The past few years have been a bit tumultuous for the Syracuse Orange defense. Recently, SU has played a system of bend-don’t-break type 4-2-5 or “Nickel” defense; that has hedged its bets on giving up plays, but being able to force turnovers or shut down offenses in the short field. This hasn’t particularly put the team in a good position for defensive stability over the course of Dino Babers’s tenure, and statistically looks quite bad (at least in terms of raw numbers).
For overall scoring defense, Syracuse ranked 88th in the country in 2019 — this was down from 64th in the 2018 campaign, but up from the other two Babers led teams, with 2016 being the worst at 120th out of the 128 teams in the FBS.