After losing against Louisville on Tuesday night, the Syracuse University men's basketball team dropped to 15-15 on the season.

If they lose to Pittsburgh in the regular season finale on Saturday, they'll end the 2025-26 campaign with a losing record. Even if they win and finish 16-15, it will be another disappointing season for the Orange. Barring a miraculous Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) tournament championship, they will miss the NCAA Tournament for the fifth straight year.

As noted by our Tom Goslowski on Wednesday, the Orange can't finish any higher than 12th in the ACC standings, a far cry from where the Orange used to be as one of the premier programs in college basketball.

In fact, the 'College Sports Only' X account with more than 100,000 followers has claimed SU as the program with the furthest fall from grace.

#1: Syracuse — The centerpiece of the old Big East, Syracuse was known for Jim Boeheim, the 2-3 zone and busting your bracket in March. Now their dome is half-empty and the ‘Cuse is about to miss its 5th straight NCAA Tournament.

And that's a sad reality for Syracuse: They are falling into an all-too-common theme: A once proud program that has fallen into disrepair and is on the verge of irrelevance. It happens all the time, in all different eras, in all different sports, and the Orange are there flirting with it now.

Let's take a look at some others that it's happened to. In some cases? The programs have come back, giving the Orange some hope moving forward.

Alabama was one of the top programs in the nation in the early days of college football prominence, six winning titles in the 1960s and 1970s before winning again in 1992.

After that? The Crimson Tide had just two double-digit win seasons between 2000 and 2007. They had three losing seasons in that time and missed a bowl game three times. Nick Saban turned them into a power again, so a resurgence can happen, but those lean years are what SU is experiencing now.

A top program in the late 1980s and through the very early 2000s, Miami fell on tough times for several years. After a 9-3 season in 2005, the Hurricanes won between five and seven games only for six of the next seven years. They missed bowl games three times in that stretch and didn't appear in an Orange Bowl again until 2017.

Even after that, Miami didn't win more than eight games for seven years. They played in the national championship game in 2025, losing to Indiana.

The Wolverines won the title in 1997 and then again in 2023, but between that? Four losing seasons. And from 2005-2014, they won more than 10 games only twice. Not a great 10-year stretch for one of the proudest programs in the nation.

Florida won national titles in 2006 and 2008, producing a great head coach (Urban Meyer) and a great quarterback (Tim Tebow), but after that? A period of instability. The Gators haven't won more than eight games since 2019 and they've had four losing seasons in the last six years.

One of the true historic programs in the women's game, the Volunteers are just 16-12 this season. The program has been to the NCAA Tournament plenty, but they haven't advanced past the Sweet 16 in the last nine years. 

They haven't been to the Final Four since 2008. Yes, it's better than what Syracuse has right now, but it's not what Pat Summitt built.

The program of the 1960s and 1970s, the Bruins are one of the most revered programs in college basketball history.

While they've also made the tournament plenty, they haven't won a title since 1995 and they haven't been to a Final Four since 2007-08. They are no longer even the top West Coast basketball power, with Arizona holding that distinction.

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