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Posted at 11:15 PM EST.

12:00 PM EST. Make no mistake that on this, the first day of the NFL playoffs, the market will be turning to college basketball, many for the first time this year, to set up some parlays with some NFL teams that play later today. They’ll also be turning to the early college games mostly because the NFL playoffs don’t kick off until 4:35. What will stick out is that the Irish are 10-4 overall while the Orange are 9-4 and now that 10-4 squad is at home and taking back some points. What a great opportunity to get behind one of the most undervalued teams in the country here spotting a porkchop.

Notre Dame’s strength of schedule ranks 276th but they have some credibility because three of its four losses came against Oklahoma, UCLA and Va Tech and they also have a win over Purdue. However, the Irish’s other loss occurred against Radford. Notre Dame has racked up wins against UIC, Chicago State, William & Mary, Duquesne, DePaul, Illinois by 2, Binghamton, Jacksonville and Coppin State. The Irish failed to make the NCAA Tournament last season for the first time since 2014. Injuries were mostly to blame as senior leaders Bonzie Colson and Matt Farrell missed a combined 20 games, all of which came during conference play. Both Colson and Farrell have graduated now along with fellow starter Martinas Geben, so the Fighting Irish will have some rebuilding to do this season but more than all of that is the Orange will start Big East play here with a pedestrian 9-4 non-conference record that puts them near the bottom of the conference and far under the radar. That was all just a tune-up for conference play and now the Orange figure to get serious.  

Last year, the Orange lost four straight ACC games in January, dropped four of five down the stretch in the regular season, surprised everyone by getting invited to the NCAA Tournament … and then reached the Sweet 16, where they gave Duke all it could handle before losing by four. Syracuse did not lose a single key player from that team and has added a couple of promising freshmen and transfers. Yes, the Orange looked awful while losing at home to Old Dominion and Buffalo but we’re not going to put a lot of weight on two non-conference losses to two very good teams. Nobody wants to run into Syracuse in the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament to face that zone and we highly doubt that the inferior Irish will have success against it either.

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