Syracuse Lacrosse: Barely Ranked, Barely Alive

The Syracuse Orange lacrosse team's days of automatically making the Final Four have been over for a few years now.

The days of the team automatically making the NCAA Tournament may be in trouble to boot.

The Orange are now 4-4 and have lost two games in a row for the first time since the 2007 season (76 games ago) after Sunday's 12-10 loss to the Duke Blue Devils at the Big City Classic.

What went wrong? Tim Desko puts it in laymen's terms:

"We didn’t play a perfect game."

Gotcha.

Even though it's a down year, there's still something about beating Syracuse in lacrosse. Just ask Duke coach John Danowski:

"Playing Syracuse is like playing Notre Dame, the Yankees and the Boston Celtics all rolled into one in our sport," Danowski said. "It’s always a tremendous challenge to play Syracuse."

In the polls, Syracuse dropped to No. 17 in the Media Poll and in the Coaches Poll. In the Media Poll, the Orange were ranked higher than Villanova, who beat SU a couple weeks back. Ah, lacrosse polls...

Virginia is your new No. 1 in both polls and UMass (UMASS!) is No. 2.

College Crosse has the rest of the weekend's action bottled up for you.