Friends and relatives have been E-mailing me for my reaction. Here is what I'm sending them:
In the early 70’s a bought a book on the history of basketball that listed the various school’s yearly records and noted that some schools had been fortunate enough to hire coaches who were enormously successful and coached there for decades, their name appearing on the right side of each year’s record, guys Like Rupp and Iba and Allen and Wooden. I wondered what it must be like to be a fan of those schools and see those eras being played out. Thanks to Jim Boeheim, I got to see it. With the help of the Dome, the Big East and ESPIN, Jimi really put us on the map and that’s what fans in a place like this, a small city with no pro teams to root for, are looking for. I call it ‘existential rooting: We win, therefore we are. The other side of that is that if we lose, we are held in disrepute or, worse, become irrelevant. And that creates resentment.
In the late 80’s, our recruiting was the best it’s ever bene. We were competing for the very top recruits and brought several of them in and were as good as anybody. Then came the first probation. A probation had three impacts: when t’s known that a school is under investigation, that can put a cloud over recruiting. Then come the actual sanctions, which can last several years. Then for years afterwards, you can’t afford to make a mistake because the penalties could be more severe. The probation was, to be frank, largely bullshit and other schools did much worse and didn’t get penalized as much but the impact was strong and we were never really a ‘selector school’ as Coach Mac used to call Penn State again. But Lawrence Moten proved an under-the-radar star and John Wallace was a 5 star recruit who grew up in Rochester as a fan of the program and decided to come here despite the probation and they kept us going at a strong level, even getting back to the national title game. Finally enough years had passed that we could get a player like Carmelo Anthony and we won the national championship.
Meanwhile, Boeheim’s 2-3 zone started to become famous after the national title. He relied on it more and more and decided to play it exclusively: it could be played in different ways passive or aggressive, suing traps, etc. And by focusing on it in practice, we could get better and better at it. The decision worked beautifully and we averaged 30 wins a year and just 7 losses over a six year period from 2008-2014. Three of those teams reached a $1 ranking and a fourth made it to the final four. We might have gotten another national championship if we hadn’t lost our center just before the 2010 and 2012 NCAA tournaments.
But the game was changing. Steph Curry and Klay Thompson led the Warriors to become and NBA dynasty by tossing in three pointers like they were lay-ups and the trend came to be to set up your jump shooters. Jay Wright had a lot of success at Villanova, (2 national titles in three years) with 3 and 4 guard line-ups, often with just a forward on the inside. A generation of player grew up learning to shoot the three pointer, resulting in opposition that could put several good shooter son the floor at the same time. That forced the zone to expand, opening up gaps in it through which players could penetrate and shot from the high post, feed the baseline or toss it back out for threes. Not only do the threes score more points but the shooting percentage on twos dramatically increases. In our four game losing streak, Duke shot 59%, Clemson 69%, Pitt 59% and Georgia Tech 63% on two point shots. Even Wake Forest shot 63% and 56% on twos in these last two games. Boeheim himself pointed out that a stretched our zone, where you can’t box out and have all that territory to cover, limits your abilities to rebound so you get killed on the boards, too. Some years back, Jim decided that his center should guard both the low and high post as well as the corners so his guards and forwards could move out to where the shooters were. Bill Russell couldn’t be in four places at once. Jim has recruited skinny, athletic centers who can cover ground but get banged around underneath the basket, with poor results for us.
Then came the second probation, also mostly BS, (and with schools who did far worse getting lesser or no penalties), with the same effect as the first one. Our recruits over the last decade have usually been ranked in the second 100 recruits while Duke was getting multiple top ten guys each year. You can occasionally get stars from ‘under the radar’ but if all your recruits are under the radar, you will be, too. Our average record over the last 9 years has been 19-14. I looked at the last poll before the NCAA tournament in each of those nine years and the number of votes we got to be in the Top 25 was ZERO. Nobody has thought we were a top 25 team in ten years. Fortunately the zone can still be a mystery to schools that haven’t seen it and we made three good NCAA runs in that time. Two improbably rallies got us two great upsets in 2016 and we became the worst team in the Finals four and wound up $10 in the final poll. In 2018 we made it from the first four to the Sweet 16 and got 79 votes, for the top 25, the most of any school not to make it. In 2021 we again got to the Sweet 16 and wound up #25. That’s not the record of a nation al power, which we thought we were.
Meanwhile, our single national title was followed by Connecticut getting it’s 2nd, 3rd and 4th, North Carolina getting their 4th, 5th and 6th, Florida getting its first two, Kansas getting their 2nd and 3rd, Duke getting #4 and 5, Kentucky getting #8, Louisville #3, and Villanova getting #2 and 3. Meanwhile, we have as many as Holy Cross, CCNY and UTEP. 1987 should have bene our first tile but we let it slip through our fingers. We hung in against a Kentucky team with 8 future NBA players in ’96 but came up short. We won it in ’03 and lost our centers in 20010 and 2012. SU fans at that time were anxious to win more as we were increasingly in the rear-view mirrors of schools we considered our piers. We’ve spent 9 years spinning our wheels and seem to be receding, rather than moving forward.
Boeheim has stuck with the zone, the 1-2-3-4-5 line-up, (point guard, shooting guard, small forward, power forward, center) and the isolation and drive concept NBA coach Mike D’Antonio taught him when they worked together on the Olympics, even everybody else is trying to play like the Warriors. Then he realized the dream of coaching his two sons on last year’s team, even though neither was a good defensive player and neither were Joe Girard or Cole Swider and our 51 year streak of winning seasons, (second all-time to UCLA’s 54), came to an end. He also made the decision, in the face of the transfer portal , to recruit 6 freshmen and hope to ‘coach them up’ as they grew up while other schools recruited veteran college players thought the portal. Those veteran teams went up the standings as if in an elevator while we had trouble beating them with our freshmen. And we may have equal trouble retaining them in the face of the portal and NIL money.
All this has created more and more critics and more and more fans who no longer care. It was readily apparent Saturday when 24,000 fans showed up for an event that would have drawn 34,000 a decade ago. I sit in section 308, seat D1. I can recall fighting to stay on my seat in the old days and my row was full and had several interlopers sitting in it. Saturday, the next 16 seats to my left were empty. Boeheim’s reaction to the criticisms and empty seats has been defiance and even delusion. He seems to view the games as the equivalent of Trump rallies, where everyone has come to admire him. This was revealed on Saturday’s post-season press conference:
Jim has said for the last couple of years that there was an “Ironclad Plan” for the succession, but refused to reveal what it was. There didn’t seem to be much of a plan today:
Syracuse Press Conference | ACC Tournament vs. Wake Forest
The transfer portal opens on Monday and we may have several players enter it. We needed to have a coaching staff in place for that to recruit from the portal. To leave things to some kind of negotiation over another job was irresponsible. Boeheim should just have announced his retirement and his support of the new coach, Red Autry. So the school had to make a move and do it quickly.
What kind of coach will Red make? Will he be just a Boeheim clone when we need something more than that? Will he be able to recruit? Will he know how to win? Stay tuned. I’m always hopeful, which isn’t the same as being optimistic.
I'll be doing a longer piece in the near future: "The Upside and Downside of Jim Boeheim"
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