sutomcat
No recent Cali or Iggy awards; Mr Irrelevant
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SU News
Why does SU keep getting late start times in NCAA tournament? It’s a compliment (PS: $; Waters)
There were a lot of bleary eyeballs around Central New York on Saturday morning after Syracuse fans stayed up late Friday to watch the Orange beat San Diego State in the first round of the NCAA tournament.
The Syracuse-San Diego State game didn’t start until 9:40 p.m., and it ended close to midnight.
There will be a need for some afternoon naps this Saturday and, likely, more droopy eyelids on Sunday morning because Syracuse will tip-off against Houston in the NCAA’s Sweet 16 at 9:55 p.m. this Saturday.
A lot of factors go into deciding which games will be on which network and at what time.
There is the quality of the match-up, the ratings potential, the geography in relation to the schools’ location and fan bases and competitive equity. That’s a fancy term for making sure one team doesn’t gain an advantage by having significantly more time than its opponent between games.
“Because it’s on television, they care about having teams that will bring ratings in the more coveted time slots,’' said John Ourand, who covers sports and television for the Sports Business Journal. “The advertisers are happy, the television network is happy and the NCAA is happy.’'
This Saturday’s Sweet 16 lineup consists of four games. At first blush, the tipoff times don’t make sense.
Oregon State’s game against Loyola will start at 2:40 p.m., or 11:40 a.m. in Corvallis, Oregon.
A game between Oral Roberts and Arkansas will start at 7:25 even though those two schools don’t have the name brand or fan bases like Syracuse and Houston who tip off at 9:55.
“It’s counter-intuitive, but 7 o’clock is a worse time slot than 9 o’clock,’' Ourand said. “Ratings increase the later you go into the night, right up until 11 o’clock or so.’'
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Former Syracuse basketball player Eric Devendorf joins the Inside Syracuse Basketball podcast to talk about the Orange’s amazing run to the Sweet 16. What did he see in Syracuse’s two NCAA tournament wins? What is the difference between the Orange now versus a month ago. And his personal insights into Buddy Boeheim’s incredible hot streak
Syracuse and the lockdown Bubble Life at the NCAA men’s tournament: Isolation, stale hotel air, team bonding (PS; $; Ditota)
The relative isolation continues in this quest to win a men’s basketball national championship.
Syracuse, one of 16 teams still here to play for an NCAA title, remains sequestered in its hotel. Players, coaches and support personnel reside in what the NCAA is calling a “controlled environment” but what everybody else is calling the Bubble Life.
There are rules that govern the Bubble. The team hotels – there are four of them -- are closed to everybody except the teams and the hotel staff and are barricaded from the public by metal barriers and the presence of police.
Each team has an entire floor to itself and nobody can stray to other floors in the hotel. Players have their own rooms, where they spend the vast majority of their time. They are not allowed to gather in each other’s rooms, though each team has a meeting room where players and personnel can coexist at prescribed social distances from each other.
Food is delivered outside players’ doors. Most of the meals come from the hotel kitchens, though players can order out. The takeout food is dropped into a sort of makeshift holding area where a guard presides over the transaction. It’s unclear how the food gets from the holding area to the players, though the NCAA has described the process as “contactless.”
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Opponent preview: Everything you need to know about No. 2 Houston (DO; Dabbundo)
Syracuse advanced to the Sweet 16 with an upset win over No. 3 West Virginia last Saturday. Now, the Orange have a chance to book their spot in the Elite Eight with a matchup against No. 2 seed Houson.
Here’s everything you need to know about the Cougars ahead of Saturday night’s game in Hinkle Fieldhouse:
All-time series
Syracuse leads 1-0
Last time they played
Syracuse and Houston’s only meeting was in 1982, when the Orange beat the Cougars in an upset home win in the Carrier Dome, 92-87. Houston’s “Phi Slama Jama” team featured Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler. Tony Bruin and Erich Santifer scored 26 and 22 points, respectively. Houston went on to lose in the national championship game that year to North Carolina State and Jim Valvano’s “Survive and Advance” team.
