No longer does Syracuse’s 33-point home loss to struggling St. John’s last month look like such a fluke.
The Orange proved they really might be that bad on Sunday with another dreadful loss to a rebuilding team.
Syracuse dropped its ACC opener*96-81*at Boston College, a team that hadn’t won a league game since March 10, 2015. The Eagles went 0-18 in the ACC last season and lost at home to the likes of Nicholls State, Hartford and Harvard earlier this year.
Even though season is not yet half over, it’s not too early to wonder if Syracuse’s NCAA tournament hopes are already beginning to fade away. The Orange (8-6, 0-1) have yet to beat a power-conference opponent and four of their six losses have come against teams outside the KenPom top 50.
The ACC affords plenty of chances for quality wins, but the conference can also bury a slumping team quickly too. Syracuse has two games against Louisville remaining as well as single games against Duke, North Carolina, Virginia, Notre Dame, Virginia Tech and Florida State, each of whom will likely be in next week’s AP Top 25.
Erratic point guard play, poor defensive rebounding and a lack of interior scoring have been Syracuse’s biggest issues so far this year, but it was abysmal defense that was the Orange’s undoing Sunday.
Boston College’s turnover-prone, rebound-adverse offense entered the day 231st nationally in points per possession, but the one thing the guard-heavy Eagles do well is shoot from the perimeter. That proved to be a perfect formula against a Syracuse 2-3 zone that failed to identify shooters, let alone consistently close out on them.
The Eagles*shredded the Orange from behind the arc as freshman guard Ky Bowman sank 7 of 8 threes and Jerome Robinson, A.J. Turner and Jordan Chatman combined for nine more. The barrage of jump shots got so bad that Jim Boeheim abandoned the zone late in the second half in favor of man-to-man.
“That was just desperation,” Boeheim told reporters in Boston on Sunday. “We cannot play man-to-man. We can’t press, either.
“It doesn’t matter who we play. We’re not stopping anybody. We’ve outscored a couple of teams that were decent, but we haven’t stopped them either. We haven’t had a good defensive effort against anybody that’s any good, and now we’ve played 14 games. If our defense wasn’t going to get any better by now, it’s a long shot that it’s going to get any better.”
It would have taken a highly efficient offensive performance from Syracuse to keep pace, but to say the least that didn’t materialize.
Poor point guard play from Franklin Howard once again bogged down Syracuse’s attack.*The typically hot-shooting Orange sank a modest 6 of 20 threes. Their only consistent interior offense came on second-chance opportunities.
The play that epitomized Syracuse’s struggles came with just under four minutes left in the first half when Tyler Lydon anticipated a lob pass intended for Robinson and tipped it away from the Boston College wing.
The ball went straight into the basket, another deflating moment in a season full of them so far for Syracuse.

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Jeff Eisenberg is the editor of The Dagger on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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