CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Syracuse men’s basketball coach Adrian Autry didn’t spend too much time before or during the Orange’s Atlantic Coast Conference Tournament game contemplating his future.
Afterward was a different story.
As the 54-year-old left the floor at Charlotte’s Spectrum Center following an 86-69 loss to SMU in the first round on Tuesday, the thoughts began trickling into his mind.
“I don’t shy away from the job that I did,” Autry said in his postgame news conference. “I’m harder on myself than anybody. I didn’t get the results that we wanted.”
The Orange, who trailed by one at halftime, collapsed in the second half against a team they beat 79-78 at home just last month. The second-half meltdown was a microcosm of a season in which Syracuse (15-17) lost its final six games and 12 of its last 15 and finished 14th in the ACC.
Autry is 49-48 since joining Syracuse, including just 24-34 in league regular-season play in his three seasons. He has failed to get the program that Jim Boeheim built into a national power to the NCAA Tournament.
The Orange lost 27 games by double-digit margins while managing just four Quadrant 1 wins and they entered this week with a 1-20 record in those measuring-stick games for the past two seasons.
It’s unclear when the school will make a decision on Autry’s future.
It didn’t wait long to awkwardly fire Boeheim in 2023, waiting just three hours after a season-ending loss in the ACC Tournament to Wake Forest before announcing Autry had been promoted to take his place.
“We knew it was going to be a learning curve,” Autry said of coaching a team that didn’t have a lot of on-court experience. “But we thought we had a group that could kind of push through that.
“But that didn’t happen the way we wanted to. You always think about when the season is over with, about your future. No different than last year,” he added. “I’ll have more thoughts again, like I always do. Right when a game is over with, there’s a lot of emotions, there’s a lot of feelings. That’s what we’ll do, I’ll continue to do as we move forward.”
Autry spoke at length about his struggles navigating a college basketball world that now includes name, imagine and likeness and the transfer portal, things he called “real issues” in today’s world that weren’t around when he was player at Syracuse.
“The landscape of college athletics has changed, and to be where we want our standard to be, a lot of those things change,” Autry said. “I think that was the struggle for me to try to adapt to that. I think you’ve got to have it. To be able to compete nationally, it’s different now.
“To be able to be relevant, to be Top 25 and compete for tournaments and be in championships, the investment has to be there from top to bottom. There’s no way around it.”
When asked what he would have done differently if he had to do it over again, Autry quipped, “I don’t know if we have enough time for that.”