Expert projections
KenPom gives Houston a 76% chance to win by a projected score of 75-67.
Bart Torvik gives UH a 78% chance to win by a predicted score of 75-67.
Haslametrics.com projects the Cougars to have a smaller edge, by a projected 74.86-68.34 score.
Jeff Sagarin’s projections show Houston at 71% to win.
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Emerman: Deep March runs make SU's average regular seasons worth it (DO; Emerman)
Almost every coach, fanbase and program would trade spots with Syracuse for the last five years. Mark Few and Gonzaga wouldn’t — they’ve made more Sweet 16s and a title game. North Carolina, Virginia and Villanova, the last four national champions, wouldn’t either. But everybody else? Syracuse has had it better.
Since 2016, only Gonzaga has made more Sweet 16s than Syracuse. Bluebloods Duke and Kentucky last advanced to the Final Four in 2015 — when Duke won it all.
Then there’s the Orange, who have never finished more than two games over .500 in conference play in the last five years but have now put together three surprise March Madness runs. They’ve been a double-digit seed each time, including the 2016 trip to the Final Four. SU’s 2021 season has lasted longer than aforementioned bluebloods Duke, Kentucky, Virginia and North Carolina, as well as truebloods Illinois, Florida, Michigan State, Texas and Ohio State.
As lucky as each run might seem, three Sweet 16s in four tournament appearances isn’t a fluke. And when that happens, average regular seasons become an afterthought.
“Do you know how many people would dream about going to three Sweet 16s, two Final Fours and an Elite Eight?” Buddy Boeheim said after SU defeated No. 3 West Virginia on Sunday. “In 10 years, I think that’s pretty good.”
Though Director of Athletics John Wildhack called SU a “top-tier program,” it isn’t the team of the early-2000s that regularly won 20 games. It’s not the team of the 1980s and 1990s that tore through the Big East and routinely made deep March runs. Between 2010 and 2016, Syracuse made two Final Fours, an Elite Eight and a Sweet 16. SU was never seeded lower than a four in that stretch, other than the 2016 Final Four team.
But college basketball’s changed — there are more No. 8 Loyola Chicago teams and No. 15 Oral Roberts teams than ever.
“Look around. Look at some of the teams that are out. It’s really hard to get to the Sweet 16,” Jim Boeheim said.
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Syracuse Orange v. Houston Cougars Prediction & Preview (3/27/21) - The Juice Online (the juice; Bierman)
Syracuse will try to stamp its ticket to the Elite 8 when it plays second-seeded Houston on Saturday at 9:55 p.m. (TV: TBS). Ahead of the game, The Juice Online’s Brad Bierman gives his predictions below.
Syracuse fans of a certain era will immediately identify the only basketball meeting between the two schools; the classic 1982 game at the Dome in which Phi Slamma Jamma came calling on a chilly December day.
Guy Lewis’s team was an-time powerhouse with two eventual Hall of Fame players, Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajawan, that would go on to lose to Cinderella North Carolina State at the buzzer in the 1983 NCAA championship game.
Against Syracuse, Drexler was the game’s leading scorer with 28 points, including a massive leaping one-handed slam dunk, symbolic of the freakish athleticism of the Cougars fraternity, but the Orangemen’s ‘triplets’ of Red Bruin (26), Leo Rautins (15) and Erich Santifer (22) combined to score 63 points as SU handed Houston one of only two losses it suffered in the regular season by a score of 92-87.
Fast forwarding to Saturday night’s meeting at cozy Hinkle Fieldhouse, it would be surprising if more than one Syracuse player finishes with 20 points or more, but it certainly will be critical for the Orange offense to spread around the wealth. Someone else (Alan Griffin, Joe Girard, the bench) needs to be on track, to help support the scoring load that Buddy Boeheim has carried in the two tournament victories.
Houston coach Kelvin Sampson is fully familiar with the SU zone having witnessed firsthand its handcuffing his Oklahoma team in the 2003 East Region final at Albany. Sampson will have drilled into his players at practice this week that solid ball movement to create open looks is the key to scoring, after watching his team shoot just 8-for-22 from beyond the arc in a furious comeback over Rutgers last weekend.
