Outgunned: SU Women’s Soccer struggles with shots, game tempo in ACC

The pattern to this year’s Syracuse women’s soccer campaign was a rather familiar one for the program.

Winning nearly all of its non-conference matches early in the season provided promise and hope before the Orange were outgunned and outclassed throughout their ACC schedule, a cycle that has continued since they joined the conference.

The program concluded their season on Oct. 31 with a 3-1 loss at Boston College. With SU finishing winless in conference play, this marks the 12^th consecutive year in which Syracuse has failed to make a postseason appearance. 

And while it’s simple to chalk it up to ACC women’s soccer being the best in the nation, SU has been hampered by its inability to control and dictate the tempo of the game, which also has deprived them of shooting opportunities against their conference opponents.

Playing in the NCAA’s toughest conference

The first point of analysis has to be looking at the competition that Syracuse is up against. This season, seven ACC teams are ranked in the United Soccer Coaches Poll, more than any other conference. This list includes national championship favorites, No. 1 Duke, and last year’s champs, Florida State. 

Of the ranked teams, the Orange played and lost to five of them this season. These games included a 5-1 drubbing at No. 6 Florida State and 3-0 losses at home to Wake Forest and Notre Dame. The Orange finished the year with a 6-10-2 record overall and a 0-9-1 record in the ACC.

The ACC has proven to produce teams that are National Championship contenders. In the last 10 national title games, 13 of the 20 teams now play in the ACC, setting the stage for SU’s struggles as they battle Top-25 teams and perennial powerhouses almost every week since joining the conference in 2013.

Most years, the Orange show incredible promise in their non-conference schedule. This season the program was 6-1-1 through eight games before the demanding ACC schedule sent a once-promising campaign crashing back down to earth, with the Orange losing nine of their 10 ACC games.

Pushing the pace and controlling the tempo

Facing the nation’s best teams is never going to be easy, which has become apparent in recent years. In particular, SU has struggled with controlling the tempo of games. This issue is particularly problematic in soccer as a team’s ability to play at their own pace is a tried-and-tested winning formula.

SU head coach Nicky Thrasher Adams noted after the 3-1 loss to Miami on Oct. 24 that her squad lacked the consistency needed to control the game’s pace that she often emphasizes in practice. 

“I’m scratching my head a little bit trying to understand why everything we trained did not apply this week,” Adams said.

This lack of ball control translates to conceding more scoring opportunities and losing the possession battle on the field, two critical facets of winning matches. Although there are no formal possession stats in NCAA soccer, SU has clearly struggled to control the ball during ACC games.

Last month against Miami at the SU Soccer Stadium, the Orange were unable to keep the Hurricanes’ strong, athletic and quick wing-backs from getting behind the back line. This led to SU often resorting to hoofing the ball long up the pitch in the hopes that a forward may be able to create a goal.

Although this approach gave the Orange an equalizer, the team was clearly gassed in the game’s later stages, which saw them concede two goals in rapid succession. This style of play also left some players looking deflated as they watched the ball sail over their heads, seemingly certain they had no chance of getting on the end of the chance.

“We’re not playing like we’re training,” Adams said after the match. “What do you expect? We’re over-complicating things. We’re making it really difficult.”

Although the inability to control games hasn’t helped the Orange, it hasn’t exactly been the main reason they are losing games. The key issue appears instead to be a product of their lack of possession, which is allowing their opponents to consistently generate more shooting and scoring opportunities.

Creating shooting opportunities

Although statistics don’t always indicate the outcome of games, shooting opportunities is among the strongest indicators. Since the COVID-shortened 2020-21 season, the Orange have simply been dominated from this statistical standpoint.

The Orange’s best ACC campaign in 2022 saw the team allow for only six more shots per game from their ACC opponents. The Orange finished this campaign with a 1-6-3 conference record.

In 2021, SU allowed their ACC opponents 13.9 more shots per game and lost every match in conference play.

The past two seasons have seen ACC opponents average even more shots per game with the same 0-9-1 ACC record each year. The Orange allowed their opponents to take 20 more shots per game in 2023, and 11 more shots per game in 2024.

This season’s improvement in shooting opportunities for Syracuse still was only half of what ACC opponents averaged against SU each game. That difference was significantly stark in SU’s 3-0 loss to Pittsburgh on Oct. 13 when the Panthers registered 37 shots to the Orange’s three.

The 2023 season saw some similar discrepancies. Their Sept. 21 matchup against Florida State, who went on to win the NCAA national title, saw SU outshot 32 to two. Later that season, UNC battered SU 6-1 as the Orange conceded a massive 42 shots to their three.

 In a rather unsustainable trend, Syracuse has failed to outshoot their ACC opponents more than twice per season over the past four campaigns, including only once in 2024’s 10-game schedule.

Across their 10 ACC games this year, the Orange gave up 22.3 shots per game and took 11.3 shots per game. The average ACC team took just over 12.3 shots per game. This means that while the Orange were finding shooting opportunities at a decent rate compared to the league average, the team was leaking opportunities on the defensive end, allowing 10 more shots per game than the average team in ACC play. 

“In the goals we’ve given up, we were lacking mentally, defensively,” Adams said following the Miami loss. “It was not acceptable in many cases. I expect a lot more.”

Overall, these numbers and statistics cannot show or point to exactly what the program needs to do to improve its fortunes, but they give one sense of how the team could be improved to mitigate one of its weaknesses, which seems to statistically correlate with losing.

If the Orange can build their squad to either boast a more rigid defense that concedes much fewer shots or bring in players across the field who are more confident on the ball and better at dictating the pace and tempo of the game, then the side may have a better chance to challenge more opponents in ACC play.

With the season over for SU, Adams has the opportunity to assess the team during the offseason through training and recruiting talented transfers and freshmen to make the trip to Central New York. But without a significant improvement in shots on goals and controlling the pace of the game, the Orange may always find an already difficult ACC slate too tough to tackle.