For 2nd straight year, John Mullen saved best game for when it mattered most
Last season, John Mullen won 24 faceoffs to propel SU over Harvard in the NCAA Tournament. Mullen was similarly dominant against Yale Sunday. Courtesy of SU Athletics
Get the latest Syracuse news delivered right to your inbox. Subscribe to our sports newsletter here.
John Mullen is nothing if not consistent. No matter how he’s playing, he remains an enigma. Through the highs and lows, ebbs and flows of the collegiate season, his desire to speak to the media remains constant; it’s zero. Despite numerous requests, he’s gone the entire 2026 season without saying a word, and after Sunday, that tally is guaranteed to go unchanged.
In all fairness, if he had elected to speak to the media, it’s not like he would’ve had much to say. His junior season hasn’t been much to write home about. Syracuse’s faceoff specialist entered it fresh off a sophomore campaign where he racked up 283 faceoff wins — second only to Cornell’s Jack Cascadden — and was a consensus Second Team All-American. He had an argument to be considered the best in the world then.
That’s been far from the case this year. After entering the year as a second-teamer on Inside Lacrosse’s Preseason All-American list and going above 50% in his first four games of the season, he suffered consecutive six-win showings against Princeton and Penn. His faceoff percentage has hovered just above 50% fairly consistently since, and he no longer looked like the world-beater he was a year ago.
But if he wasn’t going to talk to the media on Sunday, he might never speak to them again. Because, to be frank, SU’s NCAA Tournament win over Yale was the first game all season that Mullen had a performance worth speaking about.
“That’s what we were hoping for,” Syracuse head coach Gary Gait said after the win. “That he would get things together and be at the top of his game come playoff time.”
In last year’s 2025 NCAA Tournament First Round matchup against Harvard, Mullen had what was arguably his best game of the season, going 24-for-28 at the faceoff X to propel the Orange to a comeback 13-12 win over the Crimson. Mullen’s performance against Yale this year wasn’t nearly as lopsided as that, but once again, Syracuse’s faceoff specialist saved his best performance for when it counted.
He smashed his previous season high in faceoff wins — 16 — with 21 victories at the X, booking No. 6 seed SU’s (12-5, 2-2 Atlantic Coast) ticket to the NCAA Tournament Quarterfinals with a 16-15 win over Yale (9-6, 4-2 Ivy).
“He’s a great player,” Yale head coach Andrew Shay said postgame. “Our guys were just getting frustrated.”
From the outset, it was easy to see that there was something different with Mullen. Whatever it was will remain a mystery to everyone except him, but you could see it.
He rested his stick on the ground for the opening faceoff. He pushed Yale’s Nick Wehmeyer off the ball and scooped up the ground ball in one motion. He began his mad dash to the net, catching the Bulldogs off guard as Yale’s Luke Michalik desperately tried to impede Mullen’s path to the net.
No dice. Just like that, Syracuse was up 1-0.
Ben Cuomo replaced Wehmeyer on the next faceoff for Yale, and he ended up winning the clash to even the faceoff battle 1-1. Might as well take a picture, make it last longer, because that was the final time Yale even came close to making the faceoff battle competitive.
Mullen won the next nine faceoffs in similar fashion as the first — with the exception of a rapid-fire goal, of course — and entered the half at a suffocating 13-of-16 win rate. Yale may have been up 8-6, but it had no answers at the X. Whether it was Cuomo or Wehmeyer, Mullen was dominating in the same fashion in which he dominated Harvard’s Matt Barraco a year ago.
“We have a pretty good faceoff guy, who’s done a pretty good job of getting us the ball,” Syracuse attack Joey Spallina said postgame. “So, I kind of knew that we weren’t really out of it.”
The second half wasn’t nearly as pronounced of a difference, to be fair. Postgame, Shay said he tried to make a few adjustments on the wings to give his team an advantage with picking up ground balls — a department that SU won 43-33 on the day, with Mullen snagging a season-high 18.
Those changes seemingly worked. Mullen went just 8-for-17 over the game’s final two quarters, allowing Wehmeyer to finish a much more respectable 11-of-26. But the damage was truly done in the first half. At that point, the Bulldogs were just playing catch up.
“We tried to keep our guys in it and hopefully get a few more in the second half,” Shay said. “It didn’t quite even out, but it was a little bit better fight in the second half there.”
It wasn’t quite enough. Time for Mullen to celebrate. After the win, he went on a Chili’s run with his parents. It’s where one goes after imposing his will on an NCAA Tournament-caliber faceoff specialist, evidently. As any self-respecting Chili’s enjoyer knows, its menu is an unceasing maze of options, from the widely-hailed “Chicken Crispers” to “The Original Fajita Trio.” Whatever he ordered remains a mystery, just like almost every other aspect of his life.
The media would not dare disturb his dinner. Maybe, just maybe, he splurged a little bit and decided to order the world-famous “Triple Dipper,” the three-appetizer combo for just $17.99. No one would complain if he did. God knows he deserves it.
