Syracuse may end up being just fine. Let’s start with that.
Syracuse basketball is a disappointment and we should have seen it coming
Syracuse is 5-3 and one of college basketball’s biggest disappointments so far, but perhaps we all should have seen this coming.
Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports
Jim Boeheim is a Hall of Fame coach, he has ample size and talent to work with, and the only time the Orange have missed the NCAA Tournament since 2009 it was because of a self-imposed ban.
With that out of the way, let’s get to this: Syracuse doesn’t look fine at the moment.
The Orange are coming off a 52-50 neutral court loss to Connecticut, which doesn’t sound so bad until you take a look at the Huskies’ own dismal start. The loss marked the third defeat in four games for Boeheim’s team, which was also drubbed by South Carolina (64-50) and Wisconsin (77-60). Syracuse’s lone win over the last two weeks was a 77-71 victory that should have been a triumph over a North Florida team that is 3-7.
None of this is what you would expect from a preseason top 20 team that was coming off a trip to the Final Four. But perhaps it’s that same line of thinking that’s the problem here.
Viewing nearly everything about a sport through the lens of a three-week tournament is a flawed framework for obvious reasons, but that’s exactly what college basketball does. There are “tournament teams” and “non-tournament teams.” There are teams that are consistently dominant for three months but “can’t get over the hump when it counts,” and others that struggle early but are “built for March.” There are “Sweet 16 teams” and “Final Four teams” and “one and out teams.”
None of these blanket descriptions come anywhere close to telling the whole story about a team’s four-month journey, but we do it anyway, and we do it for all 351 teams that compete in Division-I.
The reason this is being brought up is to ask a question. How differently would we view Syracuse right now if we did so from the perspective of “team that probably didn’t deserve to make the tournament last year” instead of a Final Four team?
The tournament is an uneven coin where the prettier side allows you to erase months of disappointment with two or three or four wins in a couple of weeks. That’s what Syracuse did last March, going from the most controversial team that heard its name called on Selection Sunday to one of the last four standing on the season’s final weekend.
We let four wins -- only one of which came against a team seeded better than seventh -- completely wipe away the fact that the Orange lost 14 games and had the worst RPI of any at-large selection in the history of the tournament. We probably shouldn’t have done that if we didn’t want to be disappointed the year after.
Of course this isn’t exactly a new phenomenon.
A year after they both crashed the 2000 Final Four as No. 8 seeds, there was a considerable amount expected from both North Carolina and Wisconsin. While the Badgers had a decent campaign and the Tar Heels were good enough to lose only seven games, neither team ultimately made it out of the tournament’s opening weekend.
The most notorious tournament overachiever remains the 1984-85 Villanova Wildcats, who are still the lowest-seeded team (No. 8) to win a national title. Though many expected that success to turn into even more a year later, the 1985-86 Wildcats managed to earn only a No. 10 seed in the Big Dance, and were defeated by Georgia Tech in the second round.
LSU became the first double-digit seed to crash the Final Four in 1986. Despite earning a preseason ranking of No. 11 from the Associated Press, the Tigers disappointed throughout the regular season and earned another double-digit seed, this time No. 10, on Selection Sunday.
This leads us back to Syracuse.
In one light, the Orange returned a high-level NBA prospect (Tyler Lydon) from a Final Four team. In another, 'Cuse lost its top three scorers from a team that was beaten 14 times. If that 14th loss had come in mid-March and not early April, then the darker light likely would have prevailed throughout the offseason. It didn't, and so now we're here in early December talking about what a massive disappointment Syracuse has been, and wondering aloud whether or not the team will ever live up to its potential.
The fact of the matter is that Syracuse has a problem right now that is much more concerning than the way it is being viewed by the outside world.
The Orange have a bad loss to UConn, they were pasted by the two best teams on the early part of their schedule, and they have no more opportunities to secure resume-boosting non-conference wins before ACC play begins on Jan. 1. That means that if the team is going to have any shot at making another run in March, it’s going to have to do some serious work in a conference that appears to be as strong as any college basketball has seen in recent years.
That’s not an ideal prospect for a team that lost so much experience and production from a relatively average squad a season ago. Even if that team did make the Final Four.
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