Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="RF2044, post: 5372021, member: 40"] To be clear, I'm not saying we'll never be back. And I think it is completely fair to point to 2015 -- a nice round 10 years -- as the inflection point for the decline. Not only was that the year when the NCAA announced that they were investigating us, but we also suffered through a poor season that culminated with us self-imposing a post-season ban [we wouldn't have qualified for the NCAA tournament anyway, so that self-penalization was kind of hollow]. In the 5 years leading up to 2015, we were: [LIST] [*]A #1 seed in the NCAA tournament twice [*]Ranked #1 or #2 in 3 different seasons [*]Enjoyed a 30-1 regular season [*]Started a season 25-0 [*]Made both an Elite 8 and a Final 4 [/LIST] Since 2015, we've: [LIST] [*]Missed the postseason 6 out of 10 seasons, including three consecutive years leading up to now [*]Have had double digit losses all 10 seasons, including: [LIST] [*]14 losses 4 times [*]15 losses twice [*]17 losses once [*]19 losses [this year] [/LIST] [*]Suffered our first two losing seasons in 50+ years [*]Haven't qualified for the NCAA tournament 5 out of 6 years [one was COVID, but we wouldn't have made it] [*]Barely qualified for the ACC tournament [/LIST] 2015 is also the line in the sand in terms of JB's winning percentage shifting dramatically. The first 38 years, JB won approximately 74% of his games. The last 8, that percentage dipped to ~54%. We also had a losing record in the ACC conference over that time. We haven't been ranked in the regular season since something like 2018 -- think about that for a second. It's a lot more than "since 2022." Couching it that way is the "boiling frog" metaphor that got brought up in a recent thread. It rationalizes away that the program was losing altitude over an extended period of time. We didn't just drop off of a cliff, with the decline being a short term thing -- it has been a lengthy, steady slide into irrelevancy. We weren't irrelevant at the beginning of this stretch, but that's our station now, relative to the P4. And therein lies the rub -- over the past 10 years, we've lost between 12-15 games every year. We haven't been ranked in 5+ years. We have a losing ACC conference record over that span. And this year, we're close to the bottom of the standings in the conference. I get that we're Syracuse, a storied program with the seventh highest win total overall. But if this isn't irrelevancy, I don't know what is. I agree with Scooch's post above -- the occasional highlights [which mostly all occurred within the first 5 years of the 10 year decline] helped mask the direction we were trending, and were used by many to dispute that JB had lost several MPH's off of his fastball. But several of those seasons where we had a postseason run came during years where we barely qualified for the NCAA tournament. As a program, we've struggled for a LONG time. [/QUOTE]

Verification: What is a Syracuse fan's favorite color?