There has been an underlying fear among Syracuse fans that the program will get swallowed whole by the sport’s biggest fish. The indicators from the basketball program have stirred that worry. Penn State and Notre Dame in football tower over the northeast. UConn, and now St. John’s with Rick Pitino, in basketball have been competing for Final Fours. The programs with the resources, the donor networks, and the modern infrastructure to simply outspend and out-recruit everyone else in the room have been hard to watch.
Tonight, at Vinny Lobdell’s estate in Skaneateles, Syracuse will make its own case that it belongs in that conversation.
The second annual Summer Slam kicks off this evening, and I’ll be there for the Orange Fizz, invited my Lobdell himself. It says something about this event, and where this program sits right now. This isn’t a closed-door booster dinner in a back room of a steakhouse hidden like a skull-and-crossbones meeting. It’s become a can’t-miss night on the Syracuse athletics calendar, and it’s still growing.
Look at what’s happening tonight. Gerry McNamara and Carmelo Anthony, two of the players most responsible for Syracuse’s only national championship in 2003, sharing the court again, this time with several of their 2003 teammates joining them. How cool is that? The current roster running through a dunk contest and three-point shootout in front of donors. Fireworks. A live and silent auction. All of it built around a $1 million fundraising goal for One Orange Alliance, the NIL and revenue-share engine now supporting all 20 of Syracuse’s varsity programs. Last year’s inaugural event raised $500,000. Lobdell says this year is shaping up to be even bigger.
That trajectory is the real story here. This isn’t a program clinging to nostalgia to survive. It’s a program using nostalgia as fuel for something forward-looking, held in a setting many schools would love to have access to: a private barn and personal court, owned by a booster willing to open it up and put his name on the effort year after year.
And it fits a pattern that’s easy to see once you start looking for it. Bryan Blair wasn’t brought in as Syracuse’s new athletic director because of a resume built on merely wins and losses. He was brought in for his fundraising chops, at the exact moment college athletics has become a financial arms race. Fran Brown has embraced the modern version of college football about as unapologetically as any coach in the sport. McNamara, in year one, is already standing on a court with a Hall of Famer and a room full of donors trying to build something new around a program with history to spare.
None of that guarantees Syracuse out-recruits Penn State (although the Eljjah Kimble commitment is a big deal) or out-fundraises UConn. Nobody at Summer Slam tonight is under that illusion. But paranoia about getting left behind is due to a worry that program isn’t adapting, and that’s just not the case at SU. Tonight, in a backyard in Skaneateles, with 2003 legends mingling among 400 of the program’s most committed supporters, Syracuse looks like a school that knows exactly what fight it’s in, and has the energy to actually compete in it.
