Want another one? Well, there is SYRACUSE THIS YEAR. The issues and concerns that Auburn had, legitimate ones, aren't a factor. Where Gill would have followed a fellow at Auburn who went 85-40, Syracuse hasn't had a winning season since 2001. Where Auburn is a football factory, Syracuse is a basketball school.
Where Gill would have had to compete with some of the nation's best coaches at very strong programs in the SEC, the last three Big East champions are Cincinnati (ranked behind Utah, Boise, and two loss mid-major TCU in the BCS!), West Virginia, and Louisville (with the head coaches of the latter two having left for better pastures, and the coach of the former soon to do so as well).
Gill runs the same West Coast pro style offense that Syracuse AD Daryl Gross wants to run. Gill has also proven that he can rebuild a program and win in New York state, with recruits like 6'3", 230-lb. Houston prep QB Darius Willis, who was recruited by Texas A&M and Oklahoma State.
Syracuse first tried to get in on Lane Kiffin but was beaten to the punch by Tennessee. (Again, no media outrage over their failure to so much as interview Gill or Charlie Strong, because the media likes the Kiffin hire just as much as they liked the Neuheisel one. And the difference between Kiffin and Chizik is what precisely?) They then tried to hire Brian Kelly but were rebuffed. Then they begged and pleaded for at least a week for Skip Holtz to take the job before finally giving up.
Now Syracuse had already interviewed Gill during all this time, but they bring him in again. Why? The first interview was fake, the sort of things that colleges do for show while they are going after the guys that they really want behind the scenes. With those three candidates (plus any number of others) having told Syracuse no, Gill was being brought back for an actual interview for the purposes of finally considering for the job.
That is, well, sort of. Syracuse made it known to Gill that he would only be hired if their second batch of candidates didn't work out. Now it is curious that another highly regarded black prospect who was linked to the Syracuse job, Mike Locksley, saw that he had no shot and took the New Mexico job.
(New Mexico, following the thinking of Houston last year, is following a trend of some Western mid-majors in thinking that maybe a black head coach will deliver the black Texas and California talent that will allow them to compete with Utah, BYU, TCU, and Boise.)
That Syracuse never had any real interest in Gill was not exactly a big secret. Long before the Marrone hire, it had been filtering out onto some websites and blogs.
As Marrone, a longtime NFL assistant and currently an offensive coordinator with no play calling responsibility on a team that will miss the playoffs for the second year in a row, and who has been away from college football since 1994 with no college or NFL head coaching experience, is an even worse candidate than Gene Chizik, why the lack of invective at Syracuse that has been aimed at Auburn?
No one has called the Syracuse people racist. No one has even called the Syracuse people incompetent, although their steadily destroying the program that Dick McPherson built, the utterly nonsensical Greg Robinson hire (Daryl Gross insisted that he was the next Pete Carroll), and their badly botched hiring process this season would tend to indicate it.
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