SWC75
Bored Historian
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IS THIS THE RIGHT TEAM?
It has been our long desire to be considered one of the elite programs of college basketball. We seem to have the credentials We’re the fifth winningest major college program of all time with 1,946 wins and a .692 winning percentage, (both are fifth, behind Kentucky, Kansas, North Carolina and Duke – and ahead of UCLA). We’ve had 46 consecutive winning seasons, the longest streak in the country and second longest of all time, (UCLA had 54). We are 8th with 36 NCAA tournament appearances and also 8th with 65 victories. But there is one statistic that we lag behind in and it’s the most important one of all, at least in the minds of college basketball fans. We’ve won 1 national championship. Actually that’s wrong, because the Helms Foundation retroactively awarded two Syracuse teams, (1918 and 1926) “national championships (they were awarded in 1942). But most fans either aren’t aware of such titles or don’t care: the NCAA basketball tournament, which began in 1939 is the popular idea of a national championship.
That one national championship sure was fun and it was the happy ending of a long stretch during which we were good enough to dream of it but never achieved the dream. I’d been following SU basketball since the Dave Bing Era, nearly 40 years before we finally won. I remember the best thing about it was just reminding myself that we finally won every five minutes. But that one title ties us with the following schools: Oregon, Wisconsin, Stanford, Wyoming, Utah, Holy Cross, CCNY, LaSalle, California, Ohio State, Loyola (Chicago), Texas-El Paso, (formerly Texas Western), Marquette, Georgetown, Michigan, UNLV, Arkansas, Arizona and Maryland. There are some good basketball schools in that group but we don’t really see ourselves as equals with them, (and there’s one we definitely don’t want to be equated with).
We are the last national championship winning school to have won their only championship on that occasion, (Florida had never won before 2006 but they won their second title the next year. Since we won, Connecticut won their second championship, North Carolina won their 4th, Florida won their two, Kansas won their third, North Carolina won #5, Duke won #4, Connecticut won #3, Kentucky #8, Louisville #3, Connecticut #4, Duke #5 and Villanova #2. That’s the neighborhood we see ourselves living in, (except we still see ourselves above last year’s champions, who have now passed us). The desire to another national championship is now nearly as great as the desire to win the first one was in 2003. And then we’d like to win another and another, like the schools we think we are as good as have been doing. But the rules say you’ve got to win a second one before you can win a third one and you can only win one at a time. So we’d like to win one this year so we can begin climbing the ladder again.
We’d also like to get a proper send off for Jim Boeheim, the man who has won 989 of those 1,946 games, (51%), whose penultimate year this is supposed to be. (I’ll believe it when I see it.) It was announced that Boeheim would retire after the 2017-18 season when Syracuse voluntarily imposed sanctions on itself as a result of the most recent NCAA investigation. Whether that means the NCAA expects that to happen I don’t know. That decision was made two athletic directors ago and Boeheim avoids the issue. Obviously, if his career is nearing its end, winning another national championship would be a great way of sending him out.
Before you can win a national championship, you have to make it to the Final Four. We’ve done that 6 times. We went once a decade from the 1970’s to the 2000’s. This is the first decade in which we’ve gone to the Final Four twice. The problem is we did it with the wrong teams. Our 2010 team is one of my favorite Syracuse teams ever. I call it the “Noah’s Ark” team- we had two of everything. We had two strong inside players, Arinze Onuaku and Rick Jackson, two strong outside shooters in Wes Johnson and Andy Rautins. Johnson and Kris Joseph were great at driving to the basket. As a bonus, Johnson was a good shot blocker. We had two good point guards in Scoop Jardine and Brandon Triche but neither was the passer Rautins was, the best at feeding the post and also disrupting the other team from the top of the zone. That team could score in the half court and run the break equally well. We didn’t have a shot-blocking center but Onuaku had become excellent at using his bulky body to block the route to the basket- I called him “where drives go to die”. That team became the first Syracuse team to rise to #1 in the polls since the 1980’s, (the 2003 champions were never ranked that high). I still feel we were the best team in the country that year. We lost Onukau to injury in the Big East tournament. We still had a very good team and easily blew through the first two rounds but then ran into Butler, one of the best defensive teams in the country. AO and Rick had given us not only a 1-2 punch inside but they played a great two man game between each other. And they gave the guards two targets when they passed the ball inside. Without AO we only had one. Butler did not have a shot-blocking center and teams tried to beat them by getting the ball inside. We were no different but they made up for the lack by playing the passing lanes. With two inside targets, we might have been successful but with one, we had 8 turnovers trying to get the ball to Jackson. We fell behind but managed to come back and take a late lead, which vanished in the last minute, thanks to a bad call on an out-of- bounds play. And then it was over. But not for Butler, who went on to play a good but not great Duke team for the title and lose when a half-court shot rimmed out at the buzzer. I’ll always believe that our first national championship was the one we surrendered by missing those free throws against Indiana in 1987, our second one was the one we actually won in 2003 and our third was the one we didn’t win because we lost AO in 2010.
