SWC75
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We’ve just won the “The Battle for Atlantis”. It’s been observed that we have a pretty good record in winning these in-season tournaments over the years. i decided to look at the SU Media Guide and catalog our history in these tournaments. “In season” means both “pre-season” season opening tournaments and holiday tournaments. I have excluded the Carrier Classic because it was a home tournament: we didn’t have to travel, it was only a four team field and after the first few years we didn’t invite any nationally ranked teams. We had a record of 44-4 and won 20 of the 24 Carrier Classics. The only ranked team we lost to was Maryland in 1980. The unwillingness to turn it into a major event with ranked teams probably doomed the event and made it not the type of thing we’re looking for here. I’ve also tried to exclude events that were not true tournaments such as the “Round Robin” in Boston in 1956 or the “Hawaii Loa Holiday Classic” in 1986, where we played Wichita State and then Hawaii Loa: that was just a double-header in which we played Wichita State and then Hawaii Loa, a small college team on Oahu. Single games like the “Hall of Fame Tip-off Classic” against North Carolina in 1987 are also excluded.
Primary sources: the SU Media Guide, Syracuse Basketball by Rod McDonald, Bud Poliquin’s Tales from the Syracuse Orange’s Locker Room” Zander Hollander’s Modern Encyclopedia of Basketball and the ESPN College Basketball Encyclopedia, as well as internet sources like Wikipedia.
THE PRE-BOEHEIM ERA
12/26-30/1947 National Collegiate Basketball Tournament: Los Angeles, California
We beat Loyola Marymount, then known as Loyola (LA) 69-55 and Brigham Young 53-45 before losing to Marshall in the championship game 44-46. That SU team 6-2 at the time but stumbled to a 11-13 final record. Our opposition was pretty good: Loyola went 22-14, BYU 16-11 and Marshall 22-11. There was no writer’s or coach’s poll yet. None of those teams appear in the Primo-Poretta Poll, a retroactive ranking for the years prior to the writers and coach’s polls. Marshall has won the NAIB championship the previous year with a 32-6 record. That’s the organization Dr. James Naismith had created to give small colleges a championship they could compete for: it’s now called the NAIA. They were the runners up in the 1948 NAIB tournament so they were still considered a small college team at the time, but, obviously a very good one. We beat BYU twice this year, opening the season at home against them with a 74-52 win.
Wikipedia calls this the Helms Foundation Los Angeles Invitational. McDonald’s book calls it the Rose Bowl Tournament. And says it was the Olympic Auditorium in LA. On the championship game: “the game was a roughly played contest that saw Syracuse always within a few points. Trailing 46-44 with a few seconds of play remaining, Billy Gabor broke away for a sure basket but stumbled as his bad leg buckled under him to give Marshall the victory.” Ouch!
SU’s record: 2 wins 1 loss, Second Place
12/29-30/1950 Sugar Bowl Tournament: New Orleans, Louisiana
We lost to Bradley 64-72 and Kentucky 59-69. (Kentucky had lost in the first round to St. Louis 42-43.) Both were major national powers. In fact, they were ranked #2 and #1 in the country at the time, no less. So those were pretty decent performances by the Orange. Kentucky wound up 32-2 and won their third national championship in four years. Bradley went 32-6 and were ranked 6th by the writers and 7th by the coaches. Bradley didn’t go to the NCAAs that year and they didn’t go to the NIT, either. Instead they hosted something called the National Campus Tournament , a reaction to the gambling scandals that had rocked the sport and was blamed on the games played in the “big cities”. This was played in Peoria, Illinois and Syracuse beat Toledo, Utah and the host team in the final, 76-75, after falling behind 3-24. That was one of two post season tournaments Syracuse has ever won, the other being the 2003 NCAA tournament. The Orange wound up 19-9 that year but did not crack the rankings, since the last poll was before the NCT. This was the only year the NCT was held.
