Come kick a field goal with Collin Barber.

Stand close enough to hear his heart race as he steps onto the field. He glances up at 35,000 fans watching suspiciously. His muscles tighten as he confronts his own fear of failure, his own distrust of his right leg.

Follow his eyes as they dart toward the line of scrimmage. Like always, he’s obsessing over the upcoming snap and hold. They better be perfect. They better be damn perfect or else he’ll get blamed.

He gulps for a deep breath, praying he can kick the ball soon so this hell will be over.

‘With Collin, field goal kicking is a mental war,’ says Chris White, Syracuse’s special teams coach. ‘He can go in the tank a little bit, because he goes out there and worries about 100 things.’

We’re asking him to worry about one more.

Of all the kickers in Syracuse history, Barber might be the most important. From 1975-1999, Syracuse built a reputation of field goal-kicking excellence. During the three years since, Orangemen kickers have struggled.

Every time Barber walks onto the field, a tradition rests in his hands. Gary Anderson and Olindo Mare and Nate Trout and Tim Vesling built it, nailing enough 50-yarders to make Syracuse a ‘kicking school.’

They’re asking Barber to revive it.

‘Every Syracuse field goal at this point is basically a must-make,’ says Vesling, SU’s kicker from 1985-87. ‘So much of Syracuse football is built on great kickers. Well, that concept is kind of on the line right now.’

That concept seemed downright ridiculous in 1975 when Dave Jacobs arrived at Syracuse. The Orangemen played at Archbold Stadium, then the second-oldest college football venue in the United States.

Syracuse hadn’t had a field goal kicker of recognition for 20 years. Since Archbold was famous for soggy field conditions, it didn’t look like the Orangemen would have a great kicker any time soon, either.

‘Kicking at that place was absolutely awful,’ said Jacobs, now the owner of Shirt World on Marshall Street. ‘Once it rained or snowed the field was done until the next spring. It had to be the worst place to kick in the country.’

But on that field, Jacobs started one of most phenomenal achievements in the history of college field goal kicking. By making what seemed to be a nondescript PAT at the end of the 1978 season, Jacobs started a streak that would last for 11 years.

From then until 1989, Syracuse field goal kickers made an NCAA-record 262 consecutive PATs. The 1981 opening of the Carrier Dome – an indoor venue with no wind and a perfect surface – certainly played a part. But The Streak, as it is now known, is the thread that connects some of the best field goal kickers in Syracuse history.

Jacobs, Anderson, Don McAulay and Vesling continued The Streak. All four players were drafted into the NFL at the end of their careers. Anderson still plays in the NFL and is the league’s all-time scoring leader.

Jacobs, Anderson, McAulay and Vesling are all amongst the top 12 career scoring leaders in SU history. John Biskup, who kicked at Syracuse from 1989-92, stands second on that list. Trout, the kicker from 1996-99, is first.

That list doesn’t even include Mare, a Syracuse kicker in the mid-1990s who’s kicked for the Miami Dolphins the last seven years.

In all, from Jacobs’s 1978 PAT through the end of Trout’s career, six Syracuse kickers were drafted into the NFL. Three more spent time in training camps.

‘I’m proud of that Syracuse tradition,’ Anderson says. ‘It’s absolutely great.’

‘I look at all those numbers, everything that Syracuse kickers have done and it’s something I am really proud of,’ Vesling says. ‘That’s something I talk about, something that stays with me.’

It stayed with other people, too.

‘For a while there, it seemed like every kicker in training camps came from Syracuse,’ said Jan Stenerud, a Montana State graduate and the only kicker in the NFL Hall of Fame. ‘No school was doing it better.’

Until Trout graduated. Then, few schools kicked it worse than Syracuse. In 2000, Mike Shafer made just 7 of 20 field goals. He missed four field goals from 40 yards or less in a home game against Pittsburgh. For the season, he made 2 of 8 from 30-39 yards.

The next season proved almost as bad. Shafer missed his first kick of the season, from just 26 yards. Justin Sujanksy tried next, making 4 of 9 kicks before Barber replaced him.

Since then, it’s always been Barber, for better or worse. As savior of tradition, he might not be qualified. He’s already missed four extra points – including one that could have tied a game at the end of regulation against Temple in 2002 – in the shadow of The Streak. He made just 11 of 20 field goals last year and nearly lost his job on a number of occasions.

‘My whole focus got lost last year, and the Syracuse tradition got lost with that,’ Barber says. ‘I just try to go out there and kick for myself. But there’s always a lot of pressure, a lot of things to think about that make a field goal, even in the Carrier Dome, really difficult.’

Still, there’s hope. Barber has been steady this year, making 7 of 8 kicks. It’s been, statistically, the best kicking stretch for the Orangemen since Trout left.

Can Barber stay steady? Depends on whom you ask.

Mentally, field goal kicking so overwhelms him that he admits to sometimes becoming nauseous just watching other players kick in crucial situations on TV. Fundamentally, he’s so strong, so disciplined that White, the SU special team coach, swears Barber could – no, should – play in the NFL.

‘I take full responsibility for whatever happens,’ Barber says. ‘I think a lot about the Syracuse kicking tradition. It’s really important to me. I want to keep that strong and be a big part of it. That’s just another pressure I put on myself.’

Published on October 2, 2003 at 12:00 pm