Two years later we had a team that might have been even better. This one did have a shot blocking center, Fab Melo, who also had a nack for drawing charges. His blocks and rebounds helped initiate fast breaks, (this was our last SU team that really got out and ran in the grand Syracuse tradition) Kris Joseph and CJ Fair were a fine all-around pair of forwards. Jardine and Triche were now the starting backcourt but formed a trio with Dion Waiters, who played as much as either and was an explosive scorer. James Southerland came off the bench to hit some unreal outside shots. Our fourth string guard was Michael Carter-Williams, who two years later was the NBA Rookie of the Year. Rakeem Christmas, a McDonald’s All-American, was our third string center behind Melo and the always hustling Baye Moussa Keita. This team, playing in what was still a major power conference, went 30-1 during the regular season and 17-1 in conference. The only loss was when Melo was suspended for academic reasons –f or the first time. With him in the line-up, we were undefeated during the regular season. We were beaten in the Big East Tournament by a Cincinnati team that went off from three point range. Then Melo got suspended a second time, (after the NCAA found out that the work that ended his first suspension wasn’t done by Melo). We still made it to the regional finals where we lost to Ohio State in a game marred by 48 foul calls, 28 of which were on us. All the interruptions turned it into a half-court game, which since we lacks a strong inside scorer, put us at a disadvantage against the Buckeyes, who had 6-9 265 Jared Sullinger, who scored 19 points on us on 5 of 9 from the field and 9 of 12 from the line. The national championship that year was won by Kentucky, who that year had probably the best college basketball team of this decade. We traded the #1 ranking with them all year. We’d have been under-dogs against them even with Melo but I would have liked to have had the chance to play them, full strength. We never got the shot. To have two national championship contenders in three years and to lose our starting center just before the tournament began each time was pretty tough to take.
The teams we sent to the Final Four were the 2013 and 2016 teams. The 2013 team had Triche, Carter-Williams, Fair, Southerland, Christmas and Keita and added the oft-injured DaJuan Coleman, the slump-ridden shooting guard Trevor Cooney and promising freshman forward Jerami Grant. They got off to a great 18-1 start but stumbled to a 5-7 finish, the last regular season game being an incredibly dismal 39-61 loss at Georgetown. Somehow, Boeheim got that team turned around buy playing adequate offense and fanatical defense. They fought their way to the BET finals, beating that same Georgetown team 58-55 in the semis before losing to eventual national champion Louisville in the finals. Seth Davis predicted we’d lose to Montana in the first round. We squeaked by 81-34 and Davis famously posed in Syracuse drag on his next show:
We then plowed through California, Indiana and Marquette to get to the Final Four before losing some of that defensive intensity in the first half against Michigan and never quite catching up in the second.
The next year we started 25-0 and reached the #1 ranking again, although the games were so close it seemed clear that that team wasn’t on the level of the 2010 and 2012 powerhouses, as was proven when they collapsed down the stretch to finish 28-6 and go out in the second round. Then came the results of the NCAA investigation and SU’s self-imposed penalty banning the 2015 team from the post season. People said the school was willing to surrender that season because that team wasn’t good enough to do anything in the post season. They finished the regular season at 18-13. 2016 wasn’t a great improvement. We finished the regular season 19-12 – and then lost in the first round of the ACC tournament to go 19-13. Despite this we got selected for the NCAA tournament, which was very controversial. We then proceeded to win our way to another Final Four with some amazing comebacks against Gonzaga and Virginia, (who had beaten us like a drum since we joined the ACC and was doing it again until we slapped on a press, which Boeheim hates to have to do). Once again the coach, (not Boeheim), turned into a pumpkin in the national semi-finals as we lost to North Carolina, then watched Villanova win their second national championship.