SU’s record: 0 wins 2 losses. Cumulative: 2 wins 3 loses with 1 second place finish
12/28-29/1954 Holiday Festival: New York, NY
We got our doors blown off by the defending national champion, LaSalle with Tom Gola, 54-103. They didn’t have much the next day, either, losing to Niagara 70-91. Understandably these games are not described in the SU history book. I don’t know why there were only two games and the HF was usually an 8 team tournament with loser’s brackets such that everybody played 3 games. For some reason, there’s virtually nothing on the internet about the history of the Holiday Festival which for years was the #1 holiday tournament in the country. LaSalle returned to the NCAA title game, losing to Bill Russell’s San Francisco team, 63-77. They were ranked 3rd in both polls. Niagara was good too: 20-6 and ranked #16 by the coaches. They lost to Cincinnati in the NIT quarter-finals. SU finished 10-11.
SU’s Record: 0 wins 2 losses. Cumulative: 2 wins 5 loses with 1 second place finish
12/26-12/30/ 1955 Holiday Festival, New York, NY
Despite their dismal performance in the previous year’s HF, the Orange was back. They were more competitive but lost to Holy Cross, 74-87 and LaSalle 72-75 before beating Fordham 79-61. Holy Cross was a strong team, going 22-5 and ranked #14/15. They lost to Temple in the first rounds of the NCAAs. LaSalle slipped to 15-10. Fordham finished 11-14 while SU was 14-8.
SU’s Record: 1 win 2 losses. Cumulative: 3 wins 7 losses with 1 second place finish
A brief discussion of the Round Robin in Boston, 12/21-22/1956. Per the McDonald Book, there were four teams invited: Syracuse, Holy Cross, Dartmouth and North Carolina. Apparently the non-new England teams played the New England teams, switching opponents the second night. Syracuse blew out the Crusaders 95-66 and the Green Indians 86-63. The Tar Heels, who would be 32-0 national champions that year, beat Dartmouth 89-61 and Holy Cross 83-70. But that was it. Holy Cross only went 11-12 but Dartmouth was 18-7 that year, same as SU.
“Holy Cross mentor Doggie Julian felt Syracuse could have handled North Carolina…Indeed the Tar Heels own coach concurred. Talking with, (SU assistant), Andy Mogish after the Dartmouth game, Frank McGuire admitted that he’d never seen a team put two games back to back as we did. And he said he felt darned lucky the pairing worked out as they did.“ Three months later, the two teams did meet and UNC triumphed in the Eastern Regional Finals 58-67. His teammates always wondered if they could have beaten the Heels with Jim Brown, who had quit the team because Coach Marc Guley adhered to the “unwritten rule” that a 5 man team shouldn’t have more than two black starters. There’s usually a reason unwritten rules haven’t been written.
12/28-30/1957 Queen City Tournament Buffalo NY
We beat Canisius 83-73 but lost to Iowa 52-58 in the final. It wasn’t a great achievement. The Golden Griffins suffered through a 2-19 year while Iowa was 13-9.SU was 11-10.
SU’s record: 1 win 1 loss (second place). Cumulative: 4 wins 8 losses with 2 second place finishes.
12/26-29/1958 Holiday Festival, New York, NY
We lost to St. Joseph’s, who was beginning to make its presence felt on the national scene, 63-72. We rallied form that to beat Cornell 66-60 and Holy Cross 88-82. St. Joe’s was 22-5 and ranked #14/#20 in the writers and coach’s polls. Cornell was 8-15 and Holy Cross 14-11. SU was 14-9.
SU’s record: 2 wins 1 loss Cumulative: 6 wins 9 losses with 2 second place finishes.
2/4/60 Kent State Tournament
We lost to St. John’s 68-85. Apparently, there was no consolation game so we went home. (It’s interesting that it wasn’t a Holiday tournament.) The Johnnies were 17-8. SU was 13-8, their last winning record for four years. But I’m sure it seemed a lot longer as we won only 14 of 70 games, including a then record 27 game losing streak. And you thought last season was bad!
SU’s record 0-1 Cumulative: 6-10. with 2 second place finishes.
12/2-3/1960 Kent State Tournament
We’re baacckkk! They decided to make it a seasons opening tournament and give it a consolation game. We lost to Clemson 67-78 and then won the consy over Massachusetts 74-61. Clemson was 10-16 and UMASS 16-10. SU lost its next 8 in a row and wound up 4-19.
SU’s record 1-1 Cumulative: 7-11. with 2 second place finishes.
