What Adrian Autry said about his team's season struggles before facing Wake Forest

With the Syracuse basketball regular season winding down rapidly at 15-13, 6-9, currently 12th in the ACC standings, the Orange have a rare weekday stretch off before facing Wake Forest Saturday in Winston-Salem (5:45 p.m. ET / The CW), where SU is 2-4 all-time in league play. Then a trip to Louisville and a home game with Pitt, before the ACC Tournament in Charlotte and if the season ended today, a spot in the #12 vs. #13 game to kick off the tourney's first day.

Most of Orange Nation is wishing for a speedy season conclusion either way, and a subsequent change in leadership and a new direction for 2026-27.

So what happened? Autry addressed what went wrong from the Player's Era Festival in November onward during Monday's weekly ACC Coaches Call, and the challenge of keeping the outside noise abut the program's decline, outside.

Never gettting over the hump of an 0-for-3 trip to Las Vegas

We all know the season might have had a different hue to it had, provided the Orange had been able to upset then second-ranked Houston in the first of three games in the Player's Era Fesitval in Vegas over Thanksgiving week.

But Will Kyle's shot at the regulation buzzer was stuffed, and in OT the Cougars scooted past the Orange 78-74. From then on SU dropped consecutive games to Kansas and Iowa State, showed spark beating nemesis Tennessee a week later, before losing all that momentum with the upset loss to Hofstra on December 13.

"We haven't made the plays we needed to make. (Making) the plays and (close) margins have been the difference in our season," Autry said Monday summing up what went wrong.

"Whenever we've been able to make those (plays) we've gotten over the hump, but we just haven't been able to do that consistently. And I think that has been the inconsistency of our season."

The challenge of keeping the Orange players focused until the season's conclusion

From social media posts by every SU basketball stakeholder you can think of, to message boards and to national media all asking the same question referring to a long NCAA Tournament drought: What has happened to Syracuse basketball?

Obviously the players know what is going on with the talk of a coaching change. There's a famous father (and major stakeholder) of one of the team's members, which in itself ensures the attention is not going to fade until the season's conclusion. Autry says he has dealt with the matter straight on with his team.

"You always tell these young men, you have got to handle things like a man," Autry said about a topic that he knows is not going away over the next three weeks. "This is part of the job. In life, anything you want is always going to be challenging and hard."

Autry has also started to be a tad more revealing (realistic) about the future over the last couple of weeks when asked about the 'outside noise'.

"Obviously we would have liked it (the season) to go a little bit better," Autry added. "You have always got to be hopeful. We have got to get ready for the next game, and then pick your head up when all is said an done, and you deal with it."

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