SWC75
Bored Historian
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(This is the annual preview that I E-mail to friends and relatives, some of whom don't live in this area, thus the extended exposition. I've been working on it since the LeMoyne game so, other than an "Update" I did for the Lehigh game, my observations date from then.)
Last year’s SU Media Guide had a picture of Jim Boeheim frowning on it. This one has a picture of him smiling. That’s an improvement, although I recognize that smile as the wry grin he gives the officials when they make a dubious call against his team. Both images were appropriate.
Last year, after a tremendous run of five seasons in which we achieved a number one ranking in three of them, we had a rebuilding year with uncertainty at three different positons. We had our fourth point guard in four years and the second straight freshman. Kaleb Joseph proved not to be Tyler Ennis, who had jumped to the pros after a great freshman season. He wasn’t physically strong enough. He’d been more of a 2 guard in high school and his high school whirling dervish moves looked good on You-Tube but not in games. Our forwards were freshman Chris McCullough, a 5 star prospect at power forward we’d been hearing about for two years. People said he would be our best recruit since Carmelo Anthony, (hint…hint). Then there was Tyler Roberson, who been, in JB’s words, “not ready to help us” the previous season. McCullough played well for eight games against lesser opposition, then poorly for eight games and the tore his ACL. He was out for the rest of the year. We assumed that meant he was not going to be “one and done” but he announced for the NBA anyway so those 16 games were his entire career at Syracuse. (I’ve given up trying to figure out whether a guy “is ready” for the NBA or not. It’s just not a meaningful concept.) Roberson then became the power forward and Michael Gbinije, who had been a jack of all trades and master of none, became the small forward.
That left us looking to the center and shooting guard positons for consistency and leadership. That’s a bad situation. Modern centers tend to be guys who don’t put up big numbers. They are supposed to play defense and rebound. Any points they get tend to be off their rebounding. Our center, Rakeem Christmas, wasn’t even much of a rebounder. He’d been strictly a defender, sharing the position with Baye Moussa Keita. They shut down the middle in SU’s run to the Final Four in 2013. Christmas showed signs of being a guy who could make a dent in a box score late in the 2014 season but nobody expected big things from him.
Trevor Cooney had struggled mightily with his shooting, which is bad for a shooting guard. He’d shown he could shoot when left open, dropping 33 on Notre Dame two years ago. He shot .375 from the arc that year, probably around the minimum you’d want your best three point shooter to make. The problem was, he was our only consistent outside threat and every coach made it a big part of their game plan to make sure someone was chasing Cooney around the whole game. It worked and he shot only .313 last year, either with a hand in his face or rushing a shot before the hand got there. It’s hard to lead a team if you aren’t consistently productive and neither Christmas or Cooney seemed the type to provide those qualities.
And that’s not unusual for their positons: much of your production comes from the troika of the point guard and the two forward positons and these were our uncertain positons. Kaleb Joseph struggled all year with his shot, his defense and his decision-making. Gbinije helped a lot by having a fabulous February: he was scoring inside and out, rebounding and playing good defense. But he was also playing 40 minutes a game, more in overtime games. By March he was worn down and his production fell off. Tyler Roberson spent most of the year trying to figure things out. But he came on strong in several games at the end of the season.
But the thing that saved the season was that Rakeem Christmas, improbably, became the team’s star player. He showed a dazzling display of inside moves, able to attack the basket from all directions. He became a ferocious rebounder. He was still a good defender but had to lay back on defense precisely due to his new-found importance on offense and also because, with McCullough out, our only back-up center was Chinoso Obokoh, a Nigerian emigre who was just learning the game. But Rak wound up averaging 17.5 points and 9.1 rebounds a game, up from 5.8/5.1 the previous year. Without his massive improvement, it surely would have been SU’s first losing season since the 1960’s, (and yes, I’m old enough to remember the last one). As it was, we wound up 18-13 overall and 9-9 in the toughest conference in the country. The overall record was the second worst in the Jim Boeheim Era, (we were 16-13 in 1981-82 and 19-13 in 1996-97: every other JB team has won at least 20 games).
