Syracuse football head coach Dino Babers had an odd exchange with the media on Monday. Here’s why he’s off his rocker and should stop the paranoia.
Injuries have been a strong theme of the 2019 Syracuse football season to date.
A couple of guys have got hurt at spots where the depth was lacking. This has put Syracuse between a rock and a hard place.
So who is to blame for these injuries?
Syracuse football head coach Dino Babers seemingly blamed the media for some of his players being targeted specifically to their reported injuries from the press:
"“There is some stuff that has come out over the last few weeks that I think has been damaging our guys on the football field, as far as their injuries. So I don’t want to talk about this part or that part. We as coaches are watching on tape and it seems like some of our guys are taking shots to particular areas, like people are reading press clippings and they’re going after certain spots. So I’m not going to talk about where the injuries are.”"
Weird flex.
Syracuse being a private university is allowed to be as gray as they want with their injury report. For instance, if a guy gets banged up during a game all the Orange has to report is upper or lower-body injury, which obviously doesn’t tell a whole heck of a lot.
Last week the Orange traveled on the road to play NC State, the only player that the media knows of that was battling an injury and played was quarterback Tommy DeVito.
Stephen Bailey of Syracuse.com routinely asks Dino Babers in his weekly Monday presser for the latest information on the injuries and shared his take on the Babers weird response and what he was getting at on The Manchild Show with Boy Green:
"“As far as players getting targeted at certain spots? I mean I don’t know all they tell us is upper or lower body. If he’s talking about his quarterback (Tommy DeVito) wearing an extra layer of protection in pregame warmups vs NC State last week, you don’t need a media member to say hey that guy looks like he has a rib injury for a defensive player to see that. I think we’ve just seen little bits of frustration come from Dino because the season isn’t exactly going according to plan. But I don’t know what he’s talking about with what he said. That was very confusing.”"
That seems like quite the reach by Dino Babers to connect those dots.
The other thing that seems strange is Babers losing his cool over the last few weeks. He was recently questioned by the media regarding his decision to keep DeVito in the game late vs Holy Cross up big. Babers seemed irritated by the question and blew it off.
Now the frustration has resulted in finger-pointing at the media for somehow helping opponents game-plan vs Syracuse based on getting injury information? Just incredibly bizarre from the head man on the hill.
If Dino is truly frustrated with a 3-3 start to the 2019 season, just imagine how he’s going to feel when he faces arguably the toughest defense remaining on the schedule in the Pitt Panthers on Friday night in the dome.