Syracuse opens its season tomorrow, and on paper, the outside world isn’t expecting much. The ACC’s preseason media poll has the Orange picked 14th out of 17 teams. Vegas has the win total sitting at 4.5. After a 3-9 season, there’s skepticism outside CNY.

But scratch beneath the surface, and there’s real fuel for optimistic Orange fans heading into Week 1.

Start with what we’ve already been tracking all offseason. The Athletic’s Austin Mock made a bold call that Syracuse would contend for a spot in the ACC Championship Game, a genuinely aggressive prediction. He’s not alone in that thinking, either; multiple national voices have flagged Syracuse as a team built to outperform its low preseason expectations this year, the same way it did in 2024 after also being picked near the bottom of the ACC and finishing 10-3.

Mock’s second bold prediction ties directly into Syracuse’s schedule. He called Clemson’s home game against Syracuse a likely one-possession game and went as far as suggesting “the glory days of Dabo Swinney’s tenure are long gone,” raising real doubt about whether the Tigers are still the program their name suggests. Syracuse already has the history to back that swing: the Orange beat Clemson outright last season. If Clemson really is vulnerable some think, that game becomes a legitimate signature win sitting right there on Syracuse’s schedule, not a game to simply survive.

There’s also the computer modeling we flagged back in the spring, when one advanced projection system gave Syracuse the third-best odds in the entire ACC to win the conference, well before this week’s media poll buried them near the bottom. That’s a real gap between what a model built on underlying data saw in Syracuse’s roster and what human voters, working mostly off last year’s record, are projecting now.

Steve Angeli is the biggest reason that gap might close. Multiple evaluators around the conference consider him one of the better quarterbacks in the ACC when healthy, and suggest SU can compete with any team in the ACC if he’s cooking. He was doing exactly that before his Achilles injury last September, completing 63% of his passes for 1,317 yards and 10 touchdowns against just two picks through four games. Angeli says he’s 100% and that looks nothing like a 14th-place team.

And then there’s the fun one. ESPN’s website ran a million simulations of the entire college football season and pulled out a handful of the wildest individual outcomes. In one of them, Syracuse landed as the No. 4 seed in the College Football Playoff, reaching the national semifinal before falling to a 7-5 BYU team that somehow rode an eight-way conference tiebreaker all the way to the national championship game against Northwestern. Is that the most likely outcome? Of course not, it’s one result out of a million. But it’s proof that even in the most literal computer modeling of this season, a version of Syracuse making a real playoff run isn’t some far-fetched fantasy. It’s sitting somewhere inside the simulation.

Syracuse still has to go win the games in front of it, starting with New Hampshire. But between a bold ACC title prediction, a genuinely shaky Clemson team on the schedule, a healthy Angeli, and a computer model that once saw this roster as a top-three ACC team, there’s more real substance behind the optimism than the 14th-place ranking lets on. If you’re feeling strangely good about this football season…. you’re not crazy.