Open your social media platform of choice and search for Syracuse Orange men’s basketball. Look at the final score post, and you’ll be overwhelmed with comments of fans begging for John Wildhack to fire
head coach Red Autry. Go to a Syracuse men’s basketball game and hear the student section chanting for the same thing. Open the comments on our site, and you’ll see the same thing.
In the minutes after Syracuse lost 88-68 to former Orange guard Quadir Copeland’s NC State team, the final score post had 36 replies and just two likes. It’s impossible to put the noise aside. And it’s incredibly hard to come back from that once you’ve gotten there. One thing is clear: the Syracuse fanbase is ready for change and is finding every possible way to express it.
After losing to Miami over the weekend, multiple players were asked about the chants and the boos from the JMA Wireless Dome crowd. They know what they’re up against. Sitting at 12-9 and now 3-5 in the ACC, and with a KenPom record projection of 15-16, the Orange are well below the expected win total by fans and media in what was declared by most to be a make-or-break season for Red Autry. There were faint calls for Autry’s job last season, but it was largely understood by the fanbase that he was going to get a third year no matter what, but that set the scene for this season.
And boy, are fans angry.
Beating Tennessee at home feels like a million years ago. The idea of an elite Syracuse defense feels like a million years ago. SU ranks 95th in Torvik in defensive efficiency since ACC play started, and has the 10th-ranked defense in the conference. The Orange are 1-7 against top 100 KenPom opponents this season, and have lost twice to teams outside the top 100.
If there were loud boos last Saturday, they’ll be even louder — if anybody even shows up — this Saturday against Notre Dame. I’m not a fan of booing your own team in any situation, but at this point, the players surely understand where the frustration is coming from.
William Kyle said as much.
“They have passion, they want us to win,” he said after the Miami game. “We want to win as well, but it just sucks.”
Kyle has been Syracuse’s most impactful two-way player this year, and he’s also said pretty much all of the right things in the media. Meanwhile, Naithan George seemed to have a different view of the crowd reactions.
“Just give (Autry) a chance,” he said. “It’s just always bashing and bashing, but they don’t see what goes on behind the scenes, I feel like that’s very disrespectful.”
George is right to feel that Autry is being disrespected by the fanbase, but to insinuate that Orange fans didn’t give Autry a chance in a third straight season where the team misses the tournament?
The animosity is a two-way street right now. The fanbase expects better from the team, and the team expects better from the fanbase. I’ll save the actual basketball analysis for another time. I’ve written at length over the last two season about some of the failures and even successes of Syracuse basketball through the X’s and O’s lens and a film breakdown lens. There will be more of that.
But right now, this is about the fact that it’s becoming more and more obvious by the day that the ecosystem around Syracuse men’s basketball is not sustainable. Once you’ve reached a certain point where more of the discourse around your program centers around who the next coach may or may not be — and we’ve seen this on social media a ton — rather than how the product on the court can improve, it’s incredibly hard to win back that goodwill and continue to build the program.
Syracuse needs to figure out a way to get the noise focused back on the court instead of off the court.
