Syracuse appears to be headed to its first NCAA Tournament since 2008. The Orange finished third in the Big East and reached the conference tournament semifinals before losing to Connecticut on Monday. The Daily Orange spoke with ESPN bracketologist Charlie Creme about SU’s resume and where it could take it for the first round of the tournament.

 

Daily Orange: It took until the final game of the regular season for Syracuse to finally beat a ranked opponent. How important was it for them to get that quality win against Louisville?

Creme: “Ranked teams” isn’t really necessarily a category, the Top 25 RPI teams would be a category, top 50 RPI, it’s all part of the consideration, it’s all that’s looked at and discussed. So, yes, in general, beating good teams is extremely important. Syracuse — they’d done a lot of winning, they hadn’t a lot of quality winning, but they’ve done a decent job of beating some decent teams all along.

 

DO: You have the Orange as a No. 7 seed right now. What’s the range of seeding it could find itself in?

CC: I have them as a seven, but they’re actually a natural eight. One of the things that goes into this is that, in terms of bracketing teams, there are all sorts of procedures, rules that have to be followed, and many cases, especially this year, it’s extra tough this year because there are so many host schools in the mix and the Big East makes it tough because there are eight teams from the Big East in the bracket, so there’s very limited movement. So because of that, I had to move Syracuse up from a natural eight up one seed line to a seven.

 

DO: What are some potential locations we could be looking at for SU?

CC: Honestly, it could be just about anywhere that’s not Storrs, wherever Notre Dame’s playing, Queens — essentially as long as they’re not going to conflict with any Big East schools, Syracuse is in a position where they can honestly go anywhere.

 

DO: You project eight teams from the Big East to make the tournament, so how much does the quality of the conference help the Orange?

CC: The conference name doesn’t necessarily come into play, it’s each individual team compared to each individual team. That’s one thing I think we — the conference’s are so important in the game that I think we want to apply that. I think you alluded to this, it’s the schedule that they get to play because they’re in a conference, and those are the teams that happen to be in the conference. So that’s the helpful part. The schedule strength gets a little bit better when they get in the Big East because Big East competition happens to be better.”

 

DO: What are the biggest strengths and weaknesses of SU’s resume?

CC: They didn’t really lose to any bad teams. They were fairly competitive with Notre Dame at Notre Dame, that’s something to note as well, I think. They don’t have any bad losses, and that’s another thing, too, they didn’t really stumble anywhere. They’d probably like to have the Temple game back, but I’m not going to kill them for that, Temple’s easily their worst loss. If you had to define a hole, Temple would be it. While we talk about versus Top 25 teams and versus top 100 and the last 12 and the strength of schedule, and you talk about all these little metrics, it still comes down to watching games, and if you saw how Syracuse played Notre Dame, and I did catch about half of that game, then you do understand that a team can play or not. You do get a sense just by watching them. That’s a pretty good team. And I think that’s going to be the takeaway for Syracuse. That’s a pretty good team.

Published on March 17, 2013 at 11:00 pm

Contact David: dbwilson@syr.edu | @DBWilson2