I posted that we’d gone to the Final Four twice –but with the wrong teams. Everybody knew what I was talking about. We should have been in the Final Four with the 2010 and 2012 teams. Instead we get there with the 2013 and 2016 teams, neither of which really had the personnel to win a national championship. Actually, that’s been our whole problem all along. Our 1975 Final Four team was unranked. There were no seedings at the time. Our 1987 team was ranked #10 and a #2 seed. Our 1996 was ranked #14 and seeded #4. Our 2003 team was ranked #12 and seeded #3. Our 2013 was ranked #19 and seeded #4 our 2016 team was unranked and seeded #10. None of these teams were supposed to get to the Final Four. Our 1977, 1979, 1980, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 2010 and 2012 teams were all ranked higher than any of our Final Four teams but never made it that far. That’s ten teams. We keep sending the wrong teams to the Final Four!
But that, of course is the nature of the NCAA tournament. It’s like the NBA lottery. Some teams may have more balls in the mix than the others but that doesn’t mean they are going to win. We’ve got another chance to send the right team to the Final Four this year, a team that combines the best features of the 2010 and 2012 teams. This could be “the right team”.
Even if we don’t win it all, this should be a fun team to watch and an enjoyable season. Unfortunately, as Jim Boeheim has said, “all people care about is the NCAA tournament”. We’ve won that once. If that’s all that counts, then the 5th winning program in history has had only one successful season. It’s absurd to look at it that way. I think any season where we: 1) Achieve a #1 ranking; 2) Win or tie for the conference regular season title, (even if it’s unofficial as it is in the ACC), 3) Win the conference tournament or 4) Make the Final Four is a ‘special’ season by SU standards. A national championship would be an historical season. We’ve won or tied for a conference regular season title 10 times and won 5 conference tournament titles, all in different seasons. We’ve reached #1 five times and gone to 6 Final Fours, again never in the same season. There have been 19 ‘special’ seasons in the 37 since the Big East was formed. That’s more fun than having just one adequate year when we won it all. It’s interesting that we never seem to do more than one thing in a season: we’ve won or tied for the regular season title 10 times and won the conference tournament 5 times. We’ve never done both in the same year. We’ve been ranked #1 5 times and gone to the Final Four 6 times. Ditto.
Ironically, the team most fans feel was our most talented ever – 1989- did none of those things. Maybe this year we can have a team strong enough to knock down all the pins. But It’s a mistake to make an ultimate goal a minimum requirement. Or maybe we should just appreciate each team for whatever it accomplished.
It has been our long desire to be considered one of the elite programs of college basketball. We seem to have the credentials We’re the fifth winningest major college program of all time with 1,946 wins and a .692 winning percentage, (both are fifth, behind Kentucky, Kansas, North Carolina and Duke – and ahead of UCLA). We’ve had 46 consecutive winning seasons, the longest streak in the country and second longest of all time, (UCLA had 54). We are 8th with 36 NCAA tournament appearances and also 8th with 65 victories. But there is one statistic that we lag behind in and it’s the most important one of all, at least in the minds of college basketball fans. We’ve won 1 national championship. Actually that’s wrong, because the Helms Foundation retroactively awarded two Syracuse teams, (1918 and 1926) “national championships (they were awarded in 1942). But most fans either aren’t aware of such titles or don’t care: the NCAA basketball tournament, which began in 1939 is the popular idea of a national championship.
That one national championship sure was fun and it was the happy ending of a long stretch during which we were good enough to dream of it but never achieved the dream. I’d been following SU basketball since the Dave Bing Era, nearly 40 years before we finally won. I remember the best thing about it was just reminding myself that we finally won every five minutes. But that one title ties us with the following schools: Oregon, Wisconsin, Stanford, Wyoming, Utah, Holy Cross, CCNY, LaSalle, California, Ohio State, Loyola (Chicago), Texas-El Paso, (formerly Texas Western), Marquette, Georgetown, Michigan, UNLV, Arkansas, Arizona and Maryland. There are some good basketball schools in that group but we don’t really see ourselves as equals with them, (and there’s one we definitely don’t want to be equated with).
We are the last national championship winning school to have won their only championship on that occasion, (Florida had never won before 2006 but they won their second title the next year. Since we won, Connecticut won their second championship, North Carolina won their 4th, Florida won their two, Kansas won their third, North Carolina won #5, Duke won #4, Connecticut won #3, Kentucky #8, Louisville #3, Connecticut #4, Duke #5 and Villanova #2. That’s the neighborhood we see ourselves living in, (except we still see ourselves above last year’s champions, who have now passed us). The desire to another national championship is now nearly as great as the desire to win the first one was in 2003. And then we’d like to win another and another, like the schools we think we are as good as have been doing. But the rules say you’ve got to win a second one before you can win a third one and you can only win one at a time. So we’d like to win one this year so we can begin climbing the ladder again.
