The bright green Birnie Bus Service coaches pulled away from Manley Field House on Oct. 12, 2017, and despite it being a Thursday instead of a Friday, it felt like any other night before a game in the Carrier Dome.

On board were Syracuse’s players and coaching staff. The buses headed north. Players mostly relaxed as campus passed by under broken clouds.

The caravan kept heading north, then east. Players soon realized what head coach Dino Babers already knew: They weren’t staying at their usual hotel.

Nearly a year ago, Syracuse beat then-No. 2 Clemson in the Orange’s biggest upset in more than 30 years. The night preceding the showdown, Syracuse stayed in a hotel, like it always does before home games. Except last October, the Tigers had booked out the Orange’s usual lodging, the Crowne Plaza Hotel.

“They took our hotel, that got us mad,” Sean Riley said. “We go to one hotel, and they took that.”

Since Babers took over in 2015, Syracuse has stayed at the Crowne Plaza, according to an emailed statement from SU Director of Football Operations Brad Wittke. Players like the downtown location, but the noise from nearby Interstate 81 isn’t ideal. Dontae Strickland enjoys the view of the city from his 16th-floor room.

Prior to Babers’ tenure, Clemson had booked the Crowne Plaza for its visits to Syracuse. It did the same in 2017, calling the hotel before the conference schedule dropped. Without a set date, the Tigers offered more money than Syracuse, Babers said. The hotel didn’t commit immediately, informing Babers of the situation.
On a phone call with the Crowne Plaza at the time, Babers told them to take the money.

“Take that, we’ll go sleep somewhere else,” Babers remembered saying.

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Syracuse booked rooms at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel in East Syracuse for that weekend. Players liked the DoubleTree, if only for the change of pace and longer police escort to the Carrier Dome the next day.

Still, players wondered why they weren’t at Crowne Plaza. They theorized. Clemson staying at the hotel emerged as a possibility.

The rumors soon gained credibility as some players got texts from parents staying in the Crowne Plaza saying the Clemson football team was there.

“I heard rumors that they were taking our hotel,” Scoop Bradshaw said, “So it was like, ‘Damn, the Crowne Plaza, they’re gonna take our hotel?’”

Word passed through the buses, among the players. Babers and the other coaches, players remember, were tight-lipped. To Babers, the change didn’t seem like that big of a deal.

This week, in explaining his outlook on the situation at the time, Babers borrowed and modified a maxim from the hit Clint Eastwood film, “Heartbreak Ridge.”

The saying in the movie, which Eastwood’s drill sergeant character delivers to a squad of cadets: “You improvise, you overcome, you adapt.” Babers’ version is simpler.

“Adjust and improvise,” Babers said.

After the game, it reached more and more players that Clemson had stayed in SU’s usual hotel. Some still thought it was just a rumor. Chris Fredrick didn’t know it was actually true until he was asked about it recently.

Whatever the players did know that evening, it only hardened what they already thought about Clemson, themselves and their upcoming bout.

“They’re in our hotel, they think they’re Clemson,” Fredrick said he remembered thinking.

“When I heard that Clemson was staying in our hotel it was like, ‘OK, we really got to take care of business now,’” Bradshaw said. “I was fired up.”

Syracuse players went to sleep bothered that Clemson took their hotel in a way that, to them, appeared like a bully taking lunch money.

Clemson players slept in the Crowne Plaza that night like normal. They had stayed there in 2015 and 2013.

The next day, Friday, gameday, Syracuse went through preparations, just in a different setting. The ride to the stadium was different. And the outcome to a game with a 24-point favorite was different than almost anyone expected.

Syracuse players, a year later, say the hotel incident may have bothered them at the time, but it didn’t have as big of an effect on the outcome as the week of practice leading up to the game did. Still, it angered them.

Enough, maybe, to turn a close game with an overpowered foe into a stunning upset.

“We won the game,” Babers quipped on Monday.

“I think they reacted OK.”

Published on September 26, 2018 at 10:35 pm

Contact Andrew: [email protected] | @A_E_Graham