Syracuse Football Legend Tim Green Is Having A Rough Couple Weeks

I haven't really paid attention to the whole Tim Green - Skaneateles situation that the Post-Standard has dissected so well. I've have heard about the allegations and saw that the school got the hammer dropped on them this week, leading to Green's resignation as head football coach.

I think it's probably worth noting given what Tim Green means to Syracuse. Of course, he was a star player for the Orange while he played football here between '82 - '85 and he's a member of the Greater Syracuse Hall of Fame. Remember, Green was front and center during the head coaching process that ended with the hiring of Doug Marrone. Green was a huge proponent of Doug and a big reason why he's our coach right now. So..credit where credit is due.

That said, his tenure as the head coach of the Skaneateles High School football team was a mess. Before he even became coach, things got off to a rocky start. Green basically pulled a Joe McCoy. With a star quarterback for a son, Green used an extremely-close board vote (4-to-3) to get the head job over more experienced coach Ron Doctor.

Almost immediately, allegations of illegal recruiting started to trickle in. A camp that Green hosted was supposedly used to recruit multiple out-of-town players to move to Skaneateles where they would be provided with an apartment and other amenities that would make most college coaches blush.

Things got a little dicey when race became an issue.

The Lakers have four new players. One is sophomore lineman Jacob Galbato, of Chicago. His father moved into the district after being transferred to Hancock Airport in Syracuse.

The other three are seniors — Malik Merritt, Koree Reed and Khiary Gale. All three are African-American.

Skaneateles had only one African-American student in the 2009-10 year, according to the state Department of Education. In 10 years before that, there were six years in which the school had no African-American students.

Personally, the crazy thing that seems to get lost here is how few African-Americans there are in the area. I don't know anything about Skaneateles but that seems like a weird trend that you would have so few AA students in your school. I'm not trying to make a grand statement, I just honestly find that surprising. But I digress...

Anyway, Skaneateles just so happened to have a banner year in 2011 with star QB Troy Green at the helm.

In the regular season, the team outscored its opponents 390-121 — an average margin of 38 points. The Lakers scored 61 points or more in each of their last three regular season wins. In a 70-28 win over Jordan-Elbridge on Oct. 7, Troy Green tied a state record with seven touchdown passes.

On Friday, there was one apparent difference between the two teams: while Immaculate Heart had three or four coaches walking the sidelines, as most high school teams do, Skaneateles had 11. Three are paid by the district.

The hammer dropped yesterday for the Lakers, who were no longer allowed to play in their final game of the season, a championship showdown with Herkimer on Saturday in the Carrier Dome. If they had won that game, they would have been crowned Class C, Section III champions.

Instead, Green resigned, hoping it would a good-enough gesture to have the ban lifted. It doesn't look like it's going to work. Too little, too late and too many other issues for officials to let the team play.

Whatever else happens, I urge urge urge you to watch this video of Green defending his team, courtesy of Matt Mulcahy. To me, it says everything about Green and how people view him. You either see him as a passionate crusader willing to die for those around him or you see him as an over-indulgent showman. Or possibly all of those things. And how you see him might just explain how he ended up without that job today. (Trust me, stick around til the very end...)

My official opinion? Tim Green's son is a solid quarterback but, in all honesty, he's probably not going to play football professionally like his father. So Tim wanted to make sure his son had the best possible high school experience and the best way to make sure that happened was to become the head coach and do whatever it took to build a contender around him. When I said he pulled a Joe McCoy from Friday Night Lights, I wasn't kidding. Of course, this is the opinion of someone who knows little of the specifics but, that's what it seems like.