The wider viewing public wasn’t necessarily surprised that the Syracuse Orange men’s basketball team made it to the Sweet 16 once again as a double-digit seed. However, there’s still the question of “how” it happened. The zone’s certainly a big part, and the Athletic’s Sam Vecenie dug into that already this week.
Getting to the root of how this occurs in light of middling ACC results in recent years, he spoke to ACC assistants about the lack of familiarity and short timeframe in the NCAA Tournament being keys to this recent run of success. There’s also the fact that the zone has just been better of late.