After the bottom dropped out against Miami this week, it’s only natural for there to be questions surrounding Adrian Autry’s job status. The loss to the Hurricanes was one of the ugliest in recent memory. The Canes are the worst team in the ACC, have a dreadful shooting roster, and are playing under an interim coach. Yet here they were bombing from downtown and dropping 91 points on an Orange team that looked bored and detached.
College Sports Wire led its hot seat column this week with Autry:
This will be a controversial call for some people, given that Autry is in only his second season. The general rule of thumb for coach firings is that coaches should get at least three seasons, and that’s true. However, a two-year firing is warranted if the coach seems to be out of his depth and if results are way below where they should be. Modest or slight underachievement is one thing. Syracuse basketball being under .500 and being 5-9 in a very weak ACC is cause for alarm.
Syracuse just lost to a terrible Miami team on Tuesday night. The Orange barely avoided losing at home to an atrocious Boston College team this past Saturday. It’s bad enough SU is 5-9 in the ACC to begin with, but we need to remind you that SU is playing in one of the weakest ACC men’s basketball environments we have ever seen. The ACC might get only four or five teams in the 2025 NCAA Tournament. So many teams in the conference have underperformed.
The ACC is not going to get even worse than this year. It can’t really get worse than this. Going 5-9 in this year’s ACC is like going 2-12 in the ACC a decade ago when Virginia was a top-10 team and both Florida State and Miami were strong alongside Notre Dame and North Carolina. If Syracuse is below average in a historically weak version of the ACC, how can anyone at the university believe Adrian Autry can quickly fix what is broken?
Coaching jobs at high-powered basketball schools are not training programs or internships. You either develop players and win or you don’t. Some will say Syracuse needs to wait and see if Autry can turn the corner. The problem is that he has already regressed despite competing in a weak ACC. Syracuse should be able to do a lot better, and it can’t afford to wait a few years in the foolish hope that Autry will turn things around. SU should have seen enough to know it needs a better coach by now.
Hard to argue with much of this piece. It’s startling to see Autry fall from a very solid rookie campaign to this flaming disaster so quickly. The program was in need of a new voice as Jim Boeheim’s final seasons were defined by mediocre play and angry, mopey press conferences (even by his standards). But now fans are starting to wonder if mediocrity (or worse) isn’t a coaching problem, it’s just the reality for SU basketball. That seems too fatalistic, but for now there are few bright spots. The pressure is on Autry to make something of this season quickly.
