SYRACUSE, N.Y. – There is seemingly no limit on the number of questions that get sent into Mike’s Mailbox each week.
Even though we’re now almost two months into college basketball’s off-season, the emails just keeping rolling in.
One question that I have received from many readers is about limits; in particular, the NCAA’s scholarship limit. The NCAA allows teams to have 13 players on scholarship. Right now, Syracuse is three under the NCAA’s limit.
So what will Syracuse coach Adrian Autry do with those available scholarships? That’s where we start off in this week’s Mailbox.
(If you have a question; follow-up or otherwise, for the Mailbox, email it to mwaters@syracuse.com).
Q: Will the Orange fill their roster?
Mike L.
Mike: Syracuse’s roster for the 2024-25 season consists of just 10 scholarship players. That puts the SU coaches three under the NCAA’s limit of 13 scholarships.
While I’ve seen teams go through a season under the NCAA limit, it would be tricky to navigate an entire season with only 10 scholarship players.
Injuries would be a season-long issue. Foul trouble would be a game-to-game problem. And it would make scrimmaging in practice problematic.
Syracuse’s roster breaks down like this:
Guards: JJ Starling, Kyle Cuffe, Chance Westry, Jaquan Carlos and Elijah Moore
Wings/forwards: Chris Bell, Donnie Freeman and Jyare Davis
Centers: Eddie Lampkin and Naheem McLeod
Westry, who is listed at 6-foot-6, would have the ability to play guard on offense and defend at small forward.
Looking at that roster, I would think SU coach Adrian Autry and his staff would like to add a versatile big man who is capable of playing both power forward and center and then maybe try to find another wing who can move between the two and the three.
I don’t see the need to go to 13 scholarships, and 11 players might be enough. You don’t want to bring in players who you don’t think can help because they’ll sit on the bench and become unhappy.
Q: Eddie Lampkin averaged 2.2 assists per game last season in only 27.8 minutes per game for Colorado. That seems like a high total for a center. How does it compare to recent Syracuse centers?
Bill N.
Mike: Eddie Lampkin, a 6-foot-10 center, announced his decision to transfer from Colorado to Syracuse last month.
Lampkin will be a fifth-year player for the Orange next season. As a senior last year at Colorado, he averaged 10.6 points, 7.0 rebounds and a very deceptively impressive 2.2 assists per game.
I went back as far as 1980 and found just two players who played center at Syracuse who had more assists per game than Lampkin did last season. And neither was a true center.
Derrick Coleman played at power forward in his first years and then again as a senior, but as a junior in 1989, he started at center. That year, Coleman averaged 2.9 assists per game.
Similarly, Marek Dolezaj was a natural forward, but he was pressed into duty at center several times in his career. Specifically, Dolezaj had to start at center in the 2020-21 season when Bourama Sidibe was injured in the first game of the season. Dolezaj averaged 3.2 assists that season.
The highest assist numbers that I found for a true center was Danny Schayes, who in the 1980-81 season averaged 1.9 assists per game.
Q: Is Frank Anselem the first Syracuse player to transfer out of the conference and then back into the same conference that the Orange plays in?
Bryce
Mike: Frank Anselem, who played at Syracuse for two years before transferring to Georgia after the 2021-22 season, recently announced that he will transfer to Louisville for his extra year of eligibility.
The 6-foot-10 center, who now goes by Frank Anselem-Ibe, averaged 2.6 points and 2.1 rebounds for Georgia last season. Those numbers were very similar to his stats as a sophomore at Syracuse when he posted 2.6 points and 3.8 rebounds per game.
I couldn’t find another example of a player transferring from Syracuse to a school outside the conference (be it the ACC or the Big East) and then transferring again back into the same conference as Syracuse.
The first transfer out of the conference would eliminate guys like Joe Girard (Clemson) and Maliq Brown (Duke).
However, while Anselem-Ibe might be the first, I suspect with the transfer portal and the ability to transfer without sitting out year that he won’t be the last.
Q: When the NCAA dropped the limit on men’s basketball scholarships to 13, most players stayed at one school for four years. With the substantial increase in one-and-done culture due to the NBA’s age restrictions combined with the free agency of the transfer portal, do you feel it’s time to bring back those additional scholarships? Would it add to or reduce roster stability?
Mark C.
Mike: This is an interesting question. I guess one never knows what impact a change would make, but my first reaction to increasing the scholarship limit is that it would lead to more transfers; not fewer.
The players most likely to transfer are generally the ones who don’t play and don’t foresee more playing time in their future.
If Mounir Hima, Peter Carey and William Patterson are prone to transfer when they were on Syracuse’s bench last year, I would think more players would just exacerbate the issue.
Even if they were given more scholarships, I don’t think many coaches would use them all because the players who aren’t playing are unhappy and you don’t want more unhappy players in the locker room.
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