12/29-30/1961 Motor City Tournament
We were now in the throws of the awful 27 game losing streak (average score: 65-82, including a 59-122 loss to NYU two weeks before this tournament, the worst loss in SU history). We had a delightful tournament, losing to Detroit 69-97 and DePaul 59-96. The Titans were a 15-10 team, the Blue Demons a 13-10 team and SU was a lousy team at 2-22, (we were 0-22 and got so sick of it we upset BC and UCONN to end the season).
SU 0-2 Cumulative 7-13. with 2 second place finishes.
12/27-28/1963 Hurricane Classic, Miami Florida
This was a legendary and historical tournament that has been much discussed in the SU histories. This was the second year of the Fred Lewis Era, which had begun modestly with an 8-13 record in 1962-63. We had a young star in Dave Bing but this was at the beginning of his sophomore year, (remember freshmen were not eligible for the varsity at this point), and he was not yet well- known. But there were some well-known players at this four team tournament. The host team, Miami had Rick Barry, who averaged 32 points a game that year. Princeton had Bill Bradley who averaged 30ppg. The fourth team was Army, coached by Tates Locke, who had just given a young assistant his first coaching job: Bobby Knight.
Then there were the things going on off the court. SU trainer Julie Reichel had worked with the 1960 Olympic team and had gotten to know Cassius Clay, who won the light heavyweight boxing gold. Clay, who subsequently changed his name to Muhammed Ali, was training in Miami for the first Sonny Liston fight. Reichel took Dave Bing and Sam Penceal, a good defensive guard, to meet Ali, (I’m guess they were the only black players on the team at the time). Penceal: “Ali offered to take us around in his big, red convertible but we had to get back to practice. So, instead, he came to the Princeton game to watch us play. He came in with his whole retinue and sat us in the first row and talked to us all the time. If I remember correctly, Fred Lewis, our coach, wasn’t too happy that we were having a running conversation with Muhammed Ali during the course of the game. But we did, anyway.”
Everyone expected a confrontation between Barry and Bradley in the finals, (and in those days, the game was as much about individual confrontations between the stars of teams as between the tams themselves: the national scoring race got as much scrutiny as the team rankings.) Syracuse spoiled the party by beating Princeton 76-71. Ali watched his new friend Penceal hold Bradley to 17 points, (Bill fouled out midway through the second half). Miami struggled pas the Cadets, 79-71. Barry was laid low by an illness, (I’m guessing the flu), and spent time outs under a blanket, shivering. He still managed to score 25 points against Penceal’s best efforts. But the Orange prevailed in overtime 86-85 to in its first ever in-season tournament. The winning score was by on Rob Murray, a little-used reserve who was one of two seniors on the roster. It was a tournament full of glamour won by a couple of unsung heroes.
Princeton won the Ivy heavy, was 20-9 overall but unraked despite the presence of Bradley. Miami was 20-7 and also unranked, despite Barry. SU would be 17-8 and unranked, despite Bing.
SU: 2-0 Cumulative: 9-13 with one win and two second place finishes.
12/28-30/1964 Holiday Festival NY, NY
Bill Bradley got his revenge by dropping 36 on the Orange in a 69-79 SU loss. But our guys rebounded from that to crush Manhattan 87-64. SU had gotten off to an amazing start- amazingly good then amazingly bad. They beat American U. 127-67, the large margin of victory in the school’s history. Then they lost 6 in a row before beating Manhattan. Then they lost two more before righting the ship for a 11-2 finish and a final 13-10 record. It hadn’t helped that 5 of those early losses were road games, not even counting the loss to Princeton and that they were playing top teams, including Kentucky and Louisville. JB: “We weren’t quite there yet.” Princeton went 23-6 and won 3rd place in the Final Four with a 118-82 rout of Wichita State in which Bradley had 58 points, at the time a record total for an NCAA tournament game. Manhattan finished 11-11.
SU: 1-1 Cumulative: 10-14 with one win and two second place finishes.
12/28-30/1965 Los Angeles Classic
I recall this being referred to as the “Bruin Classic” at the time. It was a huge opportunity for Syracuse. This was the team we had in Dave Bing’s and Jim Boeheim’s senior year that averaged a national record, (at the time) 99 points per game. And they were invited to the home tournament of mighty UCLA, who had won the last two national championships and 58 of 60 games in the previous seasons. Beyond that, Fred Lewis was patterning Syracuse after UCLA, using a full court zone press to create racehorse basketball. What a game it would have been!
