Orange Return Home to Face Hokies

Syracuse returns to the JMA Wireless Dome for the first time in more than a month when it hosts Virginia Tech on Saturday at 12 p.m. It's Orange Central/Homecoming weekend and 'Cuse head coach Fran Brown is excited for his team to be back on its home field.

"It's always cool to come back home," Brown said at his weekly press conference. "I'm just thankful to be able to play football wherever you play no matter where it is. We're excited to always play ball, but there's no place like the Dome. So, it's nothing like being able to come home and have everyone there, especially it's homecoming, so you'll get a lot of alums and former graduates to come back. So, it's always good to be able to play in front of them, friends, family, faculty, staff, just everybody, the community itself."

Tickets for Saturday's game can be purchased at Cuse.com/tickets. The game will be televised on The CW.

Syracuse last played in the JMA Dome on Sept. 28 when it hosted Holy Cross. Three games, 35 days and more than 3,000 miles later, the Orange welcome the Hokies to the Dome for the first time since 2016. Syracuse and Virginia Tech met every year from 1992-2003 when both were members of The BIG EAST Conference. After meeting just once in the Orange's first eight years in the ACC, the teams will meet for the third time since 2021. Syracuse owns an 11-9 advantage in the series.

The 'Cuse road swing started with wins at UNLV and NC State, marking the first time since 2018 that the Orange won two-straight true road games. With the victory against the Wolfpack, Syracuse opened league play with a 2-1 record, matching the 2017 mark for the second-best three-game start to ACC play since joining the conference in 2013. The Orange had their three-game winning streak snapped at Pittsburgh, but Brown knows there is plenty still to play for heading into the final month of the regular season.

"Everything we want is still on the table," Brown said. "I just think that you just got to go handle your own business and worry about yourself, and then other things play the part. I think our conference is a really competitive conference. I feel as though that things just happen week to week. So, what we got to do is focus on us and then whatever is going to come to play at the end of the year will come to play at the end of the year. But we're still playing for a lot of things. We still have seniors on our football team that want to go out the right way. We still want to play in a conference championship. There's a lot of things we're still looking forward to, but all we can really control is Monday, and we're just trying to practice our butts off today and just being able to focus on that and not try to pay attention to people that think that there isn't anything still out there to play for when you're a senior in college. You know, some of our guys have 30 days left of football, and we want to continue to do well so we can continue to add another week and another week and another week and another week."

A win on Saturday would make the Orange bowl eligible for the third-consecutive year for the first time since Syracuse played in five-straight bowls from 1995-99. Additionally, it would improve Syracuse's all-time record to 44-30 in Orange Central/Homecoming games.

Syracuse University Athletics

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