We’d also like to get a proper send off for Jim Boeheim, the man who has won 989 of those 1,946 games, (51%), whose penultimate year this is supposed to be. (I’ll believe it when I see it.) It was announced that Boeheim would retire after the 2017-18 season when Syracuse voluntarily imposed sanctions on itself as a result of the most recent NCAA investigation. Whether that means the NCAA expects that to happen I don’t know. That decision was made two athletic directors ago and Boeheim avoids the issue. Obviously, if his career is nearing its end, winning another national championship would be a great way of sending him out.
Before you can win a national championship, you have to make it to the Final Four. We’ve done that 6 times. We went once a decade from the 1970’s to the 2000’s. This is the first decade in which we’ve gone to the Final Four twice. The problem is we did it with the wrong teams. Our 2010 team is one of my favorite Syracuse teams ever. I call it the “Noah’s Ark” team- we had two of everything. We had two strong inside players, Arinze Onuaku and Rick Jackson, two strong outside shooters in Wes Johnson and Andy Rautins. Johnson and Kris Joseph were great at driving to the basket. As a bonus, Johnson was a good shot blocker. We had two good point guards in Scoop Jardine and Brandon Triche but neither was the passer Rautins was, the best at feeding the post and also disrupting the other team from the top of the zone. That team could score in the half court and run the break equally well. We didn’t have a shot-blocking center but Onuaku had become excellent at using his bulky body to block the route to the basket- I called him “where drives go to die”. That team became the first Syracuse team to rise to #1 in the polls since the 1980’s, (the 2003 champions were never ranked that high). I still feel we were the best team in the country that year. We lost Onukau to injury in the Big East tournament. We still had a very good team and easily blew through the first two rounds but then ran into Butler, one of the best defensive teams in the country. AO and Rick had given us not only a 1-2 punch inside but they played a great two man game between each other. And they gave the guards two targets when they passed the ball inside. Without AO we only had one. Butler did not have a shot-blocking center and teams tried to beat them by getting the ball inside. We were no different but they made up for the lack by playing the passing lanes. With two inside targets, we might have been successful but with one, we had 8 turnovers trying to get the ball to Jackson. We fell behind but managed to come back and take a late lead, which vanished in the last minute, thanks to a bad call on an out-of- bounds play. And then it was over. But not for Butler, who went on to play a good but not great Duke team for the title and lose when a half-court shot rimmed out at the buzzer. I’ll always believe that our first national championship was the one we surrendered by missing those free throws against Indiana in 1987, our second one was the one we actually won in 2003 and our third was the one we didn’t win because we lost AO in 2010.
Two years later we had a team that might have been even better. This one did have a shot blocking center, Fab Melo, who also had a nack for drawing charges. His blocks and rebounds helped initiate fast breaks, (this was our last SU team that really got out and ran in the grand Syracuse tradition) Kris Joseph and CJ Fair were a fine all-around pair of forwards. Jardine and Triche were now the starting backcourt but formed a trio with Dion Waiters, who played as much as either and was an explosive scorer. James Southerland came off the bench to hit some unreal outside shots. Our fourth string guard was Michael Carter-Williams, who two years later was the NBA Rookie of the Year. Rakeem Christmas, a McDonald’s All-American, was our third string center behind Melo and the always hustling Baye Moussa Keita. This team, playing in what was still a major power conference, went 30-1 during the regular season and 17-1 in conference. The only loss was when Melo was suspended for academic reasons –f or the first time. With him in the line-up, we were undefeated during the regular season. We were beaten in the Big East Tournament by a Cincinnati team that went off from three point range. Then Melo got suspended a second time, (after the NCAA found out that the work that ended his first suspension wasn’t done by Melo). We still made it to the regional finals where we lost to Ohio State in a game marred by 48 foul calls, 28 of which were on us. All the interruptions turned it into a half-court game, which since we lacks a strong inside scorer, put us at a disadvantage against the Buckeyes, who had 6-9 265 Jared Sullinger, who scored 19 points on us on 5 of 9 from the field and 9 of 12 from the line. The national championship that year was won by Kentucky, who that year had probably the best college basketball team of this decade. We traded the #1 ranking with them all year. We’d have been under-dogs against them even with Melo but I would have liked to have had the chance to play them, full strength. We never got the shot. To have two national championship contenders in three years and to lose our starting center just before the tournament began each time was pretty tough to take.
