Doug Marrone, Master of Puppets

Behold: Doug Marrone, Syracuse football coach. You may know him better by the title most longtime Saints fans gave him when he coached in New Orleans, "Who?", but you know who we mean: the man who named Greg Paulus as starting quarterback at Syracuse for the opening of the 2009 football season, and thus gave Syracuse an instant front page slot on Google News when you search for "College football."

Before a game is played, we actually have to mention "Syracuse football" in a sentence not containing the words "...will make your eyes bleed from the horror of Syracuse football." In that sense, if you consider PR victories important in football, Doug Marrone already has his first win.

As you'll hear a hundred times today, Paulus is a real live football player, or at least was prior to his career playing college basketball at Duke, where he earned a reputation for theatrical flopping and basking in the unyielding sunshine of Dick Vitale's love. He opted for basketball over football, but did have offers from Notre Dame and Miami coming out of high school. His ability to function in Syracuse's offense is very much in question, though: picking quality QBs out of high school is enough of a crapshoot, but picking one who just came off a full collegiate career of playing basketball is even dodgier business. I don't mean to say that Paulus will try to dribble the ball, shoot the pigskin overhand, and then take an epic dive backwards. That would be silly.

Wait, wait. That's exactly what I mean to say. He's going to do exactly that, and when he does, you'll acknowledge what a genius I am for predicting it before it happens.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.