Boeheim: “I think we can bounce back. 9-9 last year was good considering all the circumstances. Last year we had a freshman point guard, inexperience at a lot of positons and we lost McCullough. The season was probably successful when you look at those things. We’re in a positon for a much better season this year. “
Before I go on to this year, let’s talk about the “circumstances”, because they were a bigger story than the basketball last season and they will continue into this season. We are getting a reputation as a program that’s often in trouble and JB even moreso, so I’ll start with some background.
In 1991 Alexander Wolff and Armen Keteyian came out with a book called “Raw Recruits”, an expose of college basketball recruiting. One of the characters they discussed was a “street agent” named Rob Johnson, who served as an intermediary between top New York City recruits and college coaches who wanted them on their team. Johnson, like many others, was making money by inculcating himself into the lives of recruits as an “advisor” while taking money from colleges to steer their charges toward their schools. Often they were dealing with multiple schools Johnson at one point pretended to be SU assistant Wayne Morgan. He bought SU paraphernalia for his kids and got them tickets to games. He was observed sitting behind the SU bench in an area reserved for VIPs. The fact that these “agents” were ubiquitous in college basketball at the time and that all the top programs had to deal with them because they got to the players first was implied but didn’t make the headlines.
The local paper, the Post Standard, decided to investigate the SU basketball program in a series of articles. The approach they took was not to see SU as a typical basketball power: what does it take be a power and stay one? Instead they got out the NCAA rules and reported every single thing they could stretch to be considered a violation of those rules in finger-waggling style. It was all about what SU was doing wrong, not what was wrong with college athletics. Most of the accusations were absurd: Billy Owens, the #1 recruit in the country, after he’d decided to end the recruiting process at last by choosing SU, dunked a basketball in celebration. That was “an illegal try-out.” An outpatient from Hutchings Psychiatric Center showed up at practice and challenged Stevie Thompson to a one-on-one contest. Boeheim allowed it for laughs. Another “illegal try-out”. A player had lived with a ‘booster’ family and impregnated the family’s daughter. In addition to a violation of NCAA rules there was an implication of statutory rape. Except the living with a booster family was allowed under NCAA rules at the time, (they later changed the rules and SU stopped the practice), and both the player and the daughter were under age. A player who had transferred out, disgruntled over playing time, charged that he’d had a grade changed “by a female professor”. He had no female professors. A former player from the Dave Bing era, George Hicker, who had become a successful businessman, was accused of employing LeRoy Ellis, the father of LeRon Ellis, as an incentive for LeRon to transfer to SU. The paper never returned Hicker’s phone calls so he took an ad out to explain that he did not employ the senior Ellis: he employed the security firm Ellis had already been working for nine years, (long before Ellis even went to Kentucky), as a security guard at another site.
There were some clear but small violations: An auto dealer named Bill Rapp had provided players with summer jobs, (not illegal) but had them paint the same wall in his dealership over and over again, suggesting that they were not ‘real’ jobs. (I assume the paintbrushes were real.) He also was known to put $50 bills in their lockers at Christmas. But the big thing was Rob Johnson.
The NCAA investigated. The University severed their relationship with Johnson, (who began steering players elsewhere, including SU’s Tony Scott). They decided SU should be unable to play in the NCAA tournament in 1993 and docked them a couple of scholarships. Wolff recently wrote in SI that Jim Boeheim had “skated” on the allegations. I remember hearing that the NCAA simply felt that they needed to justify two years of investigations by punishing SU in some way. Since then the street agents have been mostly put out of business to be replaced by high school and AAU coaches: many players go to a prep school with whom certain colleges have a cozy relationship. But that’s all ‘legal’. It’s never going to be a squeaky clean process when the stakes are high.
Meanwhile, Boeheim’s assistant, the ever-helpful Bernie Fine, was volunteering to teach kids at a local playground. His interest in the kids went beyond that. He became a father figure for them and even took them on some road trips. He also arranged for them to have the job of retrieving balls on court as the team went through their shooting drills before games. The kids who did this were called “ball boys”. It wasn’t a permanent job like a baseball ball boy: different kids did this on different nights. For individual kids, it was usually a one-time thing that people associated with the basketball program could arrange.
