Locked On Syracuse - Daily Podcast On Syracuse Orange Football & Basketball · Locked On Podcast Network, Jackson Holzer

HOT SEAT: Syracuse Basketball Faces SMU in what could be Adrian Autry's LAST GAME | Who Wins?

·39 min·3 clips

Syracuse will fire their head coach immediately if they lose this ACC tournament game to SMU.

The verdict comes quickly. Syracuse walks into the ACC tournament opener with the Syracuse side treating a loss as the end for its head coach. SMU is not exactly steady either. Grayson Singleton's side gets described as being in free fall, with its tournament bid still uncomfortable if the slide continues. So there is no calm corner here. Jackson keeps coming back to the blunt part: Syracuse does not have to beat Duke yet. It only has to beat SMU. That matters. Syracuse already beat this team on Valentine's Day, and the host does not treat the neutral-site version as some impossible ask. The frustration is the catch. The standard is pretty plain: if SMU gets rolling, Syracuse cannot let ten straight points become the whole game falling apart. One bad stretch has to stay one bad stretch. The hope comes from players who have flashed enough to make this annoying, including Donny Freeman, Nate George, and William Kyle. Freeman is talked about as an all-ACC player, George as the Georgia Tech transfer who finally had something against Pitt, and Kyle as a season-long overachiever. That is what makes the whole thing so irritating. Jackson is not selling Syracuse as good. He is saying this specific game is there to be won. Win it, and Louisville becomes Wednesday's problem. Lose it, and the program conversation starts right away. By the end, the most honest preview is also the least tidy one: nobody really knows what happens at 4:30 p.m. Eastern.

As heard by us

A tense Syracuse-SMU crossover that turns one game into a referendum on the season.

Syracuse-SMU is treated like a game with real pressure behind it, and that urgency carries the whole discussion. The hosts keep coming back to the same plain question: who actually wants it more, with Syracuse staring at a coach who could be on the way out if the team loses and…

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Need a blunt Syracuse-SMU read before Tuesday's 4:30 p.m. Eastern ACC Tournament opener?

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