Over more than a decade in this business, I like to think I'm two things: Strongly convicted and opinionated, but also willing to listen and adjust a stance when needed.

On Tuesday, I wrote that Indiana has given the blueprint out to college football programs around the country, and that if serious winning can be done at Indiana, then it can be done at Syracuse too. I wrote that there were no excuses for the Orange moving forward.

A lot of you agreed with my take, and that's great, but some of you didn't, and some of you pushed back with some interesting differences between the two programs. So, let me take some of what you've said and come up a slightly altered hypothesis.

I understand that building something like Indiana has would be difficult at Syracuse, and I'm not even asking Syracuse to actually win the national championship, but it's still completely fair to expect more from this program - and to expect them to at least be on the periphery of the title conversations.

Let me explain.

As some of you correctly pointed, the Indiana University system has about 100,000 people enrolled in it. The Bloomington campus alone has about 50,000 students. That number is three times more than Syracuse has.

It's, admittedly, not hard to do the math. More students = more alumni = more chance for rich alumni = more donors and more chances for rich donors, like Mark Cuban, to emerge.

That is fair. Indiana has more chances for money in an NIL world than Syracuse does. That can help buy players and coaches and it can help keep coaches. That's all fair.

That said, I do believe there's money out there for Syracuse football, if the athletic department truly wants to find it. Indiana made a conscious decision to invest in football. Syracuse hasn't. They should. If they do, anything is possible. Continuous winning should be the expectation, not the anomaly. 

The ACC is a worse conference than the Big Ten. We all see that. But as a result, the ACC is a winnable league. Florida State, Miami and Clemson have been wildly inconsistent over the last few years, and if a five-loss Duke team can win the league title, I'm sorry, but I'm expecting Syracuse to be able to compete for it.

The Orange have won eight bowl games in the last 30 years. They've been to just 13. That's unacceptable.

Syracuse has fielded national championship teams in men's basketball, men's lacrosse and men's soccer, and it's had women's basketball and women's lacrosse teams get to national championship games. The standard at this university should be to compete for league titles and national titles, in all sports it fields. The University needs to recognize that, and it needs to put forth a concerted effort to make it a reality.

The ACC is a winnable league. If you win the league - and are better than a five-loss Duke team - you essentially clinch a berth in the College Football Playoff. And if you can do that, you are at least in the championship conversation. That should be the expectation, and it should be realistic, regardless of alumni bases.

It's somewhat of a chicken-or-the-egg argument, right? Do you find all this money and then buy a contending roster? Or do you build a contending roster, and then players and donors flock? It's probably somewhere in the middle, but either way, it can be done.

If Syracuse invests in the program and truly commits to it, then winning at a greater level is possible. And if that happens, then people will notice, and people will want to be a part of it.

Is a two-year turnaround at Syracuse as realistic as it was for Indiana? No, probably not. But that doesn't mean it's not worth striving for. And that doesn't mean it can't happen.

Again, fans deserve more. And they shouldn't settle for less.

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