Syracuse basketball is off to a 2-0 start, and perennial Atlantic Coast Conference heavyweight Duke had a strong season-opening win against Kentucky.
But in the early part of the recently commenced 2021-22 stanza, a handful of other ACC squads have experienced defeats, and some of them appear to be head-scratchers.
Both Florida State and Virginia, two of the best teams in the conference over the past few terms, lost during the opening week of the 2021-22 campaign and have dropped out of the Associated Press top-25 poll as a result.
In fact, when the latest AP ballot came out on Monday, only two ACC squads were included, and they were Duke inside the top 10, and North Carolina hovering right inside the top 20. Multiple other conference groups, including the Orange, are receiving votes in the AP poll.
Syracuse basketball may encounter a slightly down ACC in 2021-22.
Now, I don’t want to get all crazy as it pertains to the ACC just yet, since we’re only situated within the second week of the season. But besides the Seminoles and the Cavaliers, other ACC teams to have already suffered setbacks include Pittsburgh (twice), Miami, Louisville and Georgia Tech.
A couple of points to make here. First of all, with the NCAA’s new transfer policy that allows all student-athletes to transfer once and retain immediate eligibility, rosters throughout the country in Division I men’s basketball, including the ‘Cuse line-up, went through major overhauls in the off-season.
So for some squads, their chemistry might not quite be there at this early juncture in the current season. Plus, with all student-athletes getting an extra year of eligibility amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, the rosters of many so-called mid-major programs are a year older, a year wiser, and a year more experienced.
That could help explain why some teams in the ACC and other Power 5 conferences have already fallen to mid-majors. Honestly, though, I also think there’s simply more parity in college basketball.
While acknowledging that it’s so early on in the present stanza, and prognosticating with any real accuracy right now is challenging, my sense is that the ACC in 2021-22 may contain a lot of good teams, but not a lot of great ones, save for the Blue Devils and maybe North Carolina.
Case in point, when we did a recent column highlighting the latest bracketology from ESPN’s Joe Lunardi, we noted that the ACC had the most squads in his projected field of 68, at eight, but none were higher than Duke’s No. 3 seed.
It’s not like the ACC is awful. Let’s all keep in mind that three of the last six national champions hail from the ACC, in Virginia (2019), North Carolina (2017) and Duke (2015).
However, is Syracuse basketball residing in the sport’s most dominant hoops league these days? A solid argument can be made that the answer to this question is no, but then again the Orange and its ACC colleagues have the opportunity to prove their worth on the court over the next several months.