Your weekly look at the Orange and NCAAW landscape heading into 2023.
There’s no better way to end 2022 than with one final look at your Syracuse Orange women’s basketball team (10-3, 1-1).
As always, here’s our weekly look at how the Orange performed last week, as well as what’s going on across the ACC and broader NCAAW landscape.
Let’s hop right in.
The Orange this week and next week
Note: All team records include games from up to and including Thursday, December 29.
Syracuse had a quiet week this week, going 0-1 after a Thursday night 86-77 loss to Louisville, which saw the Orange face one of the hottest programs in the conference right now.
Looking ahead, the road only gets tougher from here. This week, Syracuse will suit up for back-to-back home games, first against #6 NC State (11-2, 1-1) on New Year’s Day before a much easier matchup against Pittsburgh (7-6, 0-2) Thursday evening.
As of now, Syracuse is 0-3 against Quad 1 opponents (all road matchups versus Penn State, Purdue, and Louisville). On Sunday, the Orange hope to take advantage of a Wolfpack squad coming off a 14-point home loss to Duke.
The TNIAAM Orange Player of the Week
This week’s winner: Teisha Hyman
We’ve only got a one-game sample size to work with here, but Hyman’s 27-point performance on 55% shooting versus the Cardinals Thursday night was easily her best of the season. Hyman has picked up right where she left off last year as a scorer, and she’s proved to be a quality contributor against ACC competition during her tenure with the Orange.
(Honorable mention: the numbers don’t jump out, but Dariauna Lewis recorded her fifth double-double of the season against a physically talented Cardinals team. She was the only big Syracuse had who could compete on the boards and hold up defensively in the paint.)
ACC power rankings and a look around the conference
Note: All team records include games from up to and including Thursday, December 29.
Here are the latest standings in the ACC:
As you can see, Syracuse is in the clear middle of the pack, with not many games separating them from the top or the bottom of the conference standings.
Heading into the weekend and 2023, here are some games to watch for this week with the ACC programs:
- Louisville (11-4, 2-0) @ Duke (12-1, 2-0) on Sunday early afternoon
- #13 North Carolina (9-3, 0-1) @ #7 Virginia Tech. (11-2, 1-2) on Sunday late afternoon
- #6 NC State (11-2, 1-1) @ Syracuse (10-3, 1-1) on Sunday evening
- Clemson (10-4, 1-1) @ Florida State (13-2, 2-0) on Thursday evening
- Virginia (13-1, 2-1) @ #7 Virginia Tech. (11-2, 1-2) on Thursday evening
Latest changes in the AP poll
Note: AP top-25 poll information includes games from up to Monday, December 26.
If last week saw the least amount of change in the AP standings, this week easily saw the most so far this season. The top five for this week remained the same, but 17 of the next 20 spots saw different teams in different places, with some sizeable rises and falls.
For context, here is the latest AP top 25 from earlier this week:
For the first time this season, no new teams found their way into the top 25 and on the flip side, none of the top 25 programs from last week dropped out of the AP standings.
North Carolina and Arkansas are the biggest fallers this week, each dropping seven spots (and that’s before taking into account another UNC loss that took place after the AP poll dropped). Three teams (Gonzaga, Oklahoma, and Michigan) all made significant jumps, rising at least three spots in this week’s poll.
Three ACC teams (Notre Dame, NC State, and Virginia Tech.) make up the current AP top 10, which is the most out of any conference despite UNC’s drop-off. Two more ACC teams (Louisville with 19 points and Duke with 18 points) sit just along the periphery of the top 25.
In other words, the ACC is turning into a murderer’s row of the best teams in the country. Regardless of how the team performs, the Orange are going to be battling among the NCAAW juggernauts to begin 2023.