Jessica Smetana

I know what you're going to bring up, which is the Syracuse head coach talking about constantly being seated in the UConn sub-regional.

Is that right?

Yeah, she even said bump us down to a 10 and then we could go to Columbia, play South Carolina.

She was saying, it was a much longer quote than that, but she was saying she feels like it's personal that Syracuse is constantly put in the same group as UConn.

And that in years where Syracuse has the potential to be good enough to win a second round game, they're going up against this juggernaut in UConn every year and it's not fair.

And so according to ESPN, five of the last seven NCAA tournament appearances that Syracuse has had have been versus UConn in the second round.

Three of them have been on UConn home court.

So that is quite a significant amount.

And part of the reason is travel because it's cheaper for Syracuse to rent a bus and drive to stores than it would be to fly them to LA to play UCLA or whatever.

So I think she's saying like it's,

Like, we've had this exact same matchup so many times.

It's lazy bracketing put us in a different group because we're going to lose this game every time.

We don't have, you know, what she could have also said was... But everyone's going to lose that game in the second round at UConn.

yeah but like that's possibly that certainly this year in uconn is is really really good and it's gonna be difficult for any team to beat them but i think it's she's saying like you know let us have a different matchup basically like it's probably even difficult for her to get fans to come to this game

even though it is close by because it's like, okay, well, it's UConn and they're going to lose in the second round.

Whereas like she's saying, she's not even really getting a chance to play someone different.

She also was the coach at Buffalo before this, where they played in the UConn sub-regional a number of times.

So I'm just saying like, I think, you know,

it probably wasn't the time and the place for her to do this because it sounds like you know okay skill issue be better than like be try to be good enough to beat Yukon you know you're the head coach at Syracuse that seems like something that you should be more concerned with but I do think there is a point there with just how the brackets are made and like just repeatedly repeatedly giving people the same matchups year in and year out because five of the last seven is pretty that's a pretty

you know, large proportion of your tournament appearances that are ending up playing against UConn.