Greg Robinson is still nominally alive at Syracuse with a couple of long shot road games left at Notre Dame and Cincinnati, but make no mistake: He remains very, very fired in reality. So fired that the Orange faithful spent most of Saturday's 39-14 loss to Connecticut scouting UConn coach Randy Edsall, an SU alum first linked to the Syracuse job by the New York Times and apparently the man at the top of the wish list to replace Robinson in December.

So the upstate crowd saw Saturday's game as an audition of sorts for Edsall, whose team passed with flying colors. It's not clear at all, though, that Edsall was looking at it from the same angle, based on his response to "the question" after the Huskies' win:

First, Edsall, rumored to be courted by SU to replace the beleaguered Greg Robinson following the season, fielded "the question" by a local TV reporter, something along the lines of "can you envision yourself being on the other sideline in the Dome next season."

"That's really bad," Edsall said, his blue eyes flashing anger. "That's not appropriate at all."
[...]
"I just think my paycheck is signed by the University of Connecticut and the State of Connecticut," he said. "All I'm worried about is that we just won 39-14. That's all I'm thinking about."

This falls under the category of a non-denial denial, in an age when real denials don't necessarily mean anything, and a column in this morning's Hartford Courant called Edsall an outright liar for his successful deception about who'd start at quarterback in the Carrier Dome. I still wonder, as the NYT did, whether Syracuse is a better job than UConn. Better enough to lure away a coach who's not only won more in Storrs (Edsall is on pace for his fourth eight-win season in six years, compared to Robinson's nine total wins in four years) and has access to the same recruiting base as he would at Syracuse, but who's built the UConn program literally from the ground up and has job security for the forseeable future? Really: Who was auditioning who here?

Greg Robinson has done for the Syracuse job what Alberto Gonzales did for the Justice Department. The old shine is off. It's going to take years to repair. And I don't see any reason someone like Edsall, who's already entrenched in a winning perch that he's made all his own, would give that up for a fleeting moment of nostalgia and four years of sorting through rubble. The Orange need a young, energetic guy who's in the same situation as the program: starting from scratch.

UPDATE: The speculation is over -- G-Rob's college career sleeps with the fishes.