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Message: [QUOTE="Niastri, post: 5609611, member: 722"] At this point in the season, it's hard to get excited for games against such bad teams. I had a little excitement for Northeastern because I went to school there, but that was about it. Northeastern is ranked 210 by NET and 209 by SRS, with Stonehill 336 and 331 respectively. Of the two, Northeastern was the better opponent, but still not expected to be a challenge. Northeastern was a brutal game, both to watch and I'm sure to play. Northeastern committed 31 fouls, had three starters foul out and sent the Orange to the line 48 times. Syracuse made a respectable 71% and won the game over the Huskies by only 8... This could easily have been another game we lost and mourned because of our bad free throw shooting. Instead, we won by making 21 more free throws than our opponent. Our performance at the line skyrocketed our free throw shooting to only third worst in the college game. While you can't get excited about winning by 8 against a team you were much more heavily favored against, I guess it's nice to know we can grind out a miserable game like that one... After Stonehill, we're probably back to last in the country in FT percentage. 14-29 is just awful at the FT line. One thing I have been frustrated with Red's teams is we have periods where we just lose focus and give up runs to either let teams close the gap or let opposing teams turn close games turn into blowout losses. Northeastern was more of the same. At 6:33 left in the second half, Kingz scored to push the lead to 14 at 74-60. It looked like we might push the lead out to a respectable margin at that point, especially with the starters from Northeastern in foul trouble or already fouled out. Instead, we gave up a Northeastern 4-8 stretch of three point shooting to close the margin of victory to only 8. Northeastern only made 8-23 from three in the game. Stonehill was also a foul plagued game, with the Orange getting fouled 25 times by the low major team. It looked like it could become a brutal game as well. But oddly, something great happened... Something unexpected. Syracuse put a team away with a late run. At 8:51 of the second half, Stonehill scored to narrow their deficit to 11 at 52-41. Anybody watching the Orange often enough these days probably expected another annoying nailbiter vs a bad team. But instead, Syracuse closed out with an 25-7 run that pushed the margin of victory to a respectable amount and even gave Red the chance to play Fennell, Diawara and even Lobdell tonight. Much less disappointing than we have come to expect from these Freemanless Orange. The cupcake season had one major disappointment, and a fair amount of mediocrity. Overall our Out of Conference schedule was right where a lot of us predicted. I'm happy OOC is over. Looking ahead, Freeman is expected to be back (fingers crossed) for our next game, and it's on to conference play. I think the team is in a position where our fate is very much in our hands. The ACC is going to give us lots of chances for quality victories, and the boys have been through the crucible of Vegas and they aren't out of it yet. On forward, to bigger and better things! Starting with 10-3 Clemson at home, who could very well be a Q1 win by the end of the year... [/QUOTE]

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