Last weekend Syracuse nearly lost to lowly DePaul.  The third-ranked Orange trailed by 18 before rallying to win by 2.

Clearly, Syracuse took the Blue Demons too lightly right?

Not according to Hall of Fame coach Jim Boeheim.

"We were ready to play at DePaul," Boeheim told reporters this week.  "Whenever you have a bad game, people say you aren't ready to play.  It's never about that. We did not play well, period."

"It wasn't that it was a road game," the coach continued. "It wasn't that it was in the afternoon. It wasn't that we didn't have good food. It wasn't that we were tired. There's none of that. You have bad games, and we had a bad offensive game."

I don't entirely agree.  I do think that good teams sometimes take bad teams too lightly.  But Boeheim is right in the sense that it's never that simple.  In my opinion the "take the opponent too lightly" angle helps explain a slow start, but the good team usually gets that out of its system pretty quickly and has plenty of time to recover.

Still, I hope Syracuse fans are complaining that the Orange took the Bearcats too lightly at roughly 4 pm tomorrow.