By Alex Lawson

Syracuse is America’s premier second-tier sports town. In Spring and Summer we have the Syracuse Mets, in Fall it’s SU football, then in Winter through to Spring it’s the Crunch and Orange Basketball. With the Crunch, the Mets, and Orange football and basketball, we’ve got teams competing in the second-highest league of each of the ‘big four’ sports: the AHL, AAA baseball, Power Four college football, and Power Five college basketball. All twelve months of the year, you can catch a pretty well-attended game featuring a pretty high level of competition for a pretty reasonable price.

That’s pretty cool for a metro area this size, but what’s even cooler is that Syracuse is the only town in America where this is true. Of the more than 100 cities with a AAA baseball team, and AHL hockey team, a Power Four college football team, and a Power Five college basketball team, none besides Syracuse has all four.

Some come close. Bigger cities like Chicago and Los Angeles boast big universities and one or two minor league teams, but those are really major league towns. Others—like Columbus, OH—overshoot the mark by having one major league team alongside a few minor league and college programs. Places like Des Moines have a nearby neighbor like Ames that round out their complement of second-tier teams, but they can’t make it on their own.

The four other towns that come closest are Durham, Louisville, Tucson, and Austin. Durham has the Duke Blue Devils and the Durham Bulls, but no AHL team (the NHL Hurricanes play in nearby Raleigh). Louisville has the AAA Bats and the Cardinals competing in the ACC, and they used to have an AHL franchise too, but the Panthers left town in 2001. Tucson has the AHL Roadrunners and the University of Arizona Wildcats, but their pro baseball team plays in the Mexican Pacific League—well below AAA. Austin is home to the Texas Longhorns, and the Austin metro area includes the suburban municipalities of Round Rock, TX (with their AAA baseball team, the Express) and Cedar Park, TX (home of the Texas Stars).

Tonight, ESPN is televising the basketball game between the Tennessee Volunteers and the Syracuse Orange to a national audience, and you can still buy pretty cheap tickets to join fifteen to twenty thousand other people in watching that game in person. It’s a little thing, but it’s part of what makes this a fun place to live, and we are uniquely lucky to have it.