BUD POLIQUIN

Post-Standard Sports Columnist on Local and National Sports

• No time for nice guys
He left not in a huff and not using the kind of language that could wrinkle a pair of slacks from 20 feet. No, not Greg Robinson, who always seemed to be more Fred Rodgers than Fred Smerlas, more harp than cymbals.

• Move on, we must, after latest lost season
There are usually rules of engagement, and Curtis Brinkley was quick to establish them Saturday afternoon in Cincinnati's chummy Nippert Stadium, where he'd just lost for the last time as a college football player.

• G-Rob suffers final indignity
Down the stretch here on Saturday, in that last minute as the seconds drained from the clock in his 47th and final game as the head coach of the Syracuse University football team, Greg Robinson stood at the 30-yard-line . . . and gazed.

• Better late than never for Colgate
As he's been around Colgate football, in two different stints, for 23 years now, Dick Biddle would seem to make for a pretty good historian of all things Raider. He was, after all, an aide for a while and for these past 13 seasons, only one of which has been a losing one, he's been the head man.

• Hey Philly: Life without McNabb's not so great
We are one day shy of the 10-year anniversary of Donovan McNabb's final game in the Carrier Dome, an affair that drew 49,521 admirers who'd come for one last peek at the greatest quarterback in the history of Syracuse University football.

• Orange basks in giddy gala
Throughout the frosty morning and into the early icy afternoon, with the Golden Dome piercing the gloom and Touchdown Jesus all but nodding up there on the face of the library's 14-story wall, the tenor about the place was that of a festival, a carnival, a jubilee.

• Dantley: time stood still
It didn't make much sense, really. Not this. Not here. Not on Saturday. Not six days after the leader of this put-upon Syracuse University football team had been stripped of his coaching epaulets.

• Oh, the Orange is at Notre Dame
Steeped as they are in all those Rockne and Four Horsemen and Ara and Golden Boy legends, among others, they're so very proud here on the Indiana plain. A wee bit arrogant, even. But there are mirrors out this way, and the Fighting Irish, like Angelina Jolie, are aware of beauty when it stares back at them.

• A Genius, Indeed
He'd kept the secret for some 75 years, telling nobody just as his father had instructed down there in Ybor City where he was just a kid growing up in Florida. Oh, he might have eventually shared it with his wife during some pillow talk and he could have spilled it in some cafe somewhere out there in one of those crannies of the world he'd come to visit.

• Keep an eye on the intellectual 'Gladiator'
Emmett Gazzard gets it. He knows his game isn't bocce or lawn bowling. He knows his duty is to swing at jaws not shuttlecocks. He knows that unlike, say, croquet what you hit hits back.

• G-Rob positive, as always
Even as the bow of his vessel was sinking into the sea, Greg Robinson kept pointing to the beauty of the horizon out there over the water. The waves crashed, the ship splintered, the screams became gurgles . . . and it just did not matter.

• G-Rob suffers with dignity
If that was it on Saturday night, if that was the last home stand for Greg Robinson, the soon-to-be deposed Syracuse University football coach (and who at your breakfast table is dazed enough to think otherwise?), there was more than a little been-there-seen-that amid the proceedings.

• Might Edsall Drive the Orange?
He came to Syracuse from the Pennsylvania burg of Glen Rock back in the mid-'70s as a three-sport whiz-bang out of Susquehannock High School. Football? Basketball? Baseball? Randy Edsall was an All-State guy in each of them . . . and 30-some autumns ago, he couldn't wait to be an Orangeman. And, oh, he was going to be a good one for Frank Maloney, the SU coach who'd painted quite a picture.

• G-Rob Stuck In a Rut
That scratching you might be hearing this morning, that faint chiseling in the distance, may just be the sound of the master carver doing his sad labor. The cold marble slab has no doubt been chosen and, after what took place down here in the Saturday afternoon drizzle of Rutgers Stadium, the work has certainly begun.

• The Arm of Hartwick
In a world filled with oxymorons, non-sequiturs and abnormalities that might cause the Ripley folks to shake their heads, we can add this one more singular strangeness: NFL scouts have been seen on the campus of Hartwick College in Oneonta.

• Over time, NFL has lost sense of fairness
Now that Barack Obama has some real clout, perhaps he can do something about our long national nightmare known as the NFL's overtime rule, which is somewhere between Stalin and berets on the Un-American List.

• Boeheim Stays Zoned In
As he is to zone defense what Emeril is to jambalaya, Jim Boeheim is titillated not at all by the man-to-man. Oh, he appreciates it, all right. It’s not like Boeheim gazes upon the man-to-man the way a vegetarian does a leg of lamb. It’s just that his thing is the zone.

• Boeheim Stays Zoned In
As he is to zone defense what Emeril is to jambalaya, Jim Boeheim is titillated not at all by the man-to-man. Oh, he appreciates it, all right. It's not like Boeheim gazes upon the man-to-man the way a vegetarian does a leg of lamb. It's just that his thing is the zone.