Syracuse announced today that Greg Robinson will be fired at the end of the season.

“I have made the decision to move our football program in a new direction and have informed Greg Robinson that his tenure as Syracuse’s head coach will end at the conclusion of this season,” Syracuse Athletic Director Daryl Gross said in a statement. “Coach Robinson worked very hard to try to establish a winning program, one that could eventually compete for the conference championship on a regular basis. Unfortunately, the progress we expected to see has not occurred.”

Robinson has a 9-36 record, including 3-25 in the Big East. To most Syracuse fans, the news comes at least a year too late; there were plenty of calls last season for Robinson to be fired. In fact, a lot of Syracuse fans wonder why Robinson (who had never been a head coach before) was hired in the first place.

This year Syracuse is 2-8 and 1-5 in the Big East. Robinson will be paid his $1.1 million salary for the 2009 season, which is the last on his contract.

West Virginia coach Bill Stewart has announced that two players are indefinitely suspended from the team after they were charged with misdemeanor battery.

The players, fullback Maxwell Anderson and holder Jeremy Kash, were charged with misdemeanor battery after a fight at a Morgantown bar. (Kash is the only football player I’ve ever seen whose position is just listed as “holder.”)

Few details are available about the bar fight, which took place on October 25. The players are scheduled to be arraigned on Dec. 3.

Anderson and Kash are the fifth and sixth players Stewart has suspended in this, his first season as head coach.

At the outset of overtime in today’s Pittsburgh-Notre Dame game, Notre Dame won the coin toss, and in the process we learned that the Fighting Irish captain doesn’t understand how college football overtime works.

The team that wins the toss in college football overtime always chooses to go on defense first because of the advantage of knowing what your offense needs to do to win. But Notre Dame’s captain apparently doesn’t know that.

After Notre Dame won the toss, the ref turned to the Notre Dame captain and said, “You want to go on defense, correct?”

The captain replied, “We want to defer.”

The ref looked confused for a moment before saying, “You can’t defer.”

Eventually, it was explained to the Fighting Irish that they wanted to go on defense, and that’s what they chose to do.

And then things got even stranger. After the first play of overtime, the game had to be delayed because the sprinklers started watering the Notre Dame Stadium field. It took a couple of minutes — apparently there’s more to turning off the sprinklers than just turning a knob — but eventually the water got shut off and overtime finally resumed.

Note: When the second overtime period was played in the area where the sprinklers had been watering the field, the NBC announcers made a big deal out of how unsafe it was that they were playing on wet grass. Uh, guys? Are you aware that football games aren’t canceled when it rains?

UPDATE: Pittsburgh won 36-33 in four overtimes, with the overtimes resembling World Cup penalty kicks: Neither team could get into the end zone, so they just traded field goals until the fourth overtime, when Notre Dame’s kicker missed and Pittsburgh’s kicker made it.

On Tuesday night, Houston wide receiver Patrick Edwards suffered a compound fracture of his right leg as he ran out of the end zone and collided with some of Marshall’s band equipment.

On Thursday night, a similar incident took place, when Cincinnati wide receiver Mardy Gilyard ran out the side of the end zone and couldn’t stop before he hit the wall just a couple of yards beyond the sideline, flipping into the stands and colliding with a small child.

Gilyard, the child and everyone else emerged unscathed, but the incident was a reminder that it’s long past time for the NCAA to address the safety of players and fans in the end zone area. With so many players running so fast in the back of the end zone, it’s just impossible for players to stop in time if there’s a wall, seats, band equipment or anything else just a few yards out of bounds.

ESPN has been re-playing Gilyard’s collision with the young boy all day and has treated the whole thing like a joke. But it’s not a joke. The NCAA needs to enforce strict safety rules at every stadium, to ensure that there’s appropriate space and padding in the vicinity immediately bordering the end zone. Edwards was badly hurt, Gilyard or the young fan could have been, and unless the NCAA acts, others will be.

Here’s a video of the incident involving Gilyard:

Has Syracuse already begun the process of firing head coach Greg Robinson and replacing him with UConn coach Randy Edsall? The New York Times says yes. Syracuse and Edsall say no.

A Times report today said that Syracuse has already hired the firm of Chuck Neinas, who often works as a matchmaker for schools and coaches, and that Syracuse has gauged the interest of Edsall.

