Syracuse men’s basketball: money isn’t the only thing

Mar 10, 2023; Syracuse, New York, USA; Syracuse Orange assistant coach Gerry McNamara (left) looks on prior to a press conference at the Carmelo K. Anthony Basketball Center. Mandatory Credit: Rich Barnes-Imagn Images

For a while now, all we’ve heard about Syracuse men’s basketball getting back to the NCAA Tournament was that they needed resources to compete.

We heard it from Adrian Autry.

We heard it from Jim Boeheim

We heard it from John Wildhack

We heard it from the agents who leak to Jeff Goodman

We heard it from Gerry McNamara when he was hired.

Now we head into week two of the transfer portal and fans are losing their minds.

“Why haven’t we signed a P5 starter?”

“How can we compete without having money?”

“We need to go back to playing in the ECAC”

You can be rightfully concerned about a lot of things around Syracuse’s program right now, but the NIL money shouldn’t be at the top of the list. Look, money can make things easier for sure, but NIL isn’t the only way to win.

Syracuse has added four players from the transfer portal and one freshman to a roster that returns two rotation players. That means that Gerry McNamara has room for six more players and he’s got work to do if he wants to bring the Orange back.

He’s got options to do this and they don’t all involve throwing bags of cash out the window in the hopes they land in the right spot. I’ve watched countless people on this board losing their mind because Pitt added Nait George, Jalil Bethea and Baye Ndongo without adding much other than “those are P5 guys”…yet we spent this entire season crying about a roster that featured four starters who transferred from….wait for it….P5 programs and couldn’t get it done.

Never mind that the 5th starter was a 5-star recruit. Never mind that top top 40 recruits were part of the rotation. Do you need talent and coaching to win games? Yes. Does Syracuse have either right now? No one really knows, but the panic that has set in already is so focused on the money part. There isn’t one proven formula to win and it’s hard to know what we’ll get until this roster is complete.

I like the individual additions made so far. Overall, I’m not sure how these pieces work, but that’s part of the process. A lot of the same people who were dying for McNamara’s hiring are the same ones crying about the roster. What’s done is done in terms of the coaching staff and now they’ve got to get the pieces, but we need to stop acting like he can’t do it because of money.