Syracuse, N.Y. \u2013 When the NCAA Tournament teams were announced last March and the ACC had just four squads representing what was once America\u2019s premier college basketball conference, some conversations needed to be had.<\/p>\n
ACC administrators studied the teams that made the field, took specific note of the SEC and its 14 anointed schools and issued some guidelines to its member institutions.<\/p>\n
The goal is for ACC teams to win as many non-conference games as they can to position themselves high in the NCAA\u2019s NET rankings, which surface in early December and largely determine the field. <\/p>\n
But invariably, teams end up on the NCAA Tournament bubble, and the conference was keen to understand why some of those teams got into the tournament, while others did not. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no secret sauce, but how do you position yourself to be the selectee?\u201d said Paul Brazeau, the ACC\u2019s senior associate commissioner of men\u2019s basketball. \u201cAre you playing the right number of Quad 1 games, the right number of twos? You try to avoid bad fours. It\u2019s imprecise but a little bit of that kind of stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
Syracuse has not participated in the NCAA Tournament since 2021. But the goal, every season, is to be one of the 68 chosen ones. And that means the Orange needs to not only win games, but schedule the kind of teams that might help boost its tournament resume.<\/p>\n
This year, SU scheduled seven home games with mostly lower-level Division I teams. If that translates into fewer dramatic nail-biters in the JMA Wireless Dome, well, that\u2019s the point. The Orange is banking on a better 2024-25 roster steamrolling its \u201clesser\u201d opponents and enhancing its NET worth.<\/p>\n
SU assistant coach Peter Corasaniti, who for years has served as SU\u2019s director of basketball operations, constructs the Orange schedule.<\/p>\n
These last few seasons, Corasaniti\u2019s work has gotten exponentially harder. <\/p>\n
Teams schedule based in part on how good they believe their incoming squad will be. Duke, for example, draws top talent every season and plays a difficult non-conference schedule with the goal of winning those games and improving its NCAA Tournament seeding.<\/p>\n
But most college basketball teams are not Duke.<\/p>\n
With the transfer portal shaking up rosters every year, most programs don\u2019t know the makeup of their teams until late spring.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the hardest part of scheduling,\u201d Corasaniti said. \u201cThat\u2019s a fact for us and if you\u2019re not a top-10 team, it\u2019s gotta be the same for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n
SU finalized the last piece of its roster on May 26 with Tiefing Diawara\u2019s commitment.<\/a> In the meantime, Corasaniti needed to consider how to mix and match potential Quad 1 games with theoretically easier games at home.<\/p>\n This season, SU will play four potential Quad 1 games, one of them in the JMA Wireless Dome (Tennessee) and two (Houston, Kansas), likely three (unknown Players Era Tournament team), at a neutral site.<\/p>\n It will play eight teams that right now look like Quad 4 teams using Bart Torvik\u2019s preseason Division I rankings. It will play one potential Quad 2 game. (Torvik is one of the outside analytics sites the NCAA uses to help determine its post-season field.) <\/p>\n Those teams and Torvik rank:<\/p>\n Monmouth 188 (home, Quad 4)St. Joseph\u2019s 99 (neutral, Quad 2)Hofstra 239 (home, Quad 4)Mercyhurst 362 (home, Quad 4)Northeastern 216 (home, Quad 4)Stonehill 316 (home, Quad 4)Binghamton 332 (home, Quad 4)Drexel 266 (in Philadelphia, sort of neutral Quad 4)*Quad 4 Dome opponent that has yet to be announced<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s always the philosophy for me and the coaches,\u201d Corasaniti said, \u201cmaking sure you have a balance of a schedule that at the end of the year, it doesn\u2019t hurt you and it gives you enough opportunities that should help you make the tournament if you can get some of those Quad 1 wins.\u201d<\/p>\n Syracuse.com ranked every available ACC schedule by assigning a Torvik number to its opponents, adding them and then dividing that number by 13 (the number of non-con games). Right now, with just eight ACC schedules publicly complete, the schedules rank like this:<\/p>\n Wake Forest 137.9<\/p>\n Notre Dame 161.9<\/p>\n North Carolina 167.1<\/p>\n *Syracuse 173.6<\/p>\n Virginia Tech 174.6<\/p>\n Boston College 212.7<\/p>\n Miami 214.9<\/p>\n California 216.2<\/p>\n *SU has one more game to announce and will likely drop a notch<\/p>\n When setting up schedules, finances are a factor for SU. <\/p>\n Syracuse will pay every home opponent except Tennessee (ACC-SEC Challenge) this season. Those teams, Corasaniti said, were asking somewhere in the range of $80,000 to $120,000 to play SU in the dome. <\/p>\n Those money requests, he said, were subject to negotiation. That all of SU\u2019s buy games involve opponents located in the Northeast, a bus ride from the dome, was a factor in putting them on the schedule. <\/p>\n \u201cFor me to bring in teams that need to fly in will cost us more money and limits a lot of my options,\u201d Corasaniti said. \u201cThe first goal is to try and stay within teams that can get here by bus.\u201d<\/p>\n That leads to an obvious question:<\/p>\n Why were longtime Syracuse opponents Colgate (Torvik 250) and Cornell (173) left off SU\u2019s schedule<\/a> this season?