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J.J. Starling’s eyelids expanded away from his pupils while his face rapidly produced an ear-to-ear smirk. He began to verbalize the intended reality Syracuse’s players and coaches see as their utopia — all five guys on the floor exuding a “level five energy.”

The phrase sums up how SU head coach Adrian Autry wants his team to perform. Frankly, he doesn’t care about makes or misses. He simply wants his players gassed by each final buzzer. If they are, then they successfully reached “level five energy.”

Tenacious defense is merely the start of what Autry’s buzz-phrase actually means. If you ask Starling, though, it’s more than just a mindset; “level five energy” is a spiritual experience. When the Orange hit level five, Starling’s heartbeat is one with every patron in the JMA Wireless Dome. All distractions vanish. He’s in basketball nirvana.

“You’re just lost in the game,” Starling described about what it’s like to harness the “level five energy” Syracuse lives by. “The whole building — there’s a shift in the atmosphere. It’s just different.”

Starling said the Orange truly reached a “level five energy” late in their stunning upset victory over then-No. 13 Tennessee on Dec. 2. But that feeling Starling obsesses over hasn’t been experienced since. It certainly wasn’t on Wednesday as Syracuse (7-4, 0-0 Atlantic Coast) unconvincingly beat Mercyhurst (4-8, 0-0 Northeast) 76-62 in the Dome to avoid a two-game losing skid, following its bad loss to mid-major Hofstra last Saturday.

Facing Mercyhurst, a team that entered Wednesday ranked among KenPom’s 35 worst teams in Division I, was supposed to be a pristine opportunity for a “get-back game.” How would SU respond? Well, the Orange turned the ball over 16 times, displayed stagnant ball movement in the half-court offense and saw their defense crumble by allowing 39 second-half points.

Sure, the Orange won. Yet the final score was fairly meaningless. Their KenPom ranking dropped from 74 to 79, and keeping a low-tier squad like the Lakers in the game for most of the time won’t help their placement in the next NCAA NET Rankings — where SU currently ranks 90th.

This was another game that exposed Syracuse’s inconsistencies. And it starts with the Orange’s energy level, or lack thereof.

“We didn’t put our foot on the gas pedal like we needed to,” SU guard Nate Kingz said. “In the first half, it was a lot better, and we just didn’t come out with that same aggression. (We) just got to stick to it throughout the whole game and not have mental lapses.”

About a third of the way through Syracuse’s 2025-26 campaign, Autry has harped on energy as the primary factor that will determine wins and losses for the Orange. Not anything schematic. Not calling out anybody’s performance. Effort. Just effort.

He sincerely believes that, if he can get Syracuse playing at an intensity level higher than everyone else, it will win championships. He also emphasized there will be growing pains.

“We’re trying to compete for championships, so our level and our focus is probably a little bit different than most,” Autry said postgame. “You gotta understand what I’m asking my guys to do and what we’re doing. When we’re asking guys to gas (themselves) out, play extremely hard, you’re going to have some dips.”

Kiyan Anthony can confirm.

“He just wants us to sustain ‘level five,’” the freshman guard said of Autry’s philosophy. “He doesn’t really care about makes or misses, just playing hard defense and doing whatever we can to just sustain a ‘level five.’”

Autry said that what he’s asking out of his players is uniquely different from what players at programs around the country are being demanded to accomplish. So, what is going on behind the scenes?

Starling, who dropped a team-best 15 points Wednesday, summed up the grueling nature of Autry’s culture. It involves practice for three hours without breaks while going “110%” on both ends of the floor. He said the Orange don’t stop running once the first whistle blows inside the Carmelo K. Anthony Center. It’s an affair filled with full-court on-ball pressure and no breaks.

The intention is to simulate how Syracuse’s players’ bodies should feel, in Autry’s mind, when they exit the floor after any given contest.

“On the outside looking in, it might not seem like a lot, but when you go out on the court and actually do it, it’s hard,” Starling said of Autry’s practice routines. “That’s why everybody can’t do it.”

The Orange have obviously bought into this way of thinking. As Autry said after SU defeated Mercyhurst, Syracuse has all the “ingredients” necessary to win games. To correctly mix them all together, the Orange must exert Autry’s coveted “level five energy.”

However, erratic results indicate the Orange need to do more than simply exert additional energy to get inside the projected NCAA Tournament picture.

With Wednesday’s 14-point win over Mercyhurst, SU’s national offensive ranking, per KenPom, has plummeted to 118th. Its defense, which is supposed to be its calling card, now sits at 44th, a good number but not dominant enough to outset its lagging offense. The Orange are still shooting the 3-ball poorly (30%, 292nd in D-I), hold the second-worst free-throw shooting percentage in the nation (58%) and rank smack dab in the middle of the country for tempo — despite Autry’s goals for Syracuse to play fast.

Postgame, Autry was vehement in his stance that there’s “nothing wrong” with his offense or the team’s scheme.

And when its defense isn’t playing out of its mind, SU tends to lose. Its record when conceding 70 or more points is 1-4. In those five games, the Orange did not reach the 70-point threshold themselves.

That can’t merely be boiled down to energy. It’s not like Syracuse wasn’t giving an effort out in Las Vegas for the Players Era Festival, where it went 0-3 and was outmatched at nearly every turn. It was surely giving an effort when it fell to Hofstra last week, as Autry called it a hard-fought game.

There is a lack of concrete understanding what “level five energy” is and how it’s supposed to look in real time.

Whatever it truly is, the players fully believe in Autry’s vision for them. Kingz admitted Syracuse was “sidetracked” multiple times throughout the second half versus Mercyhurst, saying he and others were unfocused when defending off the ball and got comfortable with their first-half success.

Kingz, along with Starling, Naithan George and Sadiq White, all agreed that Syracuse is solely in control of its destiny — the Orange can beat anyone, anywhere, as long as their intensity is through the roof. KenPom may not think so. Neither do the NET Rankings. But Autry is staking his job on whether “level five energy” can carry SU’s program back to prominence.

Thus far, the jury’s still out on that.

“We put our heads down every day, from the head coach to all the coaches to the players, to the support staff, every day,” Autry said. “So when I sit up here and talk to you guys, I’m confident of what we have and what we’re doing.”

Published on December 18, 2025 at 12:38 am
Contact Cooper: ccandrew@syr.edu | @cooper_andrews