Orange Watch: Syracuse football's Dino Babers working remotely like everyone else

Item: Over the past week, the ACC Network brought the league’s 14 football coaches together (with a lot of coercing from his school’s football media relations directors) in a video roundtable to take some of the steam off of the monotony of Type A personalities, i.e. football coaches, being confined to their home office environments just like the majority of us. While there’s plenty the coaching staffs can accomplish virtually, especially on the recent recruiting front for the Orange, it’s also entertaining to hear more about the non-football side of SU’s fifth year head coach, from questions posed by ACCN hosts Jordan Cornette and Kelsey Riggs, while “seated” alongside his coaching peers.

With spring football practice canceled in March, a necessitated shift in how to effectively communicate with prospects between the current April 15-May 31 evaluation period of limited direct contact, and preparing for all sorts of different scenarios as to when the 2020 season can start, Dino Babers, like his contemporaries, is heading into uncharted territory for a genre of football CEOs that revolve their professional lives around following specific routines.

Babers and his peers let their hair down a little bit in answering all sorts of personality-driven questions on the ACCN program. Among the tidbits: Yes, Babers admitted missing showering one day during remote work from home; no, he has not found time to read a book, and he has never played a prank on any of his coaching staffs.

We have transcribed and edited for clarity two of the questions Babers was asked below:

Would you rather be quarantined with an offensive player, or a defensive player?

“I’d rather be quarantined with an offensive player (smiling and chuckling), and my defensive players know I won’t lie (laughing and much to the on-screen dismay of counterpart Virginia coach Bronco Mendenhall, a well-known defensive disciple).”

What’s the worst job you ever had?

“I had a job in high school where I was working at a (StarKist) tuna factory. At the time, it was a hell of a job, high school going to college. I’m working at the tuna company and at the time I am making more money than my Dad.

First of all, tuna is (not small, it’s a big fish). We’re taking these giant saws and we’re sawing the tuna in half and baking them in these large walk-in ovens, and pulling everything off so it can fit in those cans and get to your (gesturing to the other coaches) houses.

You do that for eight hours, you come home at 6:45 a.m., and my Mom, who’s really religious, for the first time in my life she told me I had to take my clothes off outside, put them in the washer, start the washer, walk through the house, and she wouldn’t even let me have a towel around me, go straight to the shower, and she’d have breakfast for me when I woke up.

It was as smelly situation.”

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