The teams we sent to the Final Four were the 2013 and 2016 teams. The 2013 team had Triche, Carter-Williams, Fair, Southerland, Christmas and Keita and added the oft-injured DaJuan Coleman, the slump-ridden shooting guard Trevor Cooney and promising freshman forward Jerami Grant. They got off to a great 18-1 start but stumbled to a 5-7 finish, the last regular season game being an incredibly dismal 39-61 loss at Georgetown. Somehow, Boeheim got that team turned around buy playing adequate offense and fanatical defense. They fought their way to the BET finals, beating that same Georgetown team 58-55 in the semis before losing to eventual national champion Louisville in the finals. Seth Davis predicted we’d lose to Montana in the first round. We squeaked by 81-34 and Davis famously posed in Syracuse drag on his next show:
We then plowed through California, Indiana and Marquette to get to the Final Four before losing some of that defensive intensity in the first half against Michigan and never quite catching up in the second.
The next year we started 25-0 and reached the #1 ranking again, although the games were so close it seemed clear that that team wasn’t on the level of the 2010 and 2012 powerhouses, as was proven when they collapsed down the stretch to finish 28-6 and go out in the second round. Then came the results of the NCAA investigation and SU’s self-imposed penalty banning the 2015 team from the post season. People said the school was willing to surrender that season because that team wasn’t good enough to do anything in the post season. They finished the regular season at 18-13. 2016 wasn’t a great improvement. We finished the regular season 19-12 – and then lost in the first round of the ACC tournament to go 19-13. Despite this we got selected for the NCAA tournament, which was very controversial. We then proceeded to win our way to another Final Four with some amazing comebacks against Gonzaga and Virginia, (who had beaten us like a drum since we joined the ACC and was doing it again until we slapped on a press, which Boeheim hates to have to do). Once again the coach, (not Boeheim), turned into a pumpkin in the national semi-finals as we lost to North Carolina, then watched Villanova win their second national championship.
I posted that we’d gone to the Final Four twice –but with the wrong teams. Everybody knew what I was talking about. We should have been in the Final Four with the 2010 and 2012 teams. Instead we get there with the 2013 and 2016 teams, neither of which really had the personnel to win a national championship. Actually, that’s been our whole problem all along. Our 1975 Final Four team was unranked. There were no seedings at the time. Our 1987 team was ranked #10 and a #2 seed. Our 1996 was ranked #14 and seeded #4. Our 2003 team was ranked #12 and seeded #3. Our 2013 was ranked #19 and seeded #4 our 2016 team was unranked and seeded #10. None of these teams were supposed to get to the Final Four. Our 1977, 1979, 1980, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 2010 and 2012 teams were all ranked higher than any of our Final Four teams but never made it that far. That’s ten teams. We keep sending the wrong teams to the Final Four!
But that, of course is the nature of the NCAA tournament. It’s like the NBA lottery. Some teams may have more balls in the mix than the others but that doesn’t mean they are going to win. We’ve got another chance to send the right team to the Final Four this year, a team that combines the best features of the 2010 and 2012 teams. This could be “the right team”.
Even if we don’t win it all, this should be a fun team to watch and an enjoyable season. Unfortunately, as Jim Boeheim has said, “all people care about is the NCAA tournament”. We’ve won that once. If that’s all that counts, then the 5th winning program in history has had only one successful season. It’s absurd to look at it that way. I think any season where we: 1) Achieve a #1 ranking; 2) Win or tie for the conference regular season title, (even if it’s unofficial as it is in the ACC), 3) Win the conference tournament or 4) Make the Final Four is a ‘special’ season by SU standards. A national championship would be an historical season. We’ve won or tied for a conference regular season title 10 times and won 5 conference tournament titles, all in different seasons. We’ve reached #1 five times and gone to 6 Final Fours, again never in the same season. There have been 19 ‘special’ seasons in the 37 since the Big East was formed. That’s more fun than having just one adequate year when we won it all. It’s interesting that we never seem to do more than one thing in a season: we’ve won or tied for the regular season title 10 times and won the conference tournament 5 times. We’ve never done both in the same year. We’ve been ranked #1 5 times and gone to the Final Four 6 times. Ditto.
Ironically, the team most fans feel was our most talented ever – 1989- did none of those things. Maybe this year we can have a team strong enough to knock down all the pins. But It’s a mistake to make an ultimate goal a minimum requirement. Or maybe we should just appreciate each team for whatever it accomplished.
