Syracuse Football: Scott Shafer Is Not Gonna Worry About The Hot Seat

Is Scott Shafer on The Hot Seat?

I guess so, yeah. Only two years removed from a bowl game victory, 2014 was so abysmal that, valid excuses or not, the Syracuse Orange head coach finds himself in a position where he has to show positive momentum or else he might be working someplace else in 2016, incoming recruits be damned.

We'll have plenty of time to talk about what Shafer's threshold for keeping his job will be, and how much guys like Robert Washington and Rex Culpepper might factor in, but for the time being, Shafe is keeping his head down and controlling the controllables.

"I know what I signed up for and what the job entails...Perception is becoming reality and back and forth, and I think that's not time well spent to think or worry about those things. You go to work hard. You put your head down and focus on what you can affect today knowing that if you put in a lot of good days back to back you'll get the outcomes that you had in the past."

Shafer also told Syracuse.com that he's relying on the power of recruiting to drive not only the future of the program but his future with it.

"I try not to look too far ahead in the future, but you do want to feel great about getting three recruiting classes under your belt," he said. "And that's not to say that I wasn't heavily involved with some of the recruiting in the past, but now that we're doing it the way we feel is best, you'd like to see yourself get to those three or four classes where you can say, OK these are the guys we really had a lot of time to study and figure that they would fit in here and see how it goes."

As Nate Mink notes, Greg Robinson had some gems in his final recruiting class and that wasn't nearly enough to keep him in the building. Then again, whatever you think of Scott Shafer, he's sure as hell not Greg Robinson.

Right now, Coaches Hot Seat has Shafer No. 29 on their list of coaches ranked in terms of who's most likely to lose their gig. There's a lot of variables that may or may not get us there. Final record. How the team performs the second half of the season. How the 2016 recruiting class stacks up. Whether or not we can steal a win over someone we're not supposed to. Whether or not the new AD wants to start fresh. The list goes on and on.

In the meantime, Shafer's just gonna Shafer.