New Syracuse athletic director Bryan Blair has a vision for football Saturdays that has nothing to do with what happens between the lines, and it borrows directly from two and a half hours down the Thruway.
“Those people (in Buffalo), they’re having a really good time and they’re doing it in a New York flare type of way,” Blair said of Bills Mafia. “They may not remember it (laughing), but that is Central New York. That is this environment. Those individuals want to have a good time.”
In my sit down conversation with Blair at the Lally Football Complex, he sees a through line from Buffalo to Syracuse, from Bills Mafia to Orange Nation. We’re only separated by a few hours on I-90. How can SU tap into that type of event, and that type or party? That’s the standard Blair is chasing at the JMA Wireless Dome, and he’s not being subtle about where the inspiration comes from. Watch his comments in the video above at the 18:00 mark.
Here’s the challenge Blair is up against: the Dome doesn’t have the wide-open parking lot that makes a place like Highmark Stadium so easy to turn into a tailgate city. “One of the challenges we have around the Dome is a little bit more choppy space,” Blair admitted. “It’s not a wide open parking lot.”
Syracuse has always struggled to capture energy outside the Dome. The placement of the Dome geographically is a hurdle. It’s placed up at the top of the Hill on the backside of campus, meaning a steep walk up multiple stairwells, and separated from the large, sprawling lots of South Campus. The lots around campus are relatively small and distanced from one another. But most of all, the athletic department has never fully embraced or supported it as part of the experience.
Rather than treat that as a limitation, Blair wants to lean into it, using a model he picked up working part-time in tailgating operations for the Houston Texans while at Rice University. Instead of one uniform sea of tailgates, he described distinct zoned lots, each with its own personality, the same way Houston split fans into color-coded lots by vibe.
“The blue lot was the young single fun lot,” Blair said. “The orange lot was a little bit more mature, fluid crowd, a little bit more stemmed wine glasses. Each lot had its own personality. I think we need to lean into that of giving every segment of our fan base what they want.”
That means something different depending on who’s showing up. Younger fans get the loud, high-energy scene. Older or family-oriented fans get a calmer setup, with kids’ activities like inflatables and rock walls. And for fans who don’t own the truck, cooler and grill setup that traditional tailgating requires, Blair wants a version that’s ready-made.
“You’re not going to pull up your truck onto the quad and pop down the tailgate and drink a beer,” Blair said. “So how do I create an option for you to walk in ready made and have that party ready for you at the same time? We got live music. We got TV screens, College GameDay, whatever it be going on the back burner.”
Blair was clear this isn’t a switch getting flipped for the season opener. “That’s going to be a multi-year process,” he said, describing this fall as a testing ground: some ideas will work, some won’t, and a fuller rollout is likely next year once the department has real data on what fans respond to.
It’s a small piece of a much bigger vision Blair is building around Syracuse athletics, but it might be the most immediately visible one. Fans don’t need a modernized data analytics department or a new NIL framework to notice a better tailgate scene. They just need to show up to one.
