Syracuse Football: Dino Babers suggests you don’t need a running game

Syracuse football head coach Dino Babers has an interesting take as it pertains to balance on offense. Here’s why his ideology is flawed.

The Syracuse football squad has rushed for 549 yards through two games so far in their 2018 season. Which is a healthy 274 yards per game average under Dino Babers reign as head coach.

To get into some more specifics, here is how their running game stacks up compared to the rest of college football so far this season:

• Syracuse is 23rd in rushing in the country. That’s the third highest rushing team in the ACC behind only Georgia Tech (No. 1) and Boston College (No. 6).
• While just for context, Syracuse is tied for 68th in the country in passing (averaging 232 yards passing per game). That is good enough for seventh best in the ACC.

Sounds pretty good right?

Well 244 yards of the 549 total have come from Eric Dungey, the starting quarterback at Syracuse. If you took that away (and any other quarterback carries), the running backs on the roster are only averaging 146 yards per game, which would be good for 92nd in the country.

Here are the cold hard facts, Syracuse hasn’t had a 1,000 yard rusher since 2012 when Jerome Smith broke the plateau. Under head coach Dino Babers, the Orange have struggled to consistently find a running game since he’s arrived:

• 2017: Syracuse finished 70th in the country in rushing with 161 yards rushing per game.
• 2016: Syracuse finished 115th in the country in rushing with 119 yards rushing per game.

So why is all of this relevant?

Well in Dino Babers post game comments following the win over Wagner, he suggested that you don’t need a running game to succeed in college football:

"“A lot of people say, hey you got to rush the football, you really don’t have to rush the football, if you can throw for a very high percentage. Look at the Tennessee Tech’s of the world and the West Virginia’s of the world who do that all the time.”"

Bold strategy Cotton, let’s see if it pays off. Oh wait a minute, we’ve already seen two years of sample size to see if it works. Two 4-8 seasons suggests that perhaps it doesn’t work out as well as Babers suggests.

Now some people could brush off these comments as just banter after a meaningless game against Wagner, but I see a concept flaw here. If Dino Babers truly believes that you don’t need a run game to succeed, that could explain why the Orange have struggled mightily based purely off of principle:

• 2017: Syracuse was 47th in the country rushing attempts (39.8 attempts per game)
• 2016: Syracuse was 87th in the country rushing attempts (37.5 attempts per game)

Half the battle of running the football is dedication. Not every rushing attempt is going to be 70 yards for a touchdown. More often than not, it’s going to be three yards and a cloud of dust. So the numbers that we just laid out aren’t that great as it is, but what if we took away Eric Dungey and any other Syracuse quarterback rushing attempts over those two years?

The numbers appear even more egregious:

• 2017: Syracuse would be 129th in the country in rushing attempts per game (for context there’s 130 college football teams ranked in this system).
• 2016: Syracuse would be 130th in the country in rushing attempts per game (which would be last in all of college football).

Now you can start to understand how Dino Babers comments seem to be a fatal flaw of functionality. If Babers doesn’t believe that running the football is necessary, then he’s not going to be successful in running the football.

For instance, if the Orange went into that Clemson game last year not thinking they could win the game because they’re such a big underdog, they wouldn’t have won the game. Half the game is mental. Babers often says belief without evidence, but at the end of this article there seems to be a lot of evidence that there’s no belief… in the running game.