Cuse Country

(315): SU falls to Lemoyne
(301): Really? Fan-frickin-tastic
(315): Yeah, ESPN even cut into programming to announce it

Let the agonizing… begin!

First of all, I’m pissed off that I have to rewrite large portions of the season preview I’ve been working on. I already had to seriously edit the part about James Southerland after the first exhibition. But this… this changes everything. True, this loss won’t count against us in the RPI — we are still, technically, 0-0 and opening the season in a week. (Though I’d lay even money that we fall out of the coaches’ poll when next it is updated, even if we win our first two games.) But this is a harbinger of a very mediocre season to come. Early-season losses to ‘bad’ teams have been a frequent predictor of substandard overall seasons. Consider:

• 1996-97: a team that was in the NCAA Finals the previous year loses its best player (john Wallace) and point guard (Z Sims) and then loses to WVa, Miami, and Eastern Michigan in December. NIT, first-round loss.
• 1998-99: this team lost to Ohio in the Carrier Classic. 9-seed and first-round loss in NCAAs.
• 2005-06: a December loss to Bucknell in the Dome. Needed the Gerry miracle BET run to make it to the NCAAs. First-round loss.
• 2006-07: losses to Drexel and Wichita St in December. NIT. This was the “snub” year; snubbed or not, the team was not very good and was likely a first-round exit even if they had been included in the NCAAs. This team had three senior starters by the way.
• 2007-08: losses to UMass and Rhode Island, not as bad as (say) Ohio but still not good. NIT; this time we deserved it.

There are exceptions to this pattern, though.

• 2003-04, when the defending champs lost to Charlotte in the season opener (and to the Globetrotters in preseason — Syracuse’s last exhibition loss before last night) but would ultimately make it to the Sweet Sixteen. Charlotte, however, made the tourney as a 9 seed that year, so I hesitate to consider it a ‘bad loss’. (Though it certainly felt awful to those of us in the stands.)
• Last season, there was the 3/4-court heave loss to Cleveland State. I don’t discount this because of its “fluky” nature; if you let a team hang around all game, anything can happen at the end — just like last night. But CSU ended up being pretty good too (making the 2nd round of the NCAAs as a 13 seed beating 4 seed Wake Forest) so I’m not sure that should be counted either.
• You can make a case for the 94-95 squad having bucked this trend: they lost their first game of the year to GWU, but got into the NCAAs as a 7 seed and were a Lawrence Moten brain-fart away from beating defending champions (and eventual runner-up that year) Arkansas in the second round.

But that’s really it. Losses early in the season to inferior teams generally predict inferior seasons. In some of these cases, as we’ve seen, we don’t know how good the team is that beat us, and what looks like a ‘bad loss’ can turn out to be not so terrible. In those cases, the seasons may also end up not so terrible. But we won’t be able to rely on such an outcome this year. We know that LeMoyne is a Division II school, and even the best teams from DII are at best on par with teams from the bottom 10-20% of Division I.

The reactions from last night are already flowing fast and furious around the Cuseblogs. Anyone offering excuses and ameliorations is just grasping at straws. There is nothing you can say that will convince me that this loss is not worth worrying about:

• “They’re a young team.” False. We’ve got two seniors, to begin with; two juniors, one of whom is a fourth-year player; and a sophomore who is a third-year player. All five of them have experience starting games.
• “It’ll serve as a wake-up call.” False. This never happens. We’ve been over this before. The analysis above is an attempt to show that this type of hope is sorely misplaced. Either we are good, and we beat up the bad teams, or we are not so good and lose to a bad team or two. Other than the 94-95 season described above (where the opening-night loss to GWU was followed by 14 straight wins, including one over Arizona), there are no instances I can find in the last 15 years of a Syracuse team losing to bad teams early in the year but then really getting their shit together for a strong postseason run.
• “It’s only an exhibition — it doesn’t count.” True, but meaningless. As Sean at TNIAAM so astutely points out, this game happened on the one night when there was nothing else going on in the world of sports. No World Series, no MNF, nothing but some early regular-season NBA and NHL. So this image gets fixed in the minds of the public as the definition of this year’s SU team, and it’ll take a long time to erase (if it can be erased at all).

There is one flicker of hope left that I am trying my best to fan into a real flame. Though there is plenty of experience returning on this team, that experience is all piecemeal. They lost not just three starters but three leaders, three guys who were focal points on the floor. Really the only returning player who was ever the focus of an offensive game plan is Onuaku. Everyone else was just a role player, though each of them had his shining moments here and there. So there is actually room for growth as a team. This is different than simply attributing the loss to “youth” or “inexperience”. The players themselves are not likely to improve their games much over the course of the year, at least not the primary guys (one rarely sees that sort of significant in-season improvement, except in freshmen). And they are experienced enough to know that they need to play hard on defense, crash the boards, everything they didn’t do last night. They already know better. It’s not something they will learn from the loss. But the hope I have is that they are still learning to play together. That this collection of players maybe — just maybe — will gel better once they have more on-court time. Like I said, it’s a flickering hope; it’s not like they’ve never met each other. There has been a lot of time for the players to learn each others’ strengths and how to complement each others’ games. But putting that into game action — maybe that takes longer than we think?

Please???????

Or, are we going to lose to Albany. We’re losing to Albany, aren’t we. Or at least St. Bonaventure. Or maybe St. Francis. Al I know is, some damn team from New York State is going to beat us this season.

Oh wait, that already happened. Right. Goddammit.

Thanks as always to OrangeRay for the season statistics and summaries, without which all I would be able to talk about are vague senses of memories of past seasons.