According to the Syracuse Post-Standard in Sunday's editions, the name of Bengals assistant head coach/offensive line coach Paul Alexander has surfaced in the Syracuse University head coach search.
During Saturday's final game of Greg Robinson's four-year tenure, a 30-10 loss at the University of Cincinnati, the paper said Alexander spent time with Syracuse athletic director Daryl Gross in his box.
Alexander, 49, has been with the Bengals the last 15 years, but cut his teeth during the 1980s in two of the country's major programs at Penn State and Michigan. He's a native of nearby Rochester, N.Y., and also played his college ball in Upstate New York at Cortland State while maintaining close ties to the state's high school coaches in camps and clinics.
The frontrunner for the job had been University of Connecticut head coach Randy Edsall at the beginning of the search, but his name has been in and out of the running the past week. Edsall is a former Syracuse backup quarterback whose stint as the school's recruiting coordinator mirrored its return to power in the late '80s.
