October will open with a strong Syracuse flavor for UConn, and that stretch starts on the football field before the basketball spotlight takes over.
The Orange and the Huskies will meet Saturday at Pratt & Whitney Stadium at Rentschler Field in East Hartford, with Syracuse coming in at 1-3 and UConn at 2-2. Then, just over a week later, Syracuse will bring both of its basketball teams to Connecticut for the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame Exhibition Game series at Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville.
The women play Oct. 12, and the men follow on Oct. 13.
The football game counts in the standings, and that makes it important right away for two teams still chasing the six wins needed for bowl eligibility. The basketball exhibitions don’t affect the records, but they still carry weight. For UConn, they offer Dan Hurley and Geno Auriemma an early look at teams projected for the 2025-26 Final Four while new pieces settle into the rotation after senior departures.
Syracuse has reasons to care, too. Gerry McNamara will coach the Orange men for the first time, taking over his alma mater after the program moved on from Adrian Autry, who spent three seasons in charge.
McNamara, one of the most recognizable figures in Syracuse basketball history and a member of the school’s only NCAA championship team, got his first head-coaching opportunity at Siena and took that job all the way to the NCAA Tournament in March. His 16th-seeded team pushed No.
1 Duke hard before falling 71-65 after leading by 11 at halftime.
That run turned heads nationally.
“He outcoached me, he outcoached us,” Duke head coach Scheyer said of McNamara after the game.
McNamara’s first Syracuse roster includes four returnees from the 2025-26 team that finished 15-17 overall and 6-12 in the Atlantic Coast Conference: sophomores Kiyan Anthony, Sadiq White Jr. and Calvin Russell III, plus junior Noah Lobdell. Russell also plays football for the Orange.
The group around them is built with youth and turnover in mind. Syracuse added five freshmen and six transfers, including three players who followed McNamara from Siena: junior guard Gavin Doty, senior power forward/center Tasman Goodrick and sophomore forward Francis Folefac.
On the women’s side, Felisha Legette-Jack is also a Syracuse alum and is heading into her fifth season. She has taken the Orange to two NCAA Tournament appearances, both ending in second-round losses to UConn, in 2024 and 2026.
The matchup history makes the challenge plain. UConn leads the series 41-13 in 54 meetings, and seven of Syracuse’s losses came before Geno Auriemma became the Huskies’ coach 41 seasons ago.
Syracuse has not beaten UConn since Jan. 2, 1996.
The most recent meeting came in the second round of this past March’s tournament, when UConn entered unbeaten at 35-0 and rolled past Syracuse 98-45, including a first half that ended 65-12.
After that game, Legette-Jack spoke candidly about how often Syracuse seems to land in UConn’s path.
“For us to be -- what we’ve done and our body of work, to have to come and play the best team in the country, I mean, Geno has this thing going, and I love what he’s done. But we, I thought, deserved a little more respect.”
She added: “After being in this business for 37 years, and to have to be in this particular bracket every freakin' year is unacceptable,” Legette-Jack said. “It’s wrong.”
The exhibition meeting gives her another chance to gauge where Syracuse stands now against the program it has chased for years.
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