“A dark presence looms over the sanctity of a collegiate event.

In walks the top-ranked player, in walks the destroyer of worlds.

You asked for friendlies and you got a war; Syrup is in the building.”

Those were the words commentators uttered as Andrew Mo ’29  took his place with his Syracuse teammates , the largest gaming competition for Super Smash Bros. in the world. The University competed at the August event, facing off in a best of three crew battle against Shenandoah University.

When it was his turn at the controller, Mo sat slouched slightly forward in the black folding chair, focused on the monitor before him, seemingly unshakable as onlookers and commentators reacted to his gameplay.

“This guy is crazy,” one of them said.

After one devastating blow to an opponent, the commentators let out squawks of delight while people in the crowd clasped their hands to their heads in amazement.

Mo deftly removed his headphones, offered his opponent a fist bump and turned forward again, waiting for the next player to take a seat beside him.

By the time the battle was over, the commentators labeled the “Syrup sweep” complete.

At the time, Mo was ranked eleventh globally for Super Smash Bros Ultimate. His Smash Bros. coach , who is also the esports program manager in the , says Mo is now trending closer to the top five.

“He’s probably the fifth in the world right now,” Bair says.

What Makes Syrup So Good

Mo, an undeclared major in the , first picked up a controller when he was 5, playing Smash with his brother. He says what he loves about the game is how free form it can be.

“There’s a lot of room for creativity and your gameplay has personality in it,” he says. “Your gameplay is your own, and it’s unique.”

He began playing competitively in 2019 at the age of 12, starting with local tournaments in his home state of New Jersey.

Mo says when he was getting ready to compete in his first match, he forgot to create his “in-game” tag, or name. So he played with the moniker left behind by another player—Syrup.

“It was someone else’s, so I was just like, ‘OK, this is mine now,’” Mo says.

Now, it’s how he’s known around the world.

Why He Chose Syracuse University

Mo says he was drawn to Syracuse for its programs, but also for its investment in esports and new state-of-the-art facilities.

Esports started on campus in 2017 as a student club, but the University now has both an esports communications and management bachelor’s degree—offered jointly by the and the —a�Ի� , meaning the squads are school-supported, under . Thirty students field the six varsity teams playing Call of Duty, Counter-Strike 2, Overwatch 2, Rocket League, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Valorant.

Programs are run out of two gaming facilities on campus, at the Barnes Center at The Arch and the Schine Student Center. A third space is also being built in the Marley Building.

“Syracuse is probably the only school with two whole facilities,” Mo says. “And the facilities inside, they’re very advanced and modern looking. It’s literally the perfect place to play any competitive game.”

While the NCAA doesn’t currently support esports, the University’s varsity teams compete in the Power Esports Conference (PEC) against other Division I schools, such as Michigan State, Boise State and Ohio State, among others. With a fall and spring season, the University plays each school in the fall and then again in the spring, culminating with an in-person championship in April. Some of the varsity teams also compete in the PlayVS College League (PCL).

There are seven student-athletes on the varsity Smash team, including Mo. Bair said separate of his skill, Mo’s contributions as a person and teammate in the program have also been significant. He’s humble when Smash comes up in classes, a good student and hardworking member of the varsity team.

“He represents collegiate esports really well,” Bair says.

The Impact at Syracuse

To convey what it means to have a player of Mo’s caliber, Joey Gawrysiak, executive director of esports and professor of practice, brings up another Syracuse legend.

“The analogy we always use is that Andrew is the best recruit Syracuse has had since Carmelo Anthony,” he says. “He is not only just technically gifted, he is mentally gifted at the game and understands how somebody is going to react to his play style, so he can then counteract it really well and not have to react in real time as much as the average person might have to.”

Bair says Mo might be the most talented person at a single skill you could meet in your lifetime.

“I don’t know if I will meet someone better at something than Andrew is skilled at this video game,” he says.

Part of Mo’s talent is simply innate, Bair says.

But the coach stressed the time Mo puts in to develop his game is also huge.

Mo says he tries to play every day. And if he can’t pick up a controller, he is still thinking about the game.

“I think about Smash a lot,” he says. “A big way to improve once you reach a higher level is you have to start thinking of new situations and how to implement new ideas into your game.”

Mo says Syracuse is the “perfect place to go” if you’re interested in esports.

He’s learned in his own classes how esports can translate to other majors, like business, management or production.

“I want to lean toward learning how to make content and get into maybe the production side of things, which Syracuse can definitely help me with,” he says.

The earliest memories  has involve playing sports and watching the golden age of Big East Conference basketball with stars like Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullin and Syracuse University star Pearl Washington.

