Scott Shafer: Goals, Passions, Dreams & The Damn ACC

All this talk of assistant coaches coming and going and we seem to have lost the narrative thread, which is...

Scott Shafer is the Syracuse Orange football coach and he is awesome and he will be here forever and ever. Amen.

Scott recently sat down with Andrea Adelson over at ESPN for a two-part Q&A, you can read Part I and Part II here. It's mostly boilerplate stuff but there's some nuggets worth mentioning.

Scott made quite the impact in his press conference. How much of that was pre-planned?

I knew what I wanted to accomplish and I had a goal. To be honest with you, I try not to over script anything because then I don’t think it’s real. I just wanted it to be from the heart, but I wanted to be able to stay on task so I didn’t get too emotional, having your family there, first job. I had a hard time writing anything down because I was tired, and we had a lot of taxing things going on in the office. So I said, well I’ll just get up early (Friday) morning, I’ll be fresh, and get my mind a chance to think about things. I got up real early, me and my dog got up at 3:30, went for a walk, put the coffee on early, sat down, thought about the things some really great people gave me advice on and tried to incorporate some of those things. My whole goal was to try to be honest and be myself.

Shafer also had an interesting way of discussing the Michigan fall-out, basically saying that he and RichRod had extremely divergent philosophies on football and, well, life.

He also added what he took away from working for Doug Marrone for four years:

He’s an extremely organized person and that’s one thing I’ve taken from him. Also, the ability to walk away from a situation and let his coaches coach, I think that’s probably the biggest thing I take away from it.

Over at the Daily Orange, Ryne Gery says Shafer is the right coach to keep Syracuse's momentum up in the coming years. And he's got the goals to back it up:

"We want to make one of the best teams in the nation," Shafer said. "That is a goal of ours."

Finally, the D.O. also shares some of the life lessons that Shafer has received over the years and how that translates into his coaching. And the effect he has on his players.

"He is by far the most passionate person about the game of football that I have ever met in my entire life," former Syracuse linebacker Derrell Smith said.

"He’s a master at teaching."

All good stuff.