But it didn’t happen. In the first round the Orange came up against 4th (3rd in the coach’s poll) ranked Vanderbilt and 6-10 Clyde Lee. Bing was magnificent, scoring a school record 46 points. But Lee scored 39 and pulled down 24 rebounds and the Commodores won 98-113. Thrown into the loser’s bracket, Syracuse blew out Northwestern 105-75 and ran past St. John’s 113-97. Bing scored 38 points in that game wand was named MVP even though SU technically finished 5th in the tournament. They did, eventually, get to play UCLA – in 1999. Vanderbilt wound up 24-4, 5th ranked and won the SEC with a 15-1 record. They lost to Cazzie Russell’s Michigan team 87-85 in Elite 8, so they’d been a tough opening draw in the Bruin Classic.
SU: 2-1 Cumulative: 12-15 with one win and two second place finishes.
12/20-21/1966 Christmas Tournament, Boston Massachusetts
The Bing Era piqued my interest in the team but this was the year I really fell in love with SU basketball. We had a Cinderella team that wasn’t supposed to amount to much because we’d lost Bing and Boeheim but we got off to a 19-2 start and rose to ##8 in the country before running out of gas at the end of the year. The two losses were in two different Holiday Tournaments the Orange played in.
The first was this tournament in Boston. Bob Cousy had become BC’s coach and had them ranked #10 in the country. They handled us 75-87. But good ole Manhattan was there to give us a 99-87 bounce-back. The Eagles wound up 21-3 and lost by a point to St. John’s in the Sweet 16. The Jaspers wound up 13-8.
SU: 1-1 Cumulative: 13-16 with one win and two second place finishes.
12/27-30/1966 Quaker City Classic, Philadelphia, Pa.
The Quaker City Classic was the second most renown holiday tournament of the time after the Holiday Festival in new York. We opened by beating LaSalle 88-84, then took on the #2 team in the country, Louisville with Wes Unseld and Butch Beard. This was the game that really hooked me. Syracuse would fall behind by 10-15 points and come back, whittling it down to single digits and even to 2 points at one point. That happened at least 3 different time. I remember listening to Joel Mareiness’s voice, rising with anticipation each time that we might be seeing an historical Syracuse victory. We came up just short, 71-75 and I cried myself to sleep that night. In fact, Mom ordered me to bed on time and I hid a transistor radio under my pillow and heard the end of the game through the pillow. I also remember a Sports Illustrated article on the tourney that had a picture of Vaughn harper scoring over Unseld. We rebounded with an anti-climatic 81-71 win over Villanova.
Louisville wound up 23-5and ranked #2 but were upset in the Sweet 16 by SMU. LaSalle was 14-12 and Villanova 17-9. SU was 20-6 and lost in the first round of the NIT, (this in an ERA when the NCAA was a 24 team tournament, so the NIT had a strong field), to New Mexico and Mel Daniels.
SU: 2-1 Cumulative: 15-17 with one win and two second place finishes.
12/26-30/1967 Holiday Festival NY, NY
We were expecting a big year with 4 starters back from a 20-6 team being joined by a 16-0 freshman team. But after a 108-68 opening win over George Washington we stumbled to a 4-2 start, losing to Cornell and Bowling Green. Things really began to unravel in New York as we got easily handled by St. John’s 55-70. We beat Penn State 83-73 but then lost to LaSalle 68-78 to fall to 5-4. That began a stretch of 9 losses in 10 games and t ball rolled back down the hill. We wound up 11-14. The Johnnies wound up 19-8 and lost to Davison in the round of 32 in the NCAAs. LaSalle was 20-8 and lost to Columbia in the same round. Penn State wound up 10-10. None were ranked.
SU: 1-2 Cumulative: 16-19 with one win and two second place finishes.
12/27-31/1968 Far West Classic Portland, Oregon
This was the last year SU wound up with a losing record, (if you ignore the NCAA’s silly rulings). And we earned it, stari8ng out 4-14 before rallying to 9-16.. We’d lost our first five games but rallied a bit to win 3 in a row, including an improbably 77-74 victory over Brigham Young in Provo, followed b y a another victory in the brawl with the Mormons that closed the game. We went to Portland feeling we’d turned the season around and proceeded to lay the biggest egg we’ve ever laid in an in-season to9runament. We lost three straight games to win up last. It was the margins of victory and the opposition that made it really special. Washington State was pretty good at 18-8 that season and beat us by 19, 67-86. But Arizona State was an 11-15 WAC team and they beat us by 16, 77-93. Finally we were matched with Yale, a 9-16 Ivy League team. They beat us by 18, 65-83. The kids were ready to come home by then, where they managed to beat Pitt- and then lost six more games in a row. Yeech!
