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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 2362934, member: 289"] [I]A Tough Row to Hoe[/I] In my football preview, I was pessimistic that we’d ever be able to contend for the conference title because I didn’t think we could contend for the division title in a division with multiple national championship contenders. As it turned out, we are actually competing rather well this year, largely because we seem to better at the all-important QB positon than most of the teams we have played. Last year we were down to using back-ups against some the top QB’s in the country. That’s football: certain positons are so important that an advantage there can really elevate your team. It can partially make up for the fact that you have to fill out a roster of 100+ players and some schools are clearly going to be better at that than others on a year-in-year out basis. I don’t think we are likely to be as good at that as the southern schools we are competing with. Many of them are state schools and the balance of power in recruiting has shifted to the south over the last generation. In basketball, the balance of power has historically been in the North because it is an indoor sport played in the winter and in the big cities. That advantage has somewhat balanced out over the years but I think it is still there. And the rosters, and thus the recruiting requirements, are far smaller. 2-3 guys can make a very good recruiting class if they can play. We also have the biggest arena and biggest crowds along with a long history of winning, (a national best 47 consecutive winning seasons: UCLA’s record is 54). This is what’s allowed us to continue to be national power in basketball while the football program has slipped so badly. For much of those 47 years we were in the Big East, which challenged the ACC each year as the best basketball conference in the nation, (sorry Big 10, Big 12, ACC and Pac 12). Now several Big East teams have broken away to join the new ACC super conference and I think the result is the best basketball conference there has ever been. The top teams have been excellent: Duke and North Carolina won national championships and the Tar Heels also played for one. But the real strength of the conference is its top to bottom strength. There is no Rutgers, DePaul or South Florida, teams you figure to beat even when not playing well. Last year we opened the ACC season by losing to the worst team in the conference, Boston College, 81-96. It was a down year for us, but we were later able to beat Duke. You have to play well to win in this conference and the other team gets to play well, too. You have to be very, very good to win consistently in the new ACC and we haven’t been very, very good since we joined it. The traditional means Syracuse fans have used to evaluate their teams, aside from post season success, (and even despite it, depending on what point you are trying to make) is the number of losses. In Jim Boeheim’s first 37 seasons, we had single digits in losses 24 times in 37 years. In our first ACC season we went 28-6 but that included a 25-0 start, followed by a 3-6 finish. The next year we went 18-13, (and had no post-season action due to a self-imposed ban: without it there likely would have been a couple more losses). The next year we went to the Final Four but we did it with a 23-14 team. Last season we stumbled to a 19-15 record. We have never won an ACC tournament game. After starting 11-0 in the conference in 2014, we are 30-33 since. It sparked the same sort of “the game has passed him by, let’s ease him into retirement” talk I heard a decade ago, (thus prompting the study noted above). The fact is, in this conference, only our best teams are going to emerge with single digit overall losses and a .500 record in conference play isn’t all that bad: those teams might have won several more games in another conference. We just have to adjust to the fact that the going is harder in this conference than it has traditionally been and only our best teams will have exception records. That doesn’t mean there won’t be glory at the end: our 2016 team made the Final Four after a 19-12 regular season and one and done in the ACC tournament. If we can just get in the big dance, we’ll have a chance to make some noise. After all, we’ve been playing teams that good all year. That said, I long for the days when there were no super conferences and schedules had greater balance and a good team would have a good record. Your schedule should have some ranked teams in it but it doesn’t have to be a tour of the Top 25. Bill Parcells said “You are what your record says you are.” That’s true in the NFL. It’s far from true in the ACC. [/QUOTE]

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