With one more game still waiting to be officially nailed down, Syracuse’s men’s basketball schedule is basically complete.
The latest piece fell into place Monday when the Orange announced a Feb. 6 matchup with Rutgers at Barclays Center, a former Big East rivalry game that now sits awkwardly - and interestingly - in the middle of the ACC grind. That leaves only the reported St. John’s game at Madison Square Garden as the final holdout on the calendar.
As it stands, Syracuse’s non-league slate starts Nov. 2 against New Haven and runs through a Dec. 22 home game with Binghamton. The full early portion includes Central Connecticut State on Nov. 5, a road trip to Indiana on Nov. 9, home dates with Cornell, Lafayette, Albany, Colgate, Mercyhurst and Canisius, plus road games at Oklahoma and Providence at TD Garden on Dec. 19.
There’s also the unofficially reported St. John’s game, which has been said to be on Nov.
- It has not been announced by the school yet, but the date fits cleanly into the schedule as it currently stands.
Syracuse also has three exhibition games lined up, including an Oct. 13 meeting with UConn at Mohegan Sun.
Once conference play starts, the Orange’s ACC stretch runs from Dec. 29 at Florida State through March 6 against Wake Forest. The conference slate includes home games against Georgia Tech, Duke, Louisville, Boston College, North Carolina, Virginia, Stanford, Pitt and Wake Forest, along with road trips to Miami, Pitt, Stanford, Cal, Clemson, SMU, Notre Dame and Virginia Tech.
The Rutgers game is the outlier, and that’s what makes it worth watching. It comes between a Feb. 3 home date with Virginia and a Feb. 10 trip to Clemson, so Gerry McNamara will have to decide exactly how much weight to put on a game that isn’t part of the league schedule.
Does he treat it like a speed bump in the middle of conference play, or does he lean into it as a chance to grab a marquee non-league win that could matter in Syracuse’s push to return to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2021? That likely depends, at least in part, on how Rutgers is playing by then.
The matchup will be the 50th meeting between the programs. Syracuse leads the series 39-10, and Rutgers won the most recent game in 2020 after the Orange had ripped off 13 straight wins in the series.
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Syracuse Has A Costly Problem Fran Brown Must Fix Fast
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Fran Brown now gets a crucial bye week to sort through a problem that has been too costly to ignore. With UConn next on the schedule, Syracuse has a real chance to clean up the discipline issues before they become even more damaging in league play, but the fix has to come fast if the Orange want to stop beating themselves. [Read more 🡒]
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The bigger issue for the Orange is that Angelis problems are not happening in isolation. Tackles Kam Pringle and center Joe Cruz have both been part of an underperforming front, and the cumulative effect has made the offense hard to trust in key moments. At some point, Syracuse has to decide whether this is simply a bad early run that can be corrected, or a quarterback setup that needs a different answer before the season gets away from it. [Read more 🡒]
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Kamissoko has already taken official visits to several schools, but the next few steps in his process could matter even more if he trims some of the remaining stops. Syracuse is being viewed as a leading candidate to land him, which is exactly the kind of momentum the Orange want to build early in a cycle that can shape the program for years, even if no decision has come down yet. [Read more 🡒]