<\/p>\n Corasaniti attributed part of the reason to relationships with coaches of other programs that have lobbied to play games in the dome. He said the staff was committed to \u201cbringing new blood\u201d to Syracuse, to introduce new programs to Orange fans.<\/p>\n Whether Stonehill (316) or Mercyhurst (362) moves the needle with SU fans more than Cornell or Colgate seems dubious. The more logical explanation is that those two regional programs \u2013 both an hour away by bus \u2013 have gotten too good to risk having on SU\u2019s schedule.<\/p>\n In today\u2019s NET world, Syracuse needs to beat those teams by significant margins to make a positive NET impact. <\/p>\n In the past four seasons, Colgate is 2-2 against SU. It has outscored the Orange 327-306. After beating SU in 2021-22 and 2022-23, it lost two games to SU these past two seasons by a total of six points.<\/p>\n Cornell is 0-4 against SU and has been outscored 321-273, or by an average of 12 points per game.<\/p>\n Cornell and Colgate have struggled to find mid-pack Power Five teams that will play them. Few teams want to risk what Colgate did to SU (beat them twice) or Cornell did to Cal (beat them last year).<\/p>\n Brazeau said the NCAA should be encouraging matchups like Syracuse-Cornell and Syracuse-Colgate. They involve short bus rides between campuses that make economic and academic sense. But the NET, Brazeau said, in this case discourages those games.<\/p>\n \u201cLet\u2019s take Colgate,\u201d Brazeau said. \u201cBecause at the end of the year, they\u2019re gonna be at best a bottom Quad 3. So, you gotta beat them by 40 to make a difference? What are we doing here?\u201d<\/p>\n Brazeau declined to discuss the SEC, a conference that put 14 of its 16 teams into the NCAA Tournament. That conference was the topic of much discussion in last season\u2019s conversations between league coaches and reporters. <\/p>\n Two SEC teams \u2013 Texas and Oklahoma \u2013 were awarded NCAA Tournament at-large bids after finishing 6-12 in their conference<\/a>. Those teams lost two-thirds of their league games and still participated in March Madness.<\/p>\n But they were bolstered by the SEC\u2019s incredible run in non-conference games last season. SEC teams went 185-23 in non-con games last<\/a> year. That number includes a 14-2 record in the ACC-SEC Challenge. <\/p>\n Not all those SEC games were against top-tier opponents. Texas beat seven non-con opponents by an average of 39 points. It humbled Arkansas Pine Bluff 121-57. Oklahoma beat six non-con teams by an average of 23 points. <\/p>\n The NCAA has argued that if a team beats an opponent into a 64-point submission, that is probably a good team. But who wants to watch that game? And is that really the mission here?<\/p>\n The ACC\u2019s take from those teams\u2019 tournament invitations was that the NCAA placed more emphasis on non-conference games when deciding its tournament field. Brazeau said the average NET of ACC teams at the start of conference play was about 90. When conference play ended, it was about 88.<\/p>\n So, the ACC decided to chop two games from conference schedules and asked its teams to schedule two more non-conference opponents.<\/p>\n Corasaniti said SU added St. Joe\u2019s in Las Vegas and Drexel in Philadelphia as its two extra opponents. <\/p>\n Were there opponents SU wanted to bring to the dome that failed to match up with available dome dates? Yes, Corasaniti said. Will Cornell and Colgate be permanently banished from SU\u2019s schedule? No, they will not.<\/p>\n This year\u2019s SU schedule is, as Corasaniti says every year, a bit of puzzle-making. He needs to fit the right teams into the schedule. And dome dates need to line up with those teams\u2019 availability.<\/p>\n \u201cThere isn\u2019t a plug and play formula. There truly isn\u2019t,\u201d Brazeau said. \u201cIt\u2019s gonna be tailored to what you have, how good you think you can be and the games you can get. It\u2019s inexact. At the end of the day, it\u2019s win games.\u201d<\/p>\n SU\u2019s 2025-26 non-conference schedule (All Eastern times):<\/p>\n Nov. 15 – Drexel in Philadelphia<\/p>\n Nov. 18 – Monmouth, home<\/p>\n Nov. 22 – St. Joseph\u2019s in Las Vegas, TBD<\/p>\n Nov. 24 – Houston at Players Era Festival, 6 p.m.<\/p>\n Nov. 25 – Kansas at PEF, 3:30 p.m.<\/p>\n Nov. 26 – PEF game, TBD<\/p>\n Dec. 2 – Tennessee, home (ACC\/SEC Challenge)<\/p>\n Dec. 13 – Hofstra, home, TBD<\/p>\n Dec. 17 – Mercyhurst, home, TBD<\/p>\n Dec. 20 – Northeastern, home, TBD<\/p>\n Dec. 22 – Stonehill, home, TBD<\/p>\n *No date for Binghamton or an unannounced dome opponent<\/p>\n If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement<\/a> and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and\/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Syracuse, N.Y. \u2013 When the NCAA Tournament teams were announced last March and the ACC had just four…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67427,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[402,398,400,401,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-67426","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-basketball","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-ncaa","10":"tag-ncaa-basketball","11":"tag-ncaabasketball","12":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67426","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=67426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67426\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}