HOUSTON — There are several components that can make up this senior class’s legacy.

This year’s seniors were the first class recruited entirely by Doug Marrone and the first to graduate during the Scott Shafer Era. They’ve reached three bowl games in four years for the first time since 1998-2001. They were around when Syracuse ended a six-year bowl drought and helped the Orange stay on the path toward success.

But it’s all much more simple than that.

“Winning,” defensive tackle Jay Bromley said. “Period.”

When SU (6-6, 4-4 Atlantic Coast) takes the Reliant Stadium field on Friday at 6 p.m. against Minnesota (8-4, 4-4 Big Ten), it will look to solidify the already impressive legacy of this year’s senior class. The Texas Bowl in Houston will be the final game for all four captains — Bromley, Marquis Spruill, junior Jerome Smith and Macky MacPherson — and the end of a season that Smith simply described as “tough.”

With a new-look coaching staff, a handful of record-holders gone to the NFL and two new quarterbacks, it could have been a rebuilding season. But Syracuse’s seniors wouldn’t allow that.

Smith remembers a reporter asking him about bowls during the preseason. He wanted to know what the expectation was. Smith gave him a snarl. To him, it was an obvious answer.

“We’re going bowling,” he said. “That’s our job is to go bowling, make it to a bowl game.”

Even when the Orange started 0-2, he had faith. After blowout losses to Clemson and Florida State, SU never got down. When Syracuse switched quarterbacks after Week 3, the team had faith in Shafer that the decision would be the correct one.

“If Shafe told us to rotate Terrel and Drew every other series, I would respect that,” offensive coordinator George McDonald said. “Whatever he tells me to do I respect because I have the utmost confidence in whatever decision he sees.”

Now the Orange has followed him to a bowl game, and Smith said that it has become, and will continue to be the standard. Shafer is the first SU coach to qualify for a bowl game during his first season since Paul Pasqualoni in 1991. Future teams will now be trying to beat that expectation.

That’s what this class’s legacy does. It starts with winning, but it establishes a precedent. MacPherson won’t let his group take all of the credit — he said last year’s seniors, three of which were drafted, and the ones from the year before had a lot to do with it, too — but they’re the ones that capped a run that Syracuse hadn’t seen for more than a decade.

“That really has helped with setting the stability of the program,” MacPherson said, “and hopefully in the future we can get something special going here.”

Most players and coaches are reluctant to call this season a success for that reason — they expect to go bowling every year. Six wins is simply the bare minimum. But Shafer often praises this team’s resiliency — a trait that the seniors embody better than anyone else on the roster.

They arrived at Syracuse when the program was as bad as it had ever been. They had to be contributors from the day they got on campus and many were starters by their sophomore years. The head coach who recruited them left when the program was on the upswing and still they managed to help the Orange continue along that path.

“We had minor setbacks here and there throughout the course of the season, but we know what we’re capable of when we have everybody on the right note,” Bromley said. “So that just motivated us to go out there and prove everybody wrong because we believed in each other even when nobody believed in us.”

So far, they’ve had only one season worse than .500 in SU uniforms. Syracuse lost five straight games at the end of the season to finish 5-7 in 2011. The next season — much like this one — started with question marks, but ended with the exclamation point of a bowl victory.

Shafer spoke on Thursday about how nice it is to have the “university talked about throughout Christmas and after Christmas.” In many ways, the season is already a success. Only there’s still one game remaining.

“This senior class is amazing,” Bromley said. “We made sure we bought into the program. We’re making sure that we want to go out the right way.”

Published on December 26, 2013 at 10:43 pm

Contact David: dbwilson@syr.edu | @DBWilson2