SU: 0-3 Cumulative: 16-22 with one win and two second place finishes.
12/29-30/1969 Charlotte Invitational, Charlotte, NC.
We seemed to have righted the ship at least with 6 wins to open the season before losing to American University, 88-91. They beat providence 94-83 in the first round in Charlotte, which was a big deal because Providence was, from the beginning of the 60’s thro9ugh the mid 70’s, the most successful program in the East, although this was kind of a down year for them at 14-11. We met Davidson in the final. Lefty Driesell had moved on to Maryland but the cupboard wasn’t bare for Terry Holland whose team went 22-5, ranked 15th in the nation and lost to St. Bonaventure in the round of 32. They played maybe their best game of the year and blew SU out, 81-103. Unfortunately, it heralded another agonizing slump for the Orange as we finished the year with a 5-11 stretch to break even at 12-12 after the promising start. Basically we stopped playing defense. The Davidson game was the first of five games where we gave up over 100 points, including the all-time SU record of 127 points surrendered to Pittsburgh, a team that had been averaging 65 points a game.
SU: 1-1 Cumulative: 17-23 with one win and three second place finishes.
12/26-29/1970 Quaker City Classic, Philadelphia, PA.
This time we opened 5-0 before getting crushed 75-98 by Fordham, a team that would go 26-3 that year and get Digger Phelps the Notre Dame job. We opened with Pennsylvania a team that won its first 28 games that year and was ranked #3 behind Marquette, who did the same and UCLA who had one defeat. But we gave them all they could handle, losing 77-85 in overtime. Then we beat Army in OT 71-68, (this was Bob Knights last year at the point). But after those two impressive performances, we managed to lost to St. Francis of Pa, 83-86. The Quaker’s bubble burst in an amazing 47-90 loss to a Villanova team they had earlier beaten. They wound up 28-1. Army was 11-14. St. Francis was 15-10. Instead of their usual collapse, SU, after another loss to Holy cross, ended the season on a 13-2 run that got us into the NIT, where we lost to Michigan 76-82. We finished 197, the first of our 45 straight winning seasons.
SU: 1-2 Cumulative: 18-25 with one win and three second place finishes.
12/27-30/1971 Holiday Festival, NY NY
For the third straight year we started the season on a winning streak, (6-0) and then lost, (74-78 to American U. again: their coach was Tom Young, who later got the job at Rutgers and became an early thorn in Jim Boeheim’s side), then proceeded to a holiday tournament with a 1 game losing streak.
We were a bug on the windshield of Louisville, 81-103. The Cardinals went 26-5 under their new coach, Denny Crum. They rose to a #4 national ranking and wound up I the Final Four. But then we beat Duke, 74-72. The Blue Devils were in the fallow period between Vic Bubas in the 60’s and Coach K in the 80’s and beyond and went 14-11 that year. Then we beat a 17-8 Penn state team 92-77 and went on to a 22-6 record, losing to Maryland in the NIT.
SU: 2-1 Cumulative: 20-26 with one win and three second place finishes.
12/15-16/1972 Volunteer Classic Knoxville, Tennessee
In-season tournaments were becoming all the rage and we played, incredibly, in three of them this season. Tennessee had become a power in the SEC under Ray Mears. His team this year went 19-6 but couldn’t crack the rankings, didn’t win the SEC, didn’t go to the NCAAs and didn’t got to the NIT. But they were a good team and beat us 83-87. We then beat a 9-17 Holy Cross team 84-76 in the consy.
SU: 1-1 Cumulative: 21-27 with one win and three second place finishes.
