Never listen to TNIAAM’s Syracuse basketball predictions

In the afterglow of the Syracuse Orange’s NCAA Tournament “snub” fervor, one intrepid founder of this website flagged a link that should probably be destroyed.

The TNIAAM staff predictions, assembled back in November, are typically off-the-mark, in every sport. Either we’re too cynical or too optimistic. Syracuse rarely ends up somewhere in the middle. But this year’s picks were aggressively, hilariously wrong.

First off, the title...

TNIAAM Syracuse Basketball predictions: Can Orange get back to Final Four?

Ha! Idiots.

The lulz continue with the writer-by-writer predictions, which are just... wow.

Sean Keeley

23-8 regular season: Final Four

John Cassillo

24-7 regular season: Elite Eight

Andrew Godnick

25-6 regular season: Final Four

James Szuba

24-7 regular season: Elite Eight

Not only did Syracuse fail to make the Elite Eight or Final Four -- they failed to make the NCAA Tournament at all. Once relegated to the NIT, SU packed it in and lost in the second round to Ole Miss. This was not how we’d pictured this season to pan out, but as Jim Boeheim said on Saturday, he should have never been optimistic.

Given Jim’s penchant for negativity, we saw a bright light and ran toward it... to our deaths. Realism, admittedly, was out the window when these picks were made. Syracuse has never made back-to-back Final Fours, and for good reason. Usually the players that get us to said Final Fours are gone the following year. Boeheim’s developed talent over a four-year stretch, of course. But we’ve rarely had the roster to make a deep run a couple years in a row. Having two fifth-year transfers on this year’s team should’ve been a red flag. It wasn’t, to us. That’s our fault, not theirs.

Beyond the W-L projections, we couldn’t even get the predictions around in-season minutiae correct. TNIAAM pulled together 25 ideas, and while the first two were correct (Andrew White as scoring leader, beating Duke at the Carrier Dome), many others were astoundingly off-base.

The moral of the story? Trust TNIAAM with creating coverage, but don’t necessarily expect our predictions to be correct in any way. In short, probably best to fire these assholes, before you start foolishly betting your mortgage on their awful predictions. Luckily one of them already beat us to the punch and retired to write about real estate.