In 2005 a couple of these boys, now grown men, accused Fine of having molested them. They did so after asking him for money, which he refused to pay. The University investigated the case and concluded no action needed to be taken against Fine. Then came the Sandusky scandal at Penn State. ESPN had known about the Fine allegations but had chosen not to do a story on it until the Sandusky charges made coaches molesting children big news. Then, (in 2011), they did an “Outside the Lines” report on the Fine case. One additional piece of information they had, which the University said they did not have, was a tape recording of a 2002 phone conversation between Fine’s wife Laurie and one of the accusers in which she said she knew about her husband's behavior,” but felt powerless to stop it In a surreal moment, that phone conversation (from 2002) was played on the NBA Nightly News.” The actual text of it did not make it explicitly clear what the misbehavior was or when it had occurred, (the accusers might not have been minors at the time).
All the national publicity described the boys as “former Syracuse ball boys”, suggesting the image that Syracuse must have been complicit in drawing Fines ‘victims’ into his orbit by giving them jobs as ball boys. Jim Boeheim said he’s seen Fine’s charges around, including on the road but was unaware of any abuse. He accused the accusers of being out for money. They then sued him- for money, of course- for saying that, even after he’d apologized. A third accuser surfaced, only to with his claim, saying he’d never even met Fine. He just wanted the publicity. All that happened in the end was that Fine was fired by the University. He was never prosecuted under the statute of limitations but also because it was never clear exactly what had gone on or if anything could be proven against him. But the program had another black eye and we were running out of eyes.
It had been rumored for some time that the NCAA was again investigating Syracuse. But it had nothing to do with Bernie Fine. The investigation had actually started back in 2007. Since we heard nothing for such a long period of time, I assume either they had found nothing or that it was such a minor item their investigation was extremely low priority. A friend confessed his angst over the investigation. I told him I didn’t have any: if it were anything to worry about it wouldn’t have taken this long. Boy was I wrong.
There was a new emphasis on obeying the rules after years of no more than minor sanctions. I had the impression that the NCAA decided they were shooting themselves in the foot by putting their major drawing cards on probation. But they were ready to in another direction, especially with reports of a major problem at North Carolina, where players had been placed in an African Studies Program that was apparently just set up to keep them eligible. They didn’t have to do the course work or even show up. There was also a new emphasis on a coach taking responsibility for everything going in a program.
They were investigating three things. They started investigating one of them and the other two were added when they occurred or were revealed. The NCAA does not have a drug policy. But it has a rule saying that if a school had a drug policy, it must administer it evenly, without giving any preference to athletes. Syracuse had suspended a couple of players for the opening game of the 2005 NCAA tournament for smoking marijuana. We got beat by Vermont, in a famous upset. But there were other players who used weed and they had not been suspended or their parents told of their misdeeds. The NCAA saw this as a failure to administer a set policy. SU said that they were handling each case on its own merits and had concluded that suspensions and informing the parents was not necessary in those other cases because it was a one-time thing. The policy was intended to be flexible.
While the NCAA was taking forever to look into this, it was revealed that an employee of a YMCA branch charged with supervising players, (mostly football players) form the university who were working there as interns as part of their course work for a course called “Child and Family Studies” than many athletes took, had improperly reported on their activities. Some had not done what they were assigned to do as interns. Some had been employed by the YMCA to help set up charity events and promotional activities, for which they were paid. The YMCA guy reported they had completed their course requirements and did not report that they’d been paid for their services at the events because he didn’t want to get them in trouble. He’d also provided them with free transportation and meals and hadn’t reported that.
While the NCAA was taking forever to look into that, the Big Thing happened. The Big Thing was Fabricio de Melo a 7 foot 270 pound Brazilian who was a key part of our 2012 team that achieved the best numerical record we’ve ever had here: 34-3, including a a 30-1 regular season. The one loss came when Melo was suspended, so we might have had an undefeated regular season, an amazing accomplishment in a power conference.
The problem was Melo could barely speak English; much less do college course work. He was suspended because he hadn’t done enough to complete one course he needed to pass to stay eligible. It was arranged with the professor that he could be given a passing grade if he submitted a biographical essay of a certain length. He did so and was reinstated after a two game suspension. Then, in a huge gut punch to the team and its fans, he was suspended again just prior to the 2012 NCAA tournament. We couldn’t figure out how he could academically eligible, then ineligible, then eligible again, then ineligible again, all in the same semester. It turns out he could do it by having somebody else write his essay. Apparently it was written, at least in part, by a receptionist in the athletic department after a meeting conducted by Dr. Daryl Gross , the athletic director, who came here after having been at USC during the Reggie Bush Era, where keeping players eligible by any means you could think of was par for the course. The submission of the paper ended the first suspension. The finding that Melo didn’t write it produced the second one. And it produced the shjt hitting the fan.
