Orange

Pittsburgh has been the constant. Syracuse and the Panthers have met 81 times.

The program's defining year came earlier, in 1959, when Ben Schwartzwalder's team went 11–0 and beat Texas in the Cotton Bowl to claim the consensus national championship. Ernie Davis played on that team as a sophomore; two years later he became the first Black player to win the Heisman Trophy. Syracuse has sent a run of players through to the professional game and the Hall of Fame beyond him — Jim Brown, Floyd Little, Larry Csonka among them.

Big East championships followed in 1996, 1997, 1998, 2004 and 2012, the last of them arriving just before the conference realignment that sent the Orange to the ACC. The team plays now at the JMA Wireless Dome, a venue that holds 42,774 for football and replaced Archbold Stadium, where Syracuse had played from 1907 until 1978.

None of it existed yet on 23 November 1889, when Syracuse fielded a football team for the first time.