Another day, another round of hand-wringing about Syracuse’s finances after the Wall Street Journal article, and this time the theory making the rounds is that leaving the Big East for ACC football money is where it all went wrong.

“Going all in on college football killed Syracuse University,” one post on X that had 30k views argued. “A school whose identity was tied to its elite college basketball program destroyed it to pursue short term college football money. A few million dollars from CFB will never overcome an institution losing its soul.”

We all get the emotional pull of that argument. It’s been recycled for 15 years. Anyone who remembers February nights against Georgetown, Villanova, UConn and Pitt in the old Big East knows exactly what’s being mourned here. That conference had a soul. The ACC has often felt like a business trip. Syracuse fans have been saying versions of this for years: “Even if we stunk, if we were playing Providence and Villanova and St. John’s and UConn and Seton Hall in February, I’d still watch… But Virginia? Cal? SMU?”

There’s a massive hole in this theory though. And it’s always worth posting about (which we did a few months ago), because people need to be recentered.

The old Big East everyone’s nostalgic for still exists. Villanova, St. John’s, UConn, Providence, Seton Hall, all play a real basketball-first conference schedule and battle at the Garden in March. There’s one detail that gets conveniently left out of every version of this argument: almost none of those schools play FBS football. That’s not a coincidence. It’s the entire structural reason that version of the Big East can exist and feel the way it does.

So walk through what “staying loyal to basketball” would have actually required for Syracuse. An actual decision: what happens to the football program?

Option one, drop to FCS. Option two, become independent. Both of those paths have a real, current example sitting right in front of us: UConn. The Huskies were in the American, then chose independence for football rather than join a conference, and the results speak for themselves. UConn football is a nomad, playing a patchwork schedule against whoever will take the date, with no conference affiliation, no rivalry weight, and essentially no path back to national relevance.

UConn’s basketball program has soared by being back in the Big East. But football has been put on life support. The Huskies actually won 9 games last year and have been respectable the last three seasons. The reward? Their biggest games this year are against Syracuse and UNC. The rest of the schedule is James Madison, Southern Miss, Old Dominion, Temple… need we keep going? Imagine that schedule at the Dome. Be lucky to get 20K per game.

Nobody circles a UConn football game on their calendar. There is almost no path to the CFP. You top out at the Fenway Bowl. That’s not a cautionary tale, that’s the actual, lived outcome of the exact alternative this theory is romanticizing.

And it’s not just football that would have paid for that decision. If football becomes a money-hemorrhaging disaster or gets dropped entirely, the JMA Wireless Dome, a massive facility built primarily around football, becomes a financial anchor instead of an asset (in some ways it already is). That bleeding doesn’t stay contained to one sport. It forces so much more onus to be placed on fund raising and donors.

The ACC move was a necessary evil. There was no other way out, unless you think UNH coming to the Dome this weekend is a thrill. Too bad it had to be this way, because the Syracuse reality in 1998 was perfect. A Big East in basketball that was epic. A Big East in football that allowed SU to play for national prestige and major bowl games. That world doesn’t exist anymore.

It was the decision that let Syracuse keep a real football program instead of becoming Villanova, and directly responsible for a $75 million plus swing in athletic department finances within just the first four years of the move. Has the profit been spent properly? Certainly debatable. Was something lost? Absolutely. The ADs since that move have been ineffective. The old Big East rivalries meant something the ACC never fully replicated, and Gerry McNamara’s own effort this year to schedule games against St. John’s and Rutgers is a tacit admission that Syracuse basketball drifted too far from that identity for too long.

But the theory that Syracuse should not have chased football relevance is not really an argument. It’s like saying the Jets should have drafted Peyton Manning. Everyone wanted a lifeboat onto the power conference rafts. Louisville did it. Pitt did it. BC, Virginia Tech, Miami did it. West Virginia bolted for the Big 12. UConn would’ve done it. No school turned down the ACC (or Big Ten or Big 12), because the alternative was far worse.