SU played in "The Connecticut Classic 12/22-23/72 but this, like the Boston Round-Robin was not a true tournament. The host team, Connecticut, played Harvard and SU played Yale ion the opening night. The Huskies, in this pre-Calhoun era, lost to the Crimson 70-80 while the Orange squeaked by the Bulldogs, 78-72. Syracuse blew the hosts way second night 104-73, (wouldn’t we love to beat UCONN like that now) while Harvard beat their arch-rival 79-72. But I have the SU yearbook for that season and the schedule in it says “UCONN Classic Dec 22 Yale vs. Syracuse Dec 23 Connecticut vs. Syracuse.” In other words, the match-ups were already scheduled before the tournament began. It was just a pair of double-headers. Which is why, when SU won the ECAC playoffs in 1975, (which put them in the NCAA tournament), it was stated that that was our first tournament victory of any kind wince the Hurricane Classic back in 1963. Since it wasn’t a true tournament, I won’t add it to the SU’s running in-season tournament record.
12/29-30/1972 Maryland Invitational, College Park Maryland
This was a real tournament and SU went into the finals against second ranked Maryland after barely beating a Bowling Green team that wound up 13-13 by 78-74. Maryland and Louisville were two national power of the time that we always seemed to run into in these years and found out that we were not on that level yet. We found that out 76-91 in the final and found it out again in the Sweet 16, by almost the same score 75-91.Maryland then lost to Providence, (the Ernie DIGregorio- Marvin Barnes team) in the regional final. They wound up 23-7 and ranked #8-10 in the two polls. Syracuse actually had a better numerical record, 24-5, including a miracle win requiring two steals in the final second against Penn in the Easter Regional consolation game, the last time Syracuse would end the season with a win until the 2003 national champions.
SU: 1-1 Cumulative: 22-28 with one win and four second place finishes.
12/28-29/1973 Charlotte Invitational, Charlotte, NC
There was a lot of talk that we might finally be able to win a tournament again going into this one. Davidson was still pretty good but no longer a national power, (18-9). The other teams were Miami of Ohio (13-13) and Loyola of Chicago (12-14). We seemed like the best team. They we laid a huge egg with one of the worst performances a good Syracuse team even had, getting blown out by the Redskins, (they are now the Red Hawks), 74-96. After what I assume was a Roy Danforth tongue-lashing, they beat the greyhounds 78-59 but went home disappointed again, nonetheless.
SU: 1-1 Cumulative: 23-29 with one win and four second place finishes.
12/27-28/1974 Kodak Classic, Rochester, NY
Now this one was truly a set up. Our opposition was Georgetown , which had been a 3-23 team when they hired John Thompson, Bill Russell’s old back-center with the Celtics, who had become a successful high school coach in the DC area. They Hoyas had gone 12-14 and 13-13 in their first two years. The home team, Rochester would got 9-16 that season and the fourth team, Dartmouth would go 8-18.
It seemed like a lead-pipe cinch when SU built a 16 point halftime lead. But the Hoyas shot 75% in the second half, (21 for 28) and SY missed three makeable shots in the final minute to lose 70-71. Per Rod McDonald’s book: “After the game, Danforth was still in a daze: “I just don’t believe it. I know I have said that a hundred times but I don’t believe it.” It was the first of three double figure leads blown that year: the others were back-to-back 13 points and 21 point leads in losses to Rutgers and West Virginia in Manley on 1/6-8/1975, which caused a lot of fans to give up on the team that would get us to our first Final Four and finish ranked #6 in the country, our best finish ever to that date. (Meanwhile the Hoyas were showing signs of life at 18-10, despite amazing losing to Dartmouth 56-57 in the final).
SU: 1-1 Cumulative: 24-30 with one win and four second place finishes.
11/28-29/1975 IPTAY Classic, Clemson, SC
We were on Cloud Nine after going to the Final Four the year before. We were a national power now? We opened the season in something called the IPTAY Classic at Clemson. This may have been the first ”pre-season” tournament, really meaning a beginning of the season tournament. The name was an acronym meaning “I pay ten a year”, perhaps the first booster club, formed by Clemson in 1934 where, in the depths of the depression, supporters could pay Clemson $10 a year to help the athletic program. Our first round opposition was Austin Peay State, a pretty good team in those days, (20-7) and they beat us 83-93. Again, we rallied to win the next one, 83-70 over an 8-18 Harvard team. I guess we shoulda paid the ten bucks.
SU: 1-1 Cumulative: 25-31 with one win and four second place finishes.