But Syracuse athletic director Daryl Gross told a local TV station that the university has not hired any firm and that it would be inappropriate to do so. And Edsall told reporters today, “I haven’t been contacted by any college, any university, the NFL, any person or people regarding and jobs. End of story.”

Having said that, there’s little doubt that Syracuse will fire Robinson (who has a horrendous 8-34 record), that it will hire someone to help the school identify candidates, and that Edsall will be one of the names on the wish list. Robinson, Edsall, Syracuse and UConn would all prefer for this story not to come out until the season is over, but that’s not how it works on the college football coaching carousel.

The commercials for The Express, the upcoming movie about the life of Syracuse Heisman Trophy winner Ernie Davis, say it’s “based on a true story.”

But the reality is that it’s a fictional account of Davis’s life, and it should be taken as a drama, not a history lesson.

Bob Stern, a teammate of Davis’s on the 1959 Syracuse national championship team, said he was annoyed that the movie portrayed Davis as a guy who would talk back to then-Syracuse coach Ben Schwartzwalder. He also didn’t like the portrayal of Schwartzwalder as a coach who would cuss out his players. Stern said it was a disappointment to the whole team when they got together to watch the film.

“All of the guys came back and we had a great time, but I think there were about three truths in the whole movie,” Stem said. ”Ernie Davis did win the Heisman, although it was two years later, and we played in the Cotton Bowl and we won the national title. Other than that, there were just so many things that weren’t true.”

One of the things that wasn’t true was the depiction of the 1959 Syracuse-West Virginia game, in which Davis, in the movie, plays in front of fans who shout racial slurs in Morgantown. In reality, the 1959 West Virginia game was a home game for Syracuse, and, former Syracuse quarterback Dick Easterly, “None of that happened.”

I haven’t seen The Express, so I won’t pass judgment on whether it’s a good movie or not. But I will say that college football fans who are planning to go should attend because they think they’re going to be entertained, not because they’re going to be informed.

So with South Florida falling to Pitt and Louisville mired in mediocrity and Rutgers back to their old ways and West Virginia looking anything like the revved-up Rich Rod hot rod of past seasons, could the new power in the Big East be Connecticut?

Really?

But it’s not a huge surprise.  UConn has been knocking (OK, more like tapping) on the door over the past few years.  This season, they might just kick it in.

The Huskies are unbeaten and they’re perched at No. 24 in the AP poll.  They face North Carolina on Saturday night, in a game that will be televised nationally on ESPN2. 

It’s their third straight week on ESPN or ESPN2.

They’ve still got a long way to go before nailing down a BCS berth.  But this could be the year that they finally begin to perform in football like they have for so long in basketball.

A month ago, Dave Wannstedt’s firing wasn’t a matter of if, it was a matter of when.

And now, all of a sudden, Wannstedt and Pittsburgh are sitting pretty atop the Big East. Winning at South Florida last night doesn’t completely wash away the stain of losing to Bowling Green in the opener, but it sure does make it feel like a distant memory.

So what’s gotten into Pittsburgh? In my view, it’s that they’re finally playing the kind of defense that made Wannstedt one of the most respected defensive coordinators in football in the 1980s and 1990s, with the Miami Hurricanes and Dallas Cowboys. Watching Pittsburgh last night, they played a disciplined, hard-hitting and physical style.

I really have no idea what to expect of Pittsburgh going forward — a team that can lose at home to Bowling Green but win on the road against South Florida is the embodiment of the word “unpredictable” — but I sure liked the Pittsburgh team I saw last night. Wannstedt has them playing hard.

A bronze statue has been unveiled at Syracuse in order of running back Ernie Davis.

In 1961, Davis was the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy, and he led the Orangemen to a national title in 1959.

The statue looks good.  The only problem is that it has two significant errors.

First, Davis is wearing Nike cleats.  But Nike didn’t exist in 1959.  Or 1961.

Second, the helmet is modern, featuring a facemask that wasn’t developed until well early the early 1960s.

The sculptor, 82-year-old Bruno Lucchesi of New York, worked off a picture of Davis, and used football gear that the school had sent to him.

The statue will be modified to correct the errors.

We posted earlier in the day an item from the Buffalo News linking Raiders coach Lane Kiffin to the expected vacancy at fallen football power Syracuse.

But, as an NFL source pointed out to us later in the day, there’s a potential obstacle.

Raiders owner Al Davis went to Syracuse.  And he has been a significant contributor to the school.

So the chances of Syracuse hiring the guy whom Davis eventually will fire are slim, in our view.