To say that Syracuse men’s basketball finds itself at a crossroads would be a massive understatement. This is a moment of profound change for the institution more broadly, with both a new chancellor and a new athletic director coming in … right when program legend Adrian Autry has been fired after a largely disastrous tenure at the helm in which he failed to reach the NCAA Tournament and barely cracked .500 overall across three seasons.
All of which is to say: The Orange better get this right, because their glory days are more and more in the rearview, and with how fast the landscape is changing in college sports these days, they might lose their standing for good. But what does that actually mean? What’s happened to this prestigious program, and what does the new administration (and, eventually, new coach) need to do to get things back on track? We’ve put together a five-point plan.
Realize that you do, in fact, need to choose between basketball and football
You could make a pretty compelling argument that everything that’s befallen Syracuse basketball over the last 10 years or so is downstream of choosing to jump to the ACC for the 2012-13 season. Of course, that also happened to coincide with the twilight of Boeheim’s tenure, so perhaps a step back was always inevitable. But it can’t be a coincidence that the Orange have lost 13 or more games in 10 of 13 seasons in their new conference.
It’s certainly not because the competition got tougher; the ACC isn’t nearly what it once was as far as basketball is concerned, much less what the Big East was during Boeheim’s heyday. And that’s sort of the point: The ACC, on an institutional level, has hitched its wagon to football — leaving basketball to wither on the vine…