Whenever they could, Syracuse football coaches avoided showing recruits SU’s outdated home field. Built in 1907, Archbold Stadium constantly needed repairs before home games. For years, it crumbled. One day in the mid-1970s, Ronald Cavanagh walked a Syracuse football recruit into the Archbold Stadium locker room anyway. When a rat darted across a pipe, the recruit’s mother gasped. The athlete committed to Ohio State.
“It was then that we knew we had to start thinking about a new structure, pronto,” said Cavanagh, a former SU professor and member of the SU Athletic Policy Board, which influenced the university’s decision to construct the Carrier Dome.