Real problem for Syracuse Orange basketball, Adrian Autry revealed by The Ringer

Syracuse put its full-court press on and made North Carolina sweat a little bit.

But the Orange couldn't make it back from a 32-point deficit, and Monday night ended as so many have recently for SU, with a loss.

A lot of the focus has been on head coach Adrian Autry and his future with the program, and sure, he may not have long.

There's more to it than that, though. Syracuse simply isn't the marquee name it once was.

The Ringer's Anthony Dabbundo, who covered the Orange in his time attending SU, spoke truth on the matter in a post on X on Monday night:

"It’s clear that Red Autry isn’t the answer at Syracuse, but even cleaning out the athletic department leadership probably doesn’t fix the structural issues facing the school’s basketball program in the medium term," Dabbundo writes. "It’s increasingly hard to recruit top talent to Syracuse. They’re probably going to be boxed out of the pending conference realignment wars due to lacking football prestige, and there’s an entire generation of kids who don’t even know/care about the glory days of Cuse hoops/The Big East."

That's all the truth.

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Even in Jim Boeheim's final days as head coach, things were getting a bit harder. But at least then, Syracuse had a Hall of Fame coach patrolling the sidelines. That gets you in a lot of doors.

Now? If SU isn't winning the NIL bidding wars, there isn't a ton of draw to a place that gets as much snow as any high-major school.

The JMA Wireless Dome doesn't fill the way it once did, either, a chicken-or-the-egg effect to be sure, but one other selling point that isn't quite the way it used to be when it filled to the brim and rock-and-rolled on those thrilling Syracuse basketball nights.

So the question becomes: Where does Syracuse go from here?

The problem is that there's no easy answer.

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