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Syracuse wins 75-72 to end Mountaineers' season (herald-dispatch.com; Pritt)
“We switched when we shouldn’t have switched — plain and simple,” Huggins said. “We wanted size on Buddy and we switched size off of him and he shot it over top of us. He couldn’t do that when he had length on him. We bothered him when we had length on him. I don’t know why they switched, but we kept switching. We switched three times when we shouldn’t have switched.”
After falling down by 11 at 70-59 with 2:19 to go, WVU made one final, desperate run, going on a 9-2 run to close to within four at 72-68 with 41 seconds left. Senior guard Taz Sherman answered two Boeheim free throws with a layup, making the score 74-70 with 14 seconds left. Syracuse’s Joseph Girard missed the front end of an ensuing one-and-one, leading to a Gabe Osabuohien lay-in with just over four seconds left, bringing the Mountaineers to within two.
After a jump ball tie-up kept possession with Syracuse, WVU’s Kedrian Johnson collided with Buddy Boeheim on an inbound pass, resulting on a foul on Johnson. Boeheim hit the front end of a one-and-one but missed the second, but in gathering an outlet pass and trying to split two defenders before heaving a half-court desperation shot, West Virginia point guard Miles “Deuce” McBride traveled with 0.2 seconds remaining, ending the drama.
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Axe: SU basketball’s path back to the Final Four missing familiar roadblocks (PS; $; Axe)
16 men’s college basketball teams remain sequestered on the “Survivor: Indianapolis” edition of March Madness, dreaming of what comes next.
Some, like Gonzaga and Baylor, were given a FastPass to be here the minute the season started.
Others earned plenty of double-takes on the path into the Sweet 16 bubble.
We’re looking at you, Oral Roberts.
For the 11th-seed Syracuse it’s deja vu all over again.
No one does it better as a double-digit seed than Jim Boeheim and the Orange.
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Since 2009, only two schools have been to the Sweet 16 more often than SU (PS; $; Waters)
“It’s hard to make the Sweet 16.’'
Jim Boeheim is right. The Road to the Final Four may be filled with road-blocks, but getting to the NCAA tournament’s Sweet 16 is no Sunday drive either.
In today’s game, winning two NCAA tournament games can be extremely difficult. Since the NCAA expanded the tournament field to 64 teams, a No. 4 seed has to play a No. 5 in the second round. That’s is the epitome of a toss-up game on the tournament’s first weekend for a team that, by definition of its seed, is one of the top 16 teams in the country.
And that’s if the No. 4 seed survives its first-round game. Prior to this year’s tournament, teams that were 11-seeds had a 42-78 record against No. 4 seeds in the first round. That’s a winning percentage of .350 for a team that most fans would think has little chance to pull off the upset.
“It’s hard to make the Sweet 16,’' Boeheim said after SU’s Orange’s 75-72 win over West Virginia on Sunday. “Look around. Look at some of the teams that are out. It’s really hard to get to the Sweet 16.’'
The win over West Virginia put Syracuse into the Sweet 16 for the seventh time in the last 12 years, starting with the 2009 NCAA tournament.
That puts Syracuse in a tie for second for the most Sweet 16 appearances in that time span behind only Duke and Kentucky with eight apiece. Neither Duke nor Kentucky even made it into this year’s tournament.
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“Biggest Thing is Teams Have’t Seen an Effective Zone Like That:” ex-Big East Coach – Orange Fizz – Free Syracuse Recruiting News (orangefizz.net; Amendolara)
This week we’ve discussed the theories surrounding the new Syracuse basketball brand. Instead of early tourney flameouts and crushing losses, SU is now known for wrecking brackets. For the third time in five seasons Syracuse has risen from the dead to make an inspired run to the Sweet 16. What’s the biggest reason? Pete Gillen coached at Providence against Jim Boeheim from ’94-’98, taking the Friars to the Elite 8 in ’97. He also coached at Xavier and Virginia, with 8 other NCAA Tourney appearances. I asked him on The D.A. Show on CBS Sports Radio this morning whether SU’s runs mainly stem from the unfamiliarity with the zone.
