Hmm. USA Today is an American newpaper and the temperature scale is not mentioned, which leads me to believe they might have been using the Fahrenheit scale. Then 0 degrees F is of course still below freezing. That temperature swing of 80 degrees also seems high to me to be in Centigrade.
The phrasing leads me to believe they do mean global temperatures though:

Hubble finds Mars' climate harsher than thought
[From USA TODAY, 05/20/97]
By Paul Hoversten, USA TODAY
"Mars has two distinct climates that usually are associated with periods when it is nearest to the sun and when it is farthest. That happens every Martian year, which is equal to two Earth years.
"When Mars is nearest to the sun, it gets 40% more sunlight than when it is farther away. The extra sunlight warms the average surface temperature by 80 degrees, to about zero, and stirs up continental-scale dust storms on the surface. The dust is swept high into the atmosphere, turning the sky pink and blanketing the planet.
"When Mars is farthest from the sun, surface temperatures drop to 80 below zero or colder. Bright white clouds of water ice sweep away the reddish dust, making the sky appear blue. Mars' northern ice cap of frozen carbon dioxide expands as dry ice frosts most of the planet.
"At least for half a (Martian) year, you have skies that have some parallel to what you see on Earth," Clancy says. "A sky in the dust storm period is something like a very smoggy Los Angeles sky, perhaps beautiful in its own way."
"The Hubble data shows that the Martian climate can change from week to week, from warm and dusty to cold and cloudy. Three contributing factors are Mars' elliptical orbit, its thin atmosphere and the interaction between dust and clouds."
http://rossby.metr.ou.edu/~spark/AMON/v1_n3/news/MARS.html

However, on the other hand I found this site that does mention 32 degrees Fahrenheit:

May 21, 1997
A cold, clear picture of Mars
Hubble's photos paint planet in a different light
By ROBERT S. BOYD, Knight-Ridder Tribune News
"Unlike Earth, which stays in an almost circular orbit 93 million miles from the sun, Mars travels in an elliptical orbit ranging from about 127 million to about 154 million miles from the sun.
"When it swings closest to the sun, the surface of the planet gets as warm as 32 degrees Fahrenheit, the sky turns pink and windblown dust fills the meager atmosphere.
"About a year later, when Mars is 27 million miles farther from the sun, the dust is swept away, the temperature dives below minus 100 degrees, and brilliant white ice clouds appear against a dark blue sky."
http://www.chron.com/content/interactive/space/missions/sts-103/hubble/archive/970521.html

The closeness in time of the two articles leads me to believe they are reporting on the same research. But then the phrasing here can be read to mean the temperature just at certain places.

This NASA page on Mars does give the eccentricity as about 0.1 :

Mars Fact Sheet
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact.html

However, note that it gives the perihelion distance as 206.62 million km and the aphelion distance as 249.23. This is an increase in distance of 20%, which results in a change in illumination of above 40%.
By eccentricity they must be using the mathematical definition of eccentricity as applied to an ellipse which is the distance between the foci divided by the major axis. Doing the algebra you see if the eccentricity using this definition is e, then the ratio of the aphelion distance to perihelion distance is (1+e)/(1-e) , which does give a ratio of about 1.2 for Mars' orbit.

The variations in Earth's orbit are known to produce ice ages. To get an idea how how great a change this can be even on time scales of tens of thousands of years, see the graphic here:

Ice Ages
http://museum.state.il.us/exhibits/ice_ages/

It shows an ice sheet covering all of Canada and extending into the northeastern states of the US.

Also the paper by Mustard also suggests ice ages occur on Mars at comparable time scales resulting in glaciers extending into the mid-latitudes on Mars.

Another example of the speed of climate change with orbital variations is provided by the Sahara desert. According to this page it was created only a few thoudand years ago:

Shifting Orbit Drives Saharan Desertification
"Washington - July 11, 1999 - One of the most striking climate changes of the past 11,000 years caused the abrupt desertification of the Saharan and Arabia regions midway through that period."
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/earth-99a.html

Bob Clark