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<\/p>\nOpen your social media platform of choice and search for Syracuse Orange men\u2019s basketball. Look at the final score post, and you\u2019ll be overwhelmed with comments of fans begging for John Wildhack to fire head coach Red Autry. Go to a Syracuse men\u2019s basketball game and hear the student section chanting for the same thing. Open the comments on our site, and you\u2019ll see the same thing.<\/p>\n
In the minutes after Syracuse lost 88-68 to former Orange guard Quadir Copeland\u2019s NC State team, the final score post had 36 replies and just two likes. It\u2019s impossible to put the noise aside. And it\u2019s incredibly hard to come back from that once you\u2019ve gotten there. One thing is clear: the Syracuse fanbase is ready for change and is finding every possible way to express it.<\/p>\n
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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\u2019re 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
And boy, are fans angry.<\/p>\n
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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.<\/p>\n
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If there were loud boos last Saturday, they\u2019ll be even louder \u2014 if anybody even shows up \u2014 this Saturday against Notre Dame. I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n
William Kyle said as much.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey have passion, they want us to win,\u201d he said after the Miami game. \u201cWe want to win as well, but it just sucks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kyle has been Syracuse\u2019s most impactful two-way player this year, and he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust give (Autry) a chance,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just always bashing and bashing, but they don\u2019t see what goes on behind the scenes, I feel like that\u2019s very disrespectful.\u201d<\/p>\n
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George is right to feel that Autry is being disrespected by the fanbase, but to insinuate that Orange fans didn\u2019t give Autry a chance in a third straight season where the team misses the tournament?<\/p>\n
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\u2019ll save the actual basketball analysis for another time. I\u2019ve written at length over the last two season about some of the failures and even successes of Syracuse basketball through the X\u2019s and O\u2019s lens and a film breakdown lens. There will be more of that.<\/p>\n
But right now, this is about the fact that it\u2019s becoming more and more obvious by the day that the ecosystem around Syracuse men\u2019s basketball is not sustainable. Once you\u2019ve reached a certain point where more of the discourse around your program centers around who the next coach may or may not be \u2014 and we\u2019ve seen this on social media a ton \u2014 rather than how the product on the court can improve, it\u2019s incredibly hard to win back that goodwill and continue to build the program.<\/p>\n
Syracuse needs to figure out a way to get the noise focused back on the court instead of off the court.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open your social media platform of choice and search for Syracuse Orange men\u2019s basketball. Look at the final…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":437240,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[355,206570,99,8941,206571],"class_list":{"0":"post-437239","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-nba","9":"tag-red-autry","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-syracuse-orange","12":"tag-the-orange"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437239\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/437240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}