After 2nd losing regular season, Autry says ‘Orange Standard’ is different
After Syracuse sealed its second consecutive losing regular season, Adrian Autry said the “Orange Standard” is different than what it used to be. Zoe Xixis | Asst. Photo Editor
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Ever since being announced as Jim Boeheim’s successor, Adrian Autry has been chasing one thing for the last 1,095 days.
It surrounds him on the practice courts in the Carmelo K. Anthony Basketball Center. It surrounds him in the JMA Wireless Dome.
It even surrounds him in his office, where it’s imprinted on his wall.
“Orange Standard.”
But now, following SU’s (15-16, 6-12 Atlantic Coast) second consecutive sub-.500 regular season, Autry is ready to peel back on what the “Orange Standard” is.
“The standard from what I grew up, and what I played with, that’s different now,” Autry said after Syracuse fell to Pitt in its regular-season finale. “There’s a lot of things that need to work in unison to get to that standard.”
In his first season-opening press conference as head coach in 2023, Autry said he’s “very confident” SU would return to the “Orange Standard” within the next couple of seasons.
Two years later, heading into a potential make-or-break Year 3, Autry said every fan or person familiar with Syracuse basketball knows it’s one of the best programs in the history of college basketball when defining the “Orange Standard.”
Over the last two seasons, Syracuse combined to win 29 games. Barring an ACC Tournament run, that’ll be the fewest wins the program has had across a two-season span since registering 31 victories across the 1969-70 and 1970-71 seasons.
In the years since, Syracuse established itself as a national powerhouse with a national championship, six Final Fours and became a top-10 winningest program in college basketball history.
“When we had the standard, we were able to retain, develop and have guys,” Autry said.
The elephant in the room is how much college basketball has changed since then.
“Whether it’s the rosters and the rules, or the financial piece of it, everything just changed so fast,” Autry said on March 2. “That’s a bigger impact on results than more people give credit to.”
Autry feels the Orange have progressed since his first year, in terms of adapting to college basketball’s new landscape, but “obviously, not from the record standpoint.”
But even so, the progress hasn’t put Syracuse in an echelon with the Dukes and North Carolinas of the world — programs that, historically, the Orange should be competing with in pursuit of a national title every year.
A source told The Daily Orange SU’s roster this season costs just under $8 million. They guessed that figure places the Orange seventh-to-ninth spending-wise in the ACC.
Across a 20-win season during Autry’s first year at the helm, the head coach feels the ACC didn’t embrace college basketball’s new landscape. In Year 2, which was Syracuse’s worst campaign since the 1968-69 season, Autry felt other programs caught on.
But with the Orange’s “injuries,” Autry said, “we couldn’t really compete at that level.”
With a revamped team and increased money and resources poured into building the roster, the hope — and expectation from director of athletics John Wildhack — was for Syracuse to play “meaningful games in March.” Instead, SU now needs to win the ACC Tournament to snap its four-year NCAA Tournament skid.
“This year, we competed better,” Autry said before his team heads to Charlotte. “We were able to pull out a couple of games that we couldn’t in my first two years.”
“We slowly progressed in the right direction, obviously, in today’s world, patience is very thin,” he later added.
Right now, there is no patience surrounding Autry’s job. Throughout the season, “Fire Autry” chants have been heard through the student section. In January, a caller on Autry’s radio show asked him who his best replacements would be.
“Getting back to the standard, you know, is going to be a little more challenging than we all thought it would be, or it is because everything has changed,” Autry said.
It’s gotten so challenging that, right now, Syracuse isn’t capable of chasing the “Orange Standard.”
