October will begin as a Syracuse kind of month for the UConn Huskies.

The Orange (1-3) will meet the Huskies (2-2) in football on Saturday at Pratt & Whitney Stadium at Rentschler Field in East Hartford.

And just a bit more than a week later, Syracuse will send its women’s and men’s basketball teams to Connecticut to play UConn in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame Exhibition Game series at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville.

The women will meet on Oct. 12, the men on Oct. 13.

The football game matters, its result added to the records of each team as they seek six wins and bowl eligibility.

But the basketball games matter, too, even if they don't count in the standings. The contests will give UConn coaches Dan Hurley and Geno Auriemma a first look at their 2025-26 Final Four teams that are integrating new players into the rotation after the loss of seniors.

And the games also are key for Syracuse.

New Orange men’s head coach Gerry McNamara will make his debut at the helm of his alma mater, a program legend who was part of the school’s only NCAA championship team. And women’s coach Felisha Legette-Jack can use the contest to measure the advancement of her program after it was eliminated by UConn in the second round of the Women’s NCAA Tournament in three of the past five seasons.

McNamara has the task of returning the Orange to the perennial tournament team they were under his coach, Jim Boeheim. After the dismissal of Boeheim’s successor, Adrian Autry, Syracuse hired McNamara. Autry led the program for three seasons.

In his first head-coaching job at Siena, McNamara led the Saints to the NCAA Tournament in March, and his 16th-seeded team almost engineered a stunning upset of No. 1 Duke. Up by 11 points at the half, Siena couldn’t hang on and lost 71-65.

It put McNamara on the national coaching radar.

“He outcoached me, he outcoached us,” Duke head coach Scheyer said of McNamara after the game.

McNamara inherited four returnees from the 2025-26 team that finished 15-17 (6-12 Atlantic Coast Conference) – sophomores Kiyan Anthony, Sadiq White Jr. and Calvin Russell III and junior Noah Lobdell.

Russell also plays football for the Orange.

The roster also has five freshmen and six transfers. Three transfers came with McNamara from Siena – junior guard Gavin Doty, senior power forward/center Tasman Goodrick and sophomore forward Francis Folefac. 

Legette-Jack, like McNamara, is a Syracuse alum. She is entering her fifth season on the bench and has led the Orange to two NCAA Tournament appearances, both second-round losses to UConn, in 2024 and 2026.

The two teams have met 54 times, with UConn leading the series 41-13. Seven of those losses came before Geno Auriemma took over as head coach at UConn 41 seasons ago. Syracuse hasn’t beaten UConn since Jan. 2, 1996.

And it was UConn, then undefeated at 35-0, that met Syracuse in the second round of the tournament this past March. The Huskies crushed the Orange 98-45, outscoring them in the first half 65-12.

After the game, Legette-Jack discussed the difficulty of Syracuse landing in UConn’s quadrant of the tournament bracket each season.

“For us to be -- what we’ve done and our body of work, to have to come and play the best team in the country, I mean, Geno has this thing going, and I love what he’s done. But we, I thought, deserved a little more respect.”

She continued: “After being in this business for 37 years, and to have to be in this particular bracket every freakin' year is unacceptable,” Legette-Jack said. “It’s wrong.”

The exhibition game is a chance for Legette-Jack how far away – or how close – Syracuse is to UConn now.