12/5-6/75 Steel Bowl, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania
We opened against a new National power, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, coached by Jerry Tarkanian who that year obliterated the national scoring record by averaging 110 points per game. (Jacksonville had topped our record with 99.9ppg in 1970-71Oral Roberts had upped it to 105.1 the next year. UNLV’s record was later broken by Loyola Marymount with 122.4 in 1989-90.) I guess we could congratulate ourselves on holding them under their average but we still lost 83-105. Again, we rebounded to beat the home team, Pittsburgh 90-80. The Rebels wound up 29-2, ranked #3 but got knocked off by Arizona in the Sweet 16. Pitt was a 12-15 team that year and SU wound up 20-9, losing to Texas Tech in the round of 32.
SU: 1-1 Cumulative: 26-32 with one win and four second place finishes.
Roy Danforth then decided to back to his southern roots at Tulane and his assistant, Jim Boeheim, who had been interviewing for the job at Rochester, was chosen to replace him. So SU’s pre-Boeheim in-season tournament record wound up 26-32 with one win and four second place finishes in 25 actual tournaments.
Primary sources: the SU Media Guide, Syracuse Basketball by Rod McDonald, Bud Poliquin’s Tales from the Syracuse Orange’s Locker Room” Zander Hollander’s Modern Encyclopedia of Basketball and the ESPN College Basketball Encyclopedia, as well as internet sources like Wikipedia.
THE PRE-BOEHEIM ERA
12/26-30/1947 National Collegiate Basketball Tournament: Los Angeles, California
We beat Loyola Marymount, then known as Loyola (LA) 69-55 and Brigham Young 53-45 before losing to Marshall in the championship game 44-46. That SU team 6-2 at the time but stumbled to a 11-13 final record. Our opposition was pretty good: Loyola went 22-14, BYU 16-11 and Marshall 22-11. There was no writer’s or coach’s poll yet. None of those teams appear in the Primo-Poretta Poll, a retroactive ranking for the years prior to the writers and coach’s polls. Marshall has won the NAIB championship the previous year with a 32-6 record. That’s the organization Dr. James Naismith had created to give small colleges a championship they could compete for: it’s now called the NAIA. They were the runners up in the 1948 NAIB tournament so they were still considered a small college team at the time, but, obviously a very good one. We beat BYU twice this year, opening the season at home against them with a 74-52 win.
Wikipedia calls this the Helms Foundation Los Angeles Invitational. McDonald’s book calls it the Rose Bowl Tournament. And says it was the Olympic Auditorium in LA. On the championship game: “the game was a roughly played contest that saw Syracuse always within a few points. Trailing 46-44 with a few seconds of play remaining, Billy Gabor broke away for a sure basket but stumbled as his bad leg buckled under him to give Marshall the victory.” Ouch!
SU’s record: 2 wins 1 loss, Second Place
12/29-30/1950 Sugar Bowl Tournament: New Orleans, Louisiana
We lost to Bradley 64-72 and Kentucky 59-69. (Kentucky had lost in the first round to St. Louis 42-43.) Both were major national powers. In fact, they were ranked #2 and #1 in the country at the time, no less. So those were pretty decent performances by the Orange. Kentucky wound up 32-2 and won their third national championship in four years. Bradley went 32-6 and were ranked 6th by the writers and 7th by the coaches. Bradley didn’t go to the NCAAs that year and they didn’t go to the NIT, either. Instead they hosted something called the National Campus Tournament , a reaction to the gambling scandals that had rocked the sport and was blamed on the games played in the “big cities”. This was played in Peoria, Illinois and Syracuse beat Toledo, Utah and the host team in the final, 76-75, after falling behind 3-24. That was one of two post season tournaments Syracuse has ever won, the other being the 2003 NCAA tournament. The Orange wound up 19-9 that year but did not crack the rankings, since the last poll was before the NCT. This was the only year the NCT was held.
SU’s record: 0 wins 2 losses. Cumulative: 2 wins 3 loses with 1 second place finish
12/28-29/1954 Holiday Festival: New York, NY
We got our doors blown off by the defending national champion, LaSalle with Tom Gola, 54-103. They didn’t have much the next day, either, losing to Niagara 70-91. Understandably these games are not described in the SU history book. I don’t know why there were only two games and the HF was usually an 8 team tournament with loser’s brackets such that everybody played 3 games. For some reason, there’s virtually nothing on the internet about the history of the Holiday Festival which for years was the #1 holiday tournament in the country. LaSalle returned to the NCAA title game, losing to Bill Russell’s San Francisco team, 63-77. They were ranked 3rd in both polls. Niagara was good too: 20-6 and ranked #16 by the coaches. They lost to Cincinnati in the NIT quarter-finals. SU finished 10-11.
