The Syracuse Orange have been a winning basketball program for a very long time. Their last non-winning record was a 12-12 season in 1970-71. The last losing record was the year before that, a 9-16 season that was understandably forgettable.
Those teams were coached by Roy Danforth, and while many may remember the former SU coach more for opening the door for Jim Boeheim’s tenure than those seasons, he did make it to a Final Four just a few years later.
Despite the lows of the 1969-70 and 1970-71 seasons, he was able to engineer a gradual turnaround.