That's a big part of it, yes. They have teams in the ACC they know the weakness of the zone, they know how to attack it, and they have decent success against it. Even though Syracuse does pretty well (in the ACC), now you get into the tournament, teams haven't seen a zone like that with big guys up front, like Buddy Boeheim. The size of the front line, where they played the zone, the way they bring it up from the baseline. They make adjustments so I think that's a big part of it. The kids rise up, Boeheim's a great game coach. So a lot of things go into it, but I think the biggest thing is that teams haven't seen an effective zone like that. The size of the players and the length of the Syracuse kids. Give them credit, they've been playing very well, they've done a great job, winning and winning convincingly in the two games."
As always, it’s a combination of factors that influence any run like this. It’s certainly not like SU is just a runaway machine like Gonzaga, or got the lucky draw. They’ve beaten two higher-seeded teams and got a near-perfect performance against San Diego State and clutch shooting from Buddy to beat WVU. Plus, SU started to turn up the juice late in the regular season and ACC Tourney. All those teams have seen the zone many times before.
But clearly from a coach that has faced the 2-3 and now analyzes college basketball for CBS Sports Network, it’s apparent. The 2-3 zone has the biggest effect on Syracuse going on runs in March.
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The ACC’s Sustained Success In The Sweet Sixteen Rolls On (DBR; Jacobs)
For many of us the fun of watching the NCAA tournament is seeing how top teams fare on a national stage when challenged and prepared.
If our ACC favorites are both good and lucky we can reasonably expect one will come away with a title or, nearly every year on average for nearly 40 years, a berth in the Final Four.
Or certainly reach the Sweet 16, to which the ACC sent at least a pair of members in 37 of 46 seasons in which leagues were allowed multiple entrants in the field. That includes this year, when Florida State and Syracuse alone among seven ACC entrants won twice each in the NCAAs.
By the way, two or more ACC squads reached the Sweet 16 every year from 1983 through 2006, an unparalled run.
The NCAA tournament almost always offers great surprise endings that endure in highlight videos and common memory, cloaked in a blizzard of clichés, irritating theatric affectations and idiosyncratic ramblings by certain TV commentators, and game producers’ maddening withholding of relevant stats at key junctures. (This year’s action also was interspersed with the great Geiko ad featuring Tag Team dishing, dancing and declaiming exultantly over ice cream: “Sprinkles!”)
Some of us, perhaps more perverse, watch the NCAAs rooting for upsets, surprises for the big boys and experts who preen as they reel off roster details like gourmands savoring entrees on an artisanal menu. We saw several delightful results this past weekend, among them No. 15 Oral Roberts over No.2 Ohio State of the Big Ten, No.14 Abilene Christian shooting down in-state giant Texas from the Big 12, and No.8 Loyola Chicago over No. 1 Illinois, yet another Big Ten flameout.
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Other
Former head chef at Le Moyne College buys Mazzye’s Meats: ‘It feels like family here’ (PS; $; Doran)
Two years ago, Drew D’Angelo was buying 300 pounds of Polish sausage at Mazzye’s Meats in Salina when he got talking to the owners.
They were going to sell the place, and D’Angelo asked them who would take over their beloved business.
Co-owner Dave Mazzye, who was cutting a steak, looked him in the eye and answered: “You are.”
D’Angelo chuckled and dismissed the idea. With two kids in college, he said, he didn’t have the money for the building and business. He knew the market was a community staple, but he also knew it would be long hours.
When Covid hit, D’Angelo did some soul-searching. He had worked for the Sodexo food services company as Le Moyne College’s executive chef for about 18 years. For the last several years, he found himself sitting behind a desk far too much, he said.
“I missed touching food,’' he said. “I was passionate about fresh ingredients and preparing food, and I missed it a lot. I wasn’t using my talents.”
He talked with Frank and Dave Mazzye again, and in January he bought the business at 7252 Oswego Road. The deal closed Jan. 29. He quit his job and joined Mazzye’s Meats as owner that day.
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