Syracuse Football: Andre Cisco not on All-ACC pre-season team is a joke
By Neil Adler
Syracuse football junior safety Andre Cisco didn’t get included on the All-ACC pre-season team. Say what?
Syracuse football junior safety Andre Cisco is on multiple pre-season All-America first squads, including the Associated Press, Street & Smith’s, Lindy’s and the Sporting News.
Cisco is on pre-season watch lists for numerous national defensive player of the year honors, such as the Jim Thorpe Award, the Lott IMPACT Trophy, the Nagurski Trophy and the Bednarik Award.
He’s also getting 2021 NFL Draft buzz as a potential first- or second-round pick.
Yet on Friday, when the Atlantic Coast Conference unveiled its pre-season media poll for the upcoming 2020 campaign, Cisco didn’t arrive on the All-ACC pre-season team.
Can someone please explain this to me, because the math doesn’t seem to add up in my head?
The two safeties on the All-ACC pre-season team, in case you’re wondering, are Pittsburgh redshirt junior Paris Ford and Florida State senior Hamsah Nasirildeen.
Don’t get me wrong, both of those guys are really, really good. And their respective teams are likely to prove better than Syracuse football in 2020.
Syracuse football junior safety Andre Cisco is not on the All-ACC pre-season team, and that’s ludicrous.
However, for the 6-foot, 209-pound Cisco to not make the All-ACC pre-season crew is fairly comical, in my humble opinion. He’s the active FBS leader with 12 career interceptions.
As a sophomore in the 2019 stanza, despite missing three games due to injury, Cisco still managed to tie for the ACC lead with five picks.
Then, as we’ve documented on many occasions, in 2018 during his freshman stint, this star player tied for the NCAA lead in interceptions, with seven, and Cisco received inclusion that year on the AP All-America third squad.
I sincerely hope that Cisco shows on the field this fall that he deserves placement on every All-America first team, as well as the All-ACC first unit. He could go down as one of the best defensive players in the history of the Syracuse football program.
Oh, and redshirt junior placekicker Andre Szmyt, who as a freshman in 2018 claimed the Lou Groza Award as the country’s top kicker, also didn’t make the cut for the All-ACC pre-season team.
In fact, no one from the Orange roster did. The ‘Cuse may not have a stellar 2020 term, but to not have at least one Syracuse football player on the All-ACC pre-season squad is total non-sense.