The 2026 Syracuse Football Preview

It's Syracuse Football season! This is the time of the year I pretty much lock in, so this is my big Syracuse football preview. Each week I'll recap games, dig into interesting moments, and try and keep things interesting if the team goes 3-9 once again.

I like to start every preview with a quick overview of ESPN's Bill Connelly's SP+ metric. While not perfect, it's a projection metric that now measures all FBS and FCS schools, which is one of it's kind. It essentially looks at efficiency + explosiveness of a team's offense and defense and creates a metric that can be used as a basis for a head to head matchup simulator that then let's you understand how two teams may matchup.

As you can see by the infographic above, Syracuse is favored by SP+ in just three of their twelve games this season. There are three more games in which SP+ sees the differential within roughly seven points, which translates towards a single score depending on home and away teams. The takeaway: There are six "winnable" games on the schedule for the Orange, which... is not great. There's a slim margin of error between a return to the postseason and a second consecutive disappointment after Fran Brown's ten win debut.

So what will lead to a year where Syracuse can in fact exceed the expectations of the numbers? I'm not saying we end up on earth-834000, but I do think there's room for optimism.