I'm Reasonable Confident Syracuse University Will Just Move To NYC By 2037

Update: Realizing the Pandora's Box that got opened this morning. DOC Gross and Jim Boeheim acted quick to confirm that Syracuse will not play any ACC conference home games at Madison Square Garden. They should probably just do all the talking moving forward...

“If we’re playing Duke once at home every three years,’’ Boeheim said, “you’re not going to take the Duke game out (of the Carrier Dome).’’

Original: I don't think any Syracuse Orange fan is surprised to hear that SU will look to schedule more basketball games in New York City now that we're leaving the Big East, and the Big East Tournament behind.

Madison Square Garden is our home away from home, we have tons of alumni and fans in the NYC area...it just makes too much sense not to schedule some games there in lieu of the guaranteed NYC games that we're going to lose.

The most obvious solution is to keep playing in those early-season tournaments at MSG, be they the Season Tip-Off, Coaches vs. Cancer Classic or whatever. I'm willing to bet the Barclays Arena will create some kind of early-season tournament as well and we'll jump in that rotation.

Plus, I have to imagine we'll keep scheduling St. John's, assuming they want to.

That said, we're almost certainly going to schedule some "home" games at MSG as well. And that means, just like in football, some of our best opponents are ones that Central New York fans might not get to see up close.

"We haven’t gotten that far, but we absolutely have plans to do that – absolutely," Cantor said of moving some SU home games to a New York City arena, such as Madison Square Garden.

That doesn’t mean fans won’t be able to also catch the North Carolina and Duke games in the Carrier Dome some seasons, she said. "I’m really looking forward to the day we get 60,000 Central New Yorkers in the Carrier Dome for Duke or North Carolina," Cantor said. SU remains committed to keeping those games at the Dome on a regular basis, she said.

"Looking forward to the day" sounds a lot like "maybe down the road we'll start playing Duke and UNC in the Dome...but not for a while."

In the same article, Nancy Cantor discussed some of the details that went into SU's jump to the ACC, including:

• The ACC voted to accept new members on September 13th and called SU the next day.
• The fact the Big East turned down the ESPN contract was a major decision-point.
• Syracuse will pay off the Big East exit fee of $5M "in not too long a time."

And finally, Cantor pulls a Marrone and drops some Tremendous Standpoint...

"Looking forward, we saw an opportunity to go and we felt this was a tremendous fit for us, and we felt that from a fiduciary standpoint the right thing to do in terms of stability of the conference."