ESPN, in all it's glory, has decided for us that the public face of the Syracuse Football program is, well, a faceless entity. It's #44.
Just mouse over the red dot on Syracuse on this map to see it among all the other choices. And if I need to tell you where Syracuse is on that map, then you probably don't deserve to see it anyway. Or graduated from West Virginia.
Is this the right call? Should the first thing people around the country think of when they think of SU football be a number that our current administration decided to remove from the field of play so that it will never worn again and therefore never gain any further significance and eventually fade in value and esteem?
Or perhaps shouldn't we have, I don't know, an actual face as the Face of The Program? The Axeman thinks it should be Jim Brown. Personally, I'd like to go with Donovan McNabb. While not the all-time great Brown was, McNabb is basically the only "face" of Syracuse football from the past twenty years that a random sports fan could recognize right away.
Syracuse wasn't the only interesting choice on the list. Stanford has Jim Plunkett over John Elway. UTEP has The Sun Bowl a.k.a. We Couldn't Think of Anyone From There. And Rutgers gets the 1869 Team Photo instead of a photo of Rutgers losing by 50 on any given weekend for the past 75 years.