At the end of the seaosn I do a "Downside of JB" to got with the "Upside". Some excerpts from last' year's edition:
- Jim Boeheim holds the NCAA record for 20 win seasons. Back when teams played less than 30 games a year, that was the standard of excellence. But these days, teams play 30+ games a year and winning 20 is still good but, not by itself, excellent. In 34 years, Jim Boeheim has 4 thirty win teams. Tom Izzo has 3 in 15 years. Rick Pitino has 5 in 23 years. John Calipari has 7 in 19 years. Roy Williams has 7 in 22 years. Jim Calhoun, who once had a six year stretch at Northeastern during which he went 74-75, has eight 30 win seasons. Mike Krzyzewski has twelve 30 win years. We are very good at being good but not so great at being great.
- Jim Calhoun has now won his third national championship, tying him with Bobby Knight. Mike Krzyzewski has four, as does Rupp. Branch McCracken, Hank Iba, Phil Woolpert, Ed Jucker, Denny Crum, Dean Smith, Roy Williams and Billy Donovan have two. Are they all better coaches than Jim Boeheim? Jimmy is tied with Howard Hobson, Bud Foster, John Bunn, Everett Shelton, Vadal Peterson, Doggie Julian, Nat Holman, Phog Allen, Ken Loeffler, Frank McGuire, Pete Newell, Fred Taylor, Don Haskins, Norm Sloan, Al McGuire, Joe B. Hall, Jud Heathcote, Jim Valvano, John Thompson II, Rollie Massimino, Larry Brown, Steve Fisher, Jerry Tarkanian, Nolan Richardson, Jim Harrick, Lute Olson, Tubby Smith, Tom Izzo, Gary Williams and Bill Self That’s not a bad group but it’s time to move up in class.
- I mentioned we’ve had 12 Top Ten teams under Jim Boeheim. That’s very good but other teams have had more. North Carolina has 22 top ten teams in that period, Kentucky 21, Duke 21 and Kansas 18. Are those schools really better positioned to attract talent than we are? The probation probably hurt us in that regard. In some recent years the problem has seemed to be a tendency to get worse as the season goes along. The 1998-99 started 6-0, then went 15-12. In 1999-00 it was 19-0, then 7-6, in 2000-01: 15-1, 10-8; 2001-02: 16-2, 7-11; 2003-04: 13-1, 10-7; 2004-05: 20-1, 7-6; 2005-06 15-2, 8-10; 2006-07 15-4, 9-7; 2007-08 12-3, 9-11. In 2008-2009 were on our way to such an ending: 16-1, then 3-7, but, as JB said “didn’t get destroyed” and rallied to a 9-2 finish. The other team in recent years that didn’t fade badly at the end was the national title team: 16-3, 14-2. In 2009-10 we were 24-1 and then went 6-4. This year it was 18-0, 8-7. Eleven fade-outs in thirteen years is more than a trend. And it’s not just the switch from the non-conference to the conference season. The slides have begun at different times. Is it because JB plays his starters too much? Is it that he doesn’t make strategical adjustments as the season goes on, instead becoming more conservative? Does he have trouble handling players whose confidence is wavering? I’m not sure but good teams are supposed to get better as the season progresses.
- SU owns all the Big East records for total wins in the regular season and the BET and almost anything else you want to compute over 31 years. But we’ve never really been the dominant team in our own conference. Georgetown was the dominant team in the 80’s with 4 regular season titles and 6 BET titles and a 19-8 record against us. SU won 3 regular season titles and 2 BET titles but they were clearly behind the Hoyas for the decade. Georgetown had wins of 17, 13, 17, 11 and 27 points against us. We had a 14 point win in the ’81 BET but otherwise never beat them by more than 7 in the decade. They had winning streaks against us of 4, 3, 3, 3 and 6 games. And just as soon as we overcame them, here came Jim Calhoun’s Huskies, who have won 9 regular team titles and 6 BET titles to our 5 and 3 and who have a 24-18 record against us in that time. They’ve won games by 11, 11, 18, 12, 21, 15, 14, 13, 28, 18, 23 and 14 points, (two of those being over our national title team). We’ve had 7 double figure wins over them in the same period, the highest margin 17 points, that one coming when they had three starters from their national title team out and another when their second title team wasn’t using Okafor. Two others were in 2006-07, when they were down. Our record in BET finals against the Hoyas and Huskies is 1-8. And in recent years we’ve had a big problem with the Pitt Panthers, who have won 13 of their last 16 against us, and Louisville who has won 7 in a row. Nobody should be able to beat us that often. The tough, physical teams seem to intimidate SU. In all, we’ve won 8 Big East regular season titles but only two outright: 1990-91 and 2009-10. And our post-season record in those years was 2-4.
- Part of SU’s problem is the strange inability to achieve multiple goals in the same season. We gotten at least a share of the Big East Regular season title in 1980, 1986, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1998, 2000, 2003 and 2010. We’ve won the BET in 1981, 1988, 1992, 2005 and 2006. We’ve gone to the final four in 1987, 1996 and 2003. The only years we did two of those things were 1987 and 2003 and in both cases we just shared the regular season title, lost in the BET and then went to the final four. In neither case were we favored to go that far. The only SU teams to be a #1 seed in the NCAA tournament were the 1980 and 2010 teams, 30 years apart, both of which lost in the Sweet 16.
- The Sweet 16 seems to be the Ides of March for Jim Boeheim’s SU teams. They are 19-4 in the round of 64, 15-9 in the round of 32, 4-11 in the Sweet 16 and 7-3 after that with the losses coming by 1, 3 and 9 points and two of them in the national title game. The Orange needs to develop a “sweet” tooth.