Now, as a father of two children who play youth sports, Tainsky says the “anchor events” in their household revolve around his children’s games and practices, and the sports they watch together on TV. Tainsky built his research career around the idea that sports bring people together, and that’s the focus and sensibility he’s bringing to the as its new senior associate dean of faculty affairs and academic operations.

“It’s the same feeling I hope to experience very shortly at the (JMA Wireless) Dome,” Tainsky says. “Being able to come together and root, root, root for the home team with the family was a salient experience for me as I grew up and became an athlete. Then, as a soon-retired athlete, it evolved from me competing to being one of the people either coaching or analyzing what’s going on for others to do their best to compete at the highest level.”

Tainsky, who started at Falk College on July 1, was previously a professor of management and Director of Sport and Entertainment Management at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where he was awarded Mike Ilitch School of Business awards for innovative teaching and excellence in research. He’s currently editor in chief of the , the official research journal of the (NASSM) and he has co-authored over 50 journal articles, becoming a NASSM Research Fellow in 2015.

At the core of Tainsky’s research are the decisions made by high-level sports managers and how they impact both organizational performance and the collective well-being of fans.

“Scott’s research interests–economics of sports leagues and teams, player performance analytics, and corporate social responsibility in national and international sports leagues–align perfectly with our vision for creating the nation’s premier College of Sport,” says Falk College Dean Jeremy Jordan. With programs in esports, exercise science, nutrition, sport analytics and sport management, the Falk College of Sport launched July 1 as the on a high-research activity campus (R1) to focus on sport through a holistic academic lens.

We connected with Tainsky to learn more about his research and how it will impact the College of Sport.

How did you develop an interest in studying the impact of sport?

My curiosity about the world and trying to incorporate that into my daily life. Being able to better the community that I’m a part of is ingrained by the fact that I grew up in a house where my father (Dr. Michael Tainsky) was a researcher—in his case he was trying to cure cancer and improve people’s lives that way.

Mine was much more social. As a social scientist, I have noticed the way sport can be such a valuable part of people’s lives. My first memory was watching Big East basketball, and I liked math. I try to bring those two worlds together to create the best social experiences for the greatest number of people possible.

One of the College of Sport’s areas of excellence is community sport and wellness, or as Dean Jordan also calls it, “sport for good.” How does your research fit with the uplifting power of sport?

The intellectual side of that is no one has to do sport; it’s an elective part of our lives. Since so many are choosing to spend so much of our attention on this leisure activity, it’s an incredible opportunity to see what people truly value. At the same time, we can provide leadership in utilizing that to help create the most good in the community.

We’re here to help round out that part of their choice, to provide the right amount of sport, marketed and delivered in a way that’s consumable and made more efficient, where the product is better and where the athletes are more informed.

Is there a specific theme throughout your research?

If there’s a theme to my research, it’s this idea of positive externalities, and that’s a very technical term of what is being produced can produce additional good captured by others. So, for example, in that I did with (Sport Analytics Professor) , we look at how the hotel industry is impacted by college football games. It’s not like Marriot or Hilton does anything different to be able to raise their rates or increase their occupancy rates on home football games. It happens because there’s so much excitement around sport; so much interest in being a part of that experience. So, in that case, we’re looking to quantify the externalities produced by football games.

There are other ways this presents in terms of viewership. When I follow Syracuse basketball and Syracuse basketball is having a good year, you would think that because we only have so much leisure time and I’m watching more of the Orange, it might take away the amount I choose to watch other basketball teams. But in fact, the opposite is true. As I become more deeply connected to Syracuse basketball, I’m actually more interested in some of the rival teams we’re competing against. So, we’re looking for those externalities, quantifying those externalities, and then helping round out the experience with the understanding that those things that may be counterintuitive are in play. How do we capitalize on this knowledge to produce the most good?

What are your impressions of the Falk College of Sport and what it can become?

Falk College and Syracuse University have recognized that there are four legs of the stool, and you can’t get any balance unless all four of them are functioning and working together. You can’t create athletes and have competition at the highest level without understanding the exercise science portion and the nutrition portion of sport. You can’t produce teams and individuals functioning at their highest level without sport management and sport analytics. You can’t appreciate the whole of it unless all of those pieces are talking with one another…and there is not one other place that’s doing what’s happening right now at Falk College. It’s 100 percent the reason I wanted to be a part of this project.

What drew me to Falk College was this vision of what can be if we bring together these disciplines that are often times separated and siloed. It’s such a welcome idea that I expect us to be doing incredible things quickly because of all the support I’m seeing and all of the buy-in for what we’re doing from so many different, important pieces of this puzzle.