SU’s Record: 0 wins 2 losses. Cumulative: 2 wins 5 loses with 1 second place finish
12/26-12/30/ 1955 Holiday Festival, New York, NY
Despite their dismal performance in the previous year’s HF, the Orange was back. They were more competitive but lost to Holy Cross, 74-87 and LaSalle 72-75 before beating Fordham 79-61. Holy Cross was a strong team, going 22-5 and ranked #14/15. They lost to Temple in the first rounds of the NCAAs. LaSalle slipped to 15-10. Fordham finished 11-14 while SU was 14-8.
SU’s Record: 1 win 2 losses. Cumulative: 3 wins 7 losses with 1 second place finish
A brief discussion of the Round Robin in Boston, 12/21-22/1956. Per the McDonald Book, there were four teams invited: Syracuse, Holy Cross, Dartmouth and North Carolina. Apparently the non-new England teams played the New England teams, switching opponents the second night. Syracuse blew out the Crusaders 95-66 and the Green Indians 86-63. The Tar Heels, who would be 32-0 national champions that year, beat Dartmouth 89-61 and Holy Cross 83-70. But that was it. Holy Cross only went 11-12 but Dartmouth was 18-7 that year, same as SU.
“Holy Cross mentor Doggie Julian felt Syracuse could have handled North Carolina…Indeed the Tar Heels own coach concurred. Talking with, (SU assistant), Andy Mogish after the Dartmouth game, Frank McGuire admitted that he’d never seen a team put two games back to back as we did. And he said he felt darned lucky the pairing worked out as they did.“ Three months later, the two teams did meet and UNC triumphed in the Eastern Regional Finals 58-67. His teammates always wondered if they could have beaten the Heels with Jim Brown, who had quit the team because Coach Marc Guley adhered to the “unwritten rule” that a 5 man team shouldn’t have more than two black starters. There’s usually a reason unwritten rules haven’t been written.
12/28-30/1957 Queen City Tournament Buffalo NY
We beat Canisius 83-73 but lost to Iowa 52-58 in the final. It wasn’t a great achievement. The Golden Griffins suffered through a 2-19 year while Iowa was 13-9.SU was 11-10.
SU’s record: 1 win 1 loss (second place). Cumulative: 4 wins 8 losses with 2 second place finishes.
12/26-29/1958 Holiday Festival, New York, NY
We lost to St. Joseph’s, who was beginning to make its presence felt on the national scene, 63-72. We rallied form that to beat Cornell 66-60 and Holy Cross 88-82. St. Joe’s was 22-5 and ranked #14/#20 in the writers and coach’s polls. Cornell was 8-15 and Holy Cross 14-11. SU was 14-9.
SU’s record: 2 wins 1 loss Cumulative: 6 wins 9 losses with 2 second place finishes.
2/4/60 Kent State Tournament
We lost to St. John’s 68-85. Apparently, there was no consolation game so we went home. (It’s interesting that it wasn’t a Holiday tournament.) The Johnnies were 17-8. SU was 13-8, their last winning record for four years. But I’m sure it seemed a lot longer as we won only 14 of 70 games, including a then record 27 game losing streak. And you thought last season was bad!
SU’s record 0-1 Cumulative: 6-10. with 2 second place finishes.
12/2-3/1960 Kent State Tournament
We’re baacckkk! They decided to make it a seasons opening tournament and give it a consolation game. We lost to Clemson 67-78 and then won the consy over Massachusetts 74-61. Clemson was 10-16 and UMASS 16-10. SU lost its next 8 in a row and wound up 4-19.
SU’s record 1-1 Cumulative: 7-11. with 2 second place finishes.
12/29-30/1961 Motor City Tournament
We were now in the throws of the awful 27 game losing streak (average score: 65-82, including a 59-122 loss to NYU two weeks before this tournament, the worst loss in SU history). We had a delightful tournament, losing to Detroit 69-97 and DePaul 59-