Syracuse Football: Safety Andre Cisco ‘remains underrated nationally’

Syracuse football junior safety Andre Cisco checks in at No. 33 on Bleacher Report’s list of the top-50 players for the 2020 campaign.

National pundits can’t quite seem to agree on where Syracuse football junior safety Andre Cisco ranks among the country’s elite, both at his position and overall in the sport.

Case in point, the 6-foot, 209-pound Cisco recently got left off the Atlantic Coast Conference’s All-ACC pre-season team, which is totally absurd.

ESPN.com also has published a piece where it rates the best 25 players in the ACC for the upcoming term, and Cisco is placed at No. 24. From my perspective, that’s way too low. He’s a top-10 player in the league, without question, and for my money, Cisco is in the top three.

Joel Reuter of Bleacher Report has unveiled his rankings of the top-50 guys throughout all of college football in 2020, of course factoring in that conferences such as the Big Ten and the Pac-12 have postponed their fall stanzas.

Reuter arranges Cisco at No. 33. Here’s what Reuter had to say about the Syracuse football star in his write-up on Cisco. “After tying for the FBS lead with seven interceptions as a freshman, Cisco picked off five more passes last season despite missing three games to injury. He also has 125 tackles (87 solo), 14 pass deflections and two forced fumbles in his 22 career games at Syracuse. The junior safety remains underrated nationally, due in part to his 3-star background and the fact that he suits up for a program coming off a 5-7 season.”

Syracuse football junior safety Andre Cisco should command more attention from some national prognosticators.

This is a spot-on assessment by Reuter. All of the statistics that Cisco has accumulated so far in his tenure on the Hill suggest that, if he performs admirably on the field in 2020, Cisco will become an All-American, contend for national defensive player of the year honors, receive inclusion on the All-ACC first team, and possibly win the league’s Defensive Player of the Year award.

As we’ve previously documented, Cisco is on multiple pre-season All-America first squads, including the Associated Press, Street & Smith’s, Lindy’s and the Sporting News.

He is also on pre-season watch lists for several national defensive player of the year prizes, such as the Jim Thorpe Award, the Lott IMPACT Trophy, the Nagurski Trophy and the Bednarik Award. Finally, Cisco is landing 2021 NFL Draft buzz.

Hopefully, when he crushes things in 2020, all of the national and ACC experts can finally come together and agree that he’s among the top players in all of college football.