Syracuse knew it was in real trouble for this one and decided on a pre-emptive strike. They announced a self-imposed post season ban, which meant the team had to play out the season knowing head of time that they weren’t going anywhere. The University fired, (sorry, reassigned) Gross. They fired the “Director of Basketball Operations”, (no that’s not Boeheim: he just coaches the team). They did not fire Boeheim, who retained a measure of deniability because he was not at the meeting, although I don’t know how plausible that deniability was as the Director of Basketball Operation’s office is right next to his and he obviously was concerned over his player’s eligibility. But maybe he was not invited to that meeting because the participants knew he would not have gone along with their plan. I know he’s always taken the positon on injured players: “If they, (the team doctors), say he can play, I’ll play him. If they don’t, I won’t.” I suspect that’s also his positon on academics. He’s going to do his job, which is to coach the team and he expects other to do their jobs. What they did instead was to put a date on JB’s retirement: he’s going to coach the team for another three years and then Mike Hopkins, who will coach the team for those nine games Boeheim is suspended, will finally take over as head coach after years of being the heir apparent. That is, if the new athletic director, Mark Coyle from Boise State, will go along with it, (so far he says he will).
The problem is the NCAA’s expectation that head coaches will full responsibility for everything that goes on in their entire program, not just the team itself. I suspect this is “old school” vs. “new school” thinking but the National Association of Basketball Coaches agreed and Boeheim says he supports the concept. Despite SU’s self -flagellation, the NCAA added a nine game suspension for Boeheim at the beginning of the conference season, (he can’t have any contact with the team or coaching staff during that time), a scholarship reduction from 13, (the normal limit) to 10 for four years. And 108 of Boeheim’s wins have been “vacated”. I have yet to see a breakdown of what wins or which of the violations produced each vacation, (would that be the word?), although one article said they were from 2004-2007 and 2011-12, which would seem to indicate it was about the drug policy and Fab Melo. That means that Boeheim, who was second all-time behind Mike Krzyzewski with 966 wins was dropped to 858 “official” wins, 6th place among major college coaches. More importantly, (to me) is that Syracuse’s steak of 45 consecutive winning seasons, (saved by Rakeem Christmas’s terrific year), no longer exists and we can’t catch UCLA’s all-time record of 54 straight, at least not in my lifetime. The good news there is that this record doesn’t appear in the NCAA record books. I would think that means that it’s not an “official” record and I would think we could count wins that are not official toward it. So maybe the streak is intact but I guess we aren’t supposed to say so.
What is not intact is Syracuse basketball’s reputation. I’ve heard us described as a “rogue” or “outlaw” program in the national media and Boeheim as a “serial cheater”. If those things were true we could certainly have done a better job of it and gotten a few more national championships out of it. I continue to maintain that the real problem is the assumption that athletes are normal college students and should be treated like any other student. Most of them at this level, in the major sports, are trying to get to the NBA or NFL. We should be acknowledging that basketball and football is not an extra-curricular activity to them and that they are training here for a profession. Make it an academic major and skip the phony courses. Give them at least a cost of living stipend so they wouldn’t have to paint Bill Rapp’s wall while reading about all the money the schools are making off their efforts. What kind of values are we teaching them by having them pretend to be something they are not?
In the meantime, if we don’t have dirty fingers, we at least have dirty shoes. We’re on probation for five years, not in the sense of being banned for the post season, (we can again play in the ACC and NCAA tournaments) but it means we’ll be walking on eggshells for the next few years: another violation could have more serious consequences. (That limited what we could do back in the 90’s and it took years before our recruiting got back to normal.) Walk-ons won’t be able to get scholarships, which means something to Boeheim who was, himself a walk-on who earned a scholarship here. We’ll have to make the scholarships we have count by making sure we get the best available players, not projects. But it may prove easy to out-recruit us because the other schools who want them will not be on probation.
Boeheim is appealing his sanction but the NCAA takes so long to do anything we may not hear the results until the punishment has been served. It will be interesting to see what happens at North Carolina which seems on the surface to be a much bigger scandal involving many more players, or at Louisville, where they’ve been accused of using strippers and prostitutes to recruit players. But who knows when we’ll hear anything about that?
