Through Tuesday’s games, KenPom had Syracuse as the 76th-best team in the country, T-Rank 77th, and NET 73rd. It’s unanimous: the Orange have work to do if they want to get back to the NCAA Tournament after a multi-year absence. A lot of work.

The ACC will present opportunities to accomplish some things, though, as eight teams in the conference are ahead of SU in KenPom and NET. Syracuse is close enough to most of those teams to see them in these assorted rankings (and some other conference mates are very easy to see in their rearview mirror).

As such, they need to beat most of these teams of similar quality because they are not going to get a lot of shots at “big wins” the rest of the way. With only a rematch with North Carolina in mid-February looming as a guaranteed opportunity at a name-brand victory, SU’s best shot is to win in bulk and try to eke into the tournament as the “nth-best team in the ACC”.

And the “n” in “nth-best” is probably smaller than what you think. We’ll get there.

On the whole, the conference is generally split into a few levels: North Carolina and Duke at the top, Clemson and Wake Forest on the second level, Virginia Tech and Miami are a half-step back, then the wide swath of the middle of the conference with Miami, North Carolina State, Virginia, Syracuse, Pitt, Florida State, and Boston College.

The Orange are about to become well-acquainted with their neighbors in that swath.

Following Tuesday’s win over Pitt, SU welcomes the Hurricanes, Seminoles, and Wolfpack to the Dome, then get a return game at BC. Those next four games are crucial to the Orange, who need to separate themselves from the rest of that middle of the conference.

If SU does not win at least three of those four games, an invitation to the dance won’t have a chance to get lost in the mail. Looming beyond these next four games is a higher-level quartet, including a trip to face Wake Forest and visits from Clemson and North Carolina. A couple stumbles in the coming two weeks and the Orange postseason dreams will be on life support with a few upcoming opponents all too capable of kicking the plug out of the wall.

T-Rank’s “TourneyCast” projects SU making the tourney in 4% of 10,000 simulations of the rest of the season and just 1.8% of tournaments as an at-large team. Their cut-off line is a team making the tournament as an at-large team in 38 percent of simulations.

The next-to-last team among those most likely to make the tournament as an at-large team from this set of simulations? Wake Forest. The Demon Deacons are the fourth and final team from the ACC that T-Rank projects in the field of 68.

Saturday’s opponent, the Miami Hurricanes, are the first team out of the current projected field. Other conference teams between Syracuse and Wake are Virginia Tech, North Carolina State, and Virginia. Boston College and Florida State are in the nine teams directly behind the Orange in these simulation results.

Normally, being on the tournament bubble has included having to climb over a long list of teams from across the country. The list SU is dealing with is much shorter because this list essentially doubles at their remaining schedule.

But they still need to climb over all those names.

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