Are you ready for another season of close games?
While the Syracuse Orange football team is busy welcoming some new players to campus we are busy watching for more pre-season prognostications.
Yesterday, Bill Connelly of ESPN released his latest SP+ rankings and Syracuse is 56th between Vanderbilt and West Virginia. The Orange are ranked 42nd in offense, 76th in defense and 101st in special teams. With a Strength of Schedule rank of 14, the metric predicts 4.8 wins for the Orange next season.
Syracuse finished last season ranked 46th in the SP+ rankings, so there isn’t a big drop-off despite all the production which has departed since the Holiday Bowl.
Here’s where Syracuse’s 2025 opponents are ranked in this initial SP+ list:
- Tennessee – 13
- UConn – 84
- Colgate – N/A
- Clemson -8
- Duke – 41
- SMU- 20
- Pittsburgh – 47
- Georgia Tech – 44
- North Carolina – 54
- Miami – 12
- Notre Dame – 6
- Boston College – 62
So by the SP+ numbers the Orange would be clear favorites to win two games (UConn and Colgate), clear underdogs in five games (Tennessee, Clemson, SMU, Miami and Notre Dame) and have five “toss-ups” (Duke, Pittsburgh, Georgia Tech, UNC and BC). The fact that four of those games are in the JMA Wireless Dome should give Orange fans some hope that this team can find a way to get bowl eligibility gain in 2025.