Last year’s SU Media Guide had a picture of Jim Boeheim frowning on it. This one has a picture of him smiling. That’s an improvement, although I recognize that smile as the wry grin he gives the officials when they make a dubious call against his team. Both images were appropriate.
Last year, after a tremendous run of five seasons in which we achieved a number one ranking in three of them, we had a rebuilding year with uncertainty at three different positons. We had our fourth point guard in four years and the second straight freshman. Kaleb Joseph proved not to be Tyler Ennis, who had jumped to the pros after a great freshman season. He wasn’t physically strong enough. He’d been more of a 2 guard in high school and his high school whirling dervish moves looked good on You-Tube but not in games. Our forwards were freshman Chris McCullough, a 5 star prospect at power forward we’d been hearing about for two years. People said he would be our best recruit since Carmelo Anthony, (hint…hint). Then there was Tyler Roberson, who been, in JB’s words, “not ready to help us” the previous season. McCullough played well for eight games against lesser opposition, then poorly for eight games and the tore his ACL. He was out for the rest of the year. We assumed that meant he was not going to be “one and done” but he announced for the NBA anyway so those 16 games were his entire career at Syracuse. (I’ve given up trying to figure out whether a guy “is ready” for the NBA or not. It’s just not a meaningful concept.) Roberson then became the power forward and Michael Gbinije, who had been a jack of all trades and master of none, became the small forward.
That left us looking to the center and shooting guard positons for consistency and leadership. That’s a bad situation. Modern centers tend to be guys who don’t put up big numbers. They are supposed to play defense and rebound. Any points they get tend to be off their rebounding. Our center, Rakeem Christmas, wasn’t even much of a rebounder. He’d been strictly a defender, sharing the position with Baye Moussa Keita. They shut down the middle in SU’s run to the Final Four in 2013. Christmas showed signs of being a guy who could make a dent in a box score late in the 2014 season but nobody expected big things from him.
Trevor Cooney had struggled mightily with his shooting, which is bad for a shooting guard. He’d shown he could shoot when left open, dropping 33 on Notre Dame two years ago. He shot .375 from the arc that year, probably around the minimum you’d want your best three point shooter to make. The problem was, he was our only consistent outside threat and every coach made it a big part of their game plan to make sure someone was chasing Cooney around the whole game. It worked and he shot only .313 last year, either with a hand in his face or rushing a shot before the hand got there. It’s hard to lead a team if you aren’t consistently productive and neither Christmas or Cooney seemed the type to provide those qualities.
And that’s not unusual for their positons: much of your production comes from the troika of the point guard and the two forward positons and these were our uncertain positons. Kaleb Joseph struggled all year with his shot, his defense and his decision-making. Gbinije helped a lot by having a fabulous February: he was scoring inside and out, rebounding and playing good defense. But he was also playing 40 minutes a game, more in overtime games. By March he was worn down and his production fell off. Tyler Roberson spent most of the year trying to figure things out. But he came on strong in several games at the end of the season.
But the thing that saved the season was that Rakeem Christmas, improbably, became the team’s star player. He showed a dazzling display of inside moves, able to attack the basket from all directions. He became a ferocious rebounder. He was still a good defender but had to lay back on defense precisely due to his new-found importance on offense and also because, with McCullough out, our only back-up center was Chinoso Obokoh, a Nigerian emigre who was just learning the game. But Rak wound up averaging 17.5 points and 9.1 rebounds a game, up from 5.8/5.1 the previous year. Without his massive improvement, it surely would have been SU’s first losing season since the 1960’s, (and yes, I’m old enough to remember the last one). As it was, we wound up 18-13 overall and 9-9 in the toughest conference in the country. The overall record was the second worst in the Jim Boeheim Era, (we were 16-13 in 1981-82 and 19-13 in 1996-97: every other JB team has won at least 20 games).
Boeheim: “I think we can bounce back. 9-9 last year was good considering all the circumstances. Last year we had a freshman point guard, inexperience at a lot of positons and we lost McCullough. The season was probably successful when you look at those things. We’re in a positon for a much better season this year. “
Before I go on to this year, let’s talk about the “circumstances”, because they were a bigger story than the basketball last season and they will continue into this season. We are getting a reputation as a program that’s often in trouble and JB even moreso, so I’ll start with some background.
