Contact Anthony: amdabbun@syr.edu | @AnthonyDabbundo