Only the 5th season since 2000
The Syracuse Orange find themselves back in the top 25 after their win over the Miami Hurricanes on Saturday.
For just the 5th season since 2000, Syracuse is ranked in the AP Poll. The Orange enter this week’s poll at 23rd in between Missouri and Army. Despite not playing this week, we’d anticipate that Syracuse will remain ranked but you can’t be too sure that the same people who have UNLV ranked 19th aren’t really watching all these games.
Fran Brown’s squad grabbed the final spot in the Coaches Poll behind Memphis and just 18 points ahead of Texas A&M. Syracuse should be in good shape even though Tulane is one of the teams outside the top 25 in this poll. Should the Green Wave knock off Army this week, it would likely send the Black Knights out instead.
There’s a chance that Syracuse will land in a strong enough bowl game that a win could allow the team to challenge for the best final AP ranking since 2001’s 14th place. It’s hard to predict how the pollsters will treat first round CFP losers. You’d think that those 12 teams would be the top 12 all the way through, but history tells us it doesn’t follow logic.
No matter what, it’s a nice bounce back from the disaster that was the Pitt game in October and it would be great to finish Fran’s first season in the last rankings.