In 1991 Alexander Wolff and Armen Keteyian came out with a book called “Raw Recruits”, an expose of college basketball recruiting. One of the characters they discussed was a “street agent” named Rob Johnson, who served as an intermediary between top New York City recruits and college coaches who wanted them on their team. Johnson, like many others, was making money by inculcating himself into the lives of recruits as an “advisor” while taking money from colleges to steer their charges toward their schools. Often they were dealing with multiple schools Johnson at one point pretended to be SU assistant Wayne Morgan. He bought SU paraphernalia for his kids and got them tickets to games. He was observed sitting behind the SU bench in an area reserved for VIPs. The fact that these “agents” were ubiquitous in college basketball at the time and that all the top programs had to deal with them because they got to the players first was implied but didn’t make the headlines.
The local paper, the Post Standard, decided to investigate the SU basketball program in a series of articles. The approach they took was not to see SU as a typical basketball power: what does it take be a power and stay one? Instead they got out the NCAA rules and reported every single thing they could stretch to be considered a violation of those rules in finger-waggling style. It was all about what SU was doing wrong, not what was wrong with college athletics. Most of the accusations were absurd: Billy Owens, the #1 recruit in the country, after he’d decided to end the recruiting process at last by choosing SU, dunked a basketball in celebration. That was “an illegal try-out.” An outpatient from Hutchings Psychiatric Center showed up at practice and challenged Stevie Thompson to a one-on-one contest. Boeheim allowed it for laughs. Another “illegal try-out”. A player had lived with a ‘booster’ family and impregnated the family’s daughter. In addition to a violation of NCAA rules there was an implication of statutory rape. Except the living with a booster family was allowed under NCAA rules at the time, (they later changed the rules and SU stopped the practice), and both the player and the daughter were under age. A player who had transferred out, disgruntled over playing time, charged that he’d had a grade changed “by a female professor”. He had no female professors. A former player from the Dave Bing era, George Hicker, who had become a successful businessman, was accused of employing LeRoy Ellis, the father of LeRon Ellis, as an incentive for LeRon to transfer to SU. The paper never returned Hicker’s phone calls so he took an ad out to explain that he did not employ the senior Ellis: he employed the security firm Ellis had already been working for nine years, (long before Ellis even went to Kentucky), as a security guard at another site.
There were some clear but small violations: An auto dealer named Bill Rapp had provided players with summer jobs, (not illegal) but had them paint the same wall in his dealership over and over again, suggesting that they were not ‘real’ jobs. (I assume the paintbrushes were real.) He also was known to put $50 bills in their lockers at Christmas. But the big thing was Rob Johnson.
The NCAA investigated. The University severed their relationship with Johnson, (who began steering players elsewhere, including SU’s Tony Scott). They decided SU should be unable to play in the NCAA tournament in 1993 and docked them a couple of scholarships. Wolff recently wrote in SI that Jim Boeheim had “skated” on the allegations. I remember hearing that the NCAA simply felt that they needed to justify two years of investigations by punishing SU in some way. Since then the street agents have been mostly put out of business to be replaced by high school and AAU coaches: many players go to a prep school with whom certain colleges have a cozy relationship. But that’s all ‘legal’. It’s never going to be a squeaky clean process when the stakes are high.
Meanwhile, Boeheim’s assistant, the ever-helpful Bernie Fine, was volunteering to teach kids at a local playground. His interest in the kids went beyond that. He became a father figure for them and even took them on some road trips. He also arranged for them to have the job of retrieving balls on court as the team went through their shooting drills before games. The kids who did this were called “ball boys”. It wasn’t a permanent job like a baseball ball boy: different kids did this on different nights. For individual kids, it was usually a one-time thing that people associated with the basketball program could arrange.
In 2005 a couple of these boys, now grown men, accused Fine of having molested them. They did so after asking him for money, which he refused to pay. The University investigated the case and concluded no action needed to be taken against Fine. Then came the Sandusky scandal at Penn State. ESPN had known about the Fine allegations but had chosen not to do a story on it until the Sandusky charges made coaches molesting children big news. Then, (in 2011), they did an “Outside the Lines” report on the Fine case. One additional piece of information they had, which the University said they did not have, was a tape recording of a 2002 phone conversation between Fine’s wife Laurie and one of the accusers in which she said she knew about her husband's behavior,” but felt powerless to stop it In a surreal moment, that phone conversation (from 2002) was played on the NBA Nightly News.” The actual text of it did not make it explicitly clear what the misbehavior was or when it had occurred, (the accusers might not have been minors at the time).
All the national publicity described the boys as “former Syracuse ball boys”, suggesting the image that Syracuse must have been complicit in drawing Fines ‘victims’ into his orbit by giving them jobs as ball boys. Jim Boeheim said he’s seen Fine’s charges around, including on the road but was unaware of any abuse. He accused the accusers of being out for money. They then sued him- for money, of course- for saying that, even after he’d apologized. A third accuser surfaced, only to with his claim, saying he’d never even met Fine. He just wanted the publicity. All that happened in the end was that Fine was fired by the University. He was never prosecuted under the statute of limitations but also because it was never clear exactly what had gone on or if anything could be proven against him. But the program had another black eye and we were running out of eyes.
It had been rumored for some time that the NCAA was again investigating Syracuse. But it had nothing to do with Bernie Fine. The investigation had actually started back in 2007. Since we heard nothing for such a long period of time, I assume either they had found nothing or that it was such a minor item their investigation was extremely low priority. A friend confessed his angst over the investigation. I told him I didn’t have any: if it were anything to worry about it wouldn’t have taken this long. Boy was I wrong.
There was a new emphasis on obeying the rules after years of no more than minor sanctions. I had the impression that the NCAA decided they were shooting themselves in the foot by putting their major drawing cards on probation. But they were ready to in another direction, especially with reports of a major problem at North Carolina, where players had been placed in an African Studies Program that was apparently just set up to keep them eligible. They didn’t have to do the course work or even show up. There was also a new emphasis on a coach taking responsibility for everything going in a program.
They were investigating three things. They started investigating one of them and the other two were added when they occurred or were revealed. The NCAA does not have a drug policy. But it has a rule saying that if a school had a drug policy, it must administer it evenly, without giving any preference to athletes. Syracuse had suspended a couple of players for the opening game of the 2005 NCAA tournament for smoking marijuana. We got beat by Vermont, in a famous upset. But there were other players who used weed and they had not been suspended or their parents told of their misdeeds. The NCAA saw this as a failure to administer a set policy. SU said that they were handling each case on its own merits and had concluded that suspensions and informing the parents was not necessary in those other cases because it was a one-time thing. The policy was intended to be flexible.
While the NCAA was taking forever to look into this, it was revealed that an employee of a YMCA branch charged with supervising players, (mostly football players) form the university who were working there as interns as part of their course work for a course called “Child and Family Studies” than many athletes took, had improperly reported on their activities. Some had not done what they were assigned to do as interns. Some had been employed by the YMCA to help set up charity events and promotional activities, for which they were paid. The YMCA guy reported they had completed their course requirements and did not report that they’d been paid for their services at the events because he didn’t want to get them in trouble. He’d also provided them with free transportation and meals and hadn’t reported that.
While the NCAA was taking forever to look into that, the Big Thing happened. The Big Thing was Fabricio de Melo a 7 foot 270 pound Brazilian who was a key part of our 2012 team that achieved the best numerical record we’ve ever had here: 34-3, including a a 30-1 regular season. The one loss came when Melo was suspended, so we might have had an undefeated regular season, an amazing accomplishment in a power conference.
The problem was Melo could barely speak English; much less do college course work. He was suspended because he hadn’t done enough to complete one course he needed to pass to stay eligible. It was arranged with the professor that he could be given a passing grade if he submitted a biographical essay of a certain length. He did so and was reinstated after a two game suspension. Then, in a huge gut punch to the team and its fans, he was suspended again just prior to the 2012 NCAA tournament. We couldn’t figure out how he could academically eligible, then ineligible, then eligible again, then ineligible again, all in the same semester. It turns out he could do it by having somebody else write his essay. Apparently it was written, at least in part, by a receptionist in the athletic department after a meeting conducted by Dr. Daryl Gross , the athletic director, who came here after having been at USC during the Reggie Bush Era, where keeping players eligible by any means you could think of was par for the course. The submission of the paper ended the first suspension. The finding that Melo didn’t write it produced the second one. And it produced the shjt hitting the fan.
Syracuse knew it was in real trouble for this one and decided on a pre-emptive strike. They announced a self-imposed post season ban, which meant the team had to play out the season knowing head of time that they weren’t going anywhere. The University fired, (sorry, reassigned) Gross. They fired the “Director of Basketball Operations”, (no that’s not Boeheim: he just coaches the team). They did not fire Boeheim, who retained a measure of deniability because he was not at the meeting, although I don’t know how plausible that deniability was as the Director of Basketball Operation’s office is right next to his and he obviously was concerned over his player’s eligibility. But maybe he was not invited to that meeting because the participants knew he would not have gone along with their plan. I know he’s always taken the positon on injured players: “If they, (the team doctors), say he can play, I’ll play him. If they don’t, I won’t.” I suspect that’s also his positon on academics. He’s going to do his job, which is to coach the team and he expects other to do their jobs. What they did instead was to put a date on JB’s retirement: he’s going to coach the team for another three years and then Mike Hopkins, who will coach the team for those nine games Boeheim is suspended, will finally take over as head coach after years of being the heir apparent. That is, if the new athletic director, Mark Coyle from Boise State, will go along with it, (so far he says he will).
The problem is the NCAA’s expectation that head coaches will full responsibility for everything that goes on in their entire program, not just the team itself. I suspect this is “old school” vs. “new school” thinking but the National Association of Basketball Coaches agreed and Boeheim says he supports the concept. Despite SU’s self -flagellation, the NCAA added a nine game suspension for Boeheim at the beginning of the conference season, (he can’t have any contact with the team or coaching staff during that time), a scholarship reduction from 13, (the normal limit) to 10 for four years. And 108 of Boeheim’s wins have been “vacated”. I have yet to see a breakdown of what wins or which of the violations produced each vacation, (would that be the word?), although one article said they were from 2004-2007 and 2011-12, which would seem to indicate it was about the drug policy and Fab Melo. That means that Boeheim, who was second all-time behind Mike Krzyzewski with 966 wins was dropped to 858 “official” wins, 6th place among major college coaches. More importantly, (to me) is that Syracuse’s steak of 45 consecutive winning seasons, (saved by Rakeem Christmas’s terrific year), no longer exists and we can’t catch UCLA’s all-time record of 54 straight, at least not in my lifetime. The good news there is that this record doesn’t appear in the NCAA record books. I would think that means that it’s not an “official” record and I would think we could count wins that are not official toward it. So maybe the streak is intact but I guess we aren’t supposed to say so.
What is not intact is Syracuse basketball’s reputation. I’ve heard us described as a “rogue” or “outlaw” program in the national media and Boeheim as a “serial cheater”. If those things were true we could certainly have done a better job of it and gotten a few more national championships out of it. I continue to maintain that the real problem is the assumption that athletes are normal college students and should be treated like any other student. Most of them at this level, in the major sports, are trying to get to the NBA or NFL. We should be acknowledging that basketball and football is not an extra-curricular activity to them and that they are training here for a profession. Make it an academic major and skip the phony courses. Give them at least a cost of living stipend so they wouldn’t have to paint Bill Rapp’s wall while reading about all the money the schools are making off their efforts. What kind of values are we teaching them by having them pretend to be something they are not?
In the meantime, if we don’t have dirty fingers, we at least have dirty shoes. We’re on probation for five years, not in the sense of being banned for the post season, (we can again play in the ACC and NCAA tournaments) but it means we’ll be walking on eggshells for the next few years: another violation could have more serious consequences. (That limited what we could do back in the 90’s and it took years before our recruiting got back to normal.) Walk-ons won’t be able to get scholarships, which means something to Boeheim who was, himself a walk-on who earned a scholarship here. We’ll have to make the scholarships we have count by making sure we get the best available players, not projects. But it may prove easy to out-recruit us because the other schools who want them will not be on probation.
Boeheim is appealing his sanction but the NCAA takes so long to do anything we may not hear the results until the punishment has been served. It will be interesting to see what happens at North Carolina which seems on the surface to be a much bigger scandal involving many more players, or at Louisville, where they’ve been accused of using strippers and prostitutes to recruit players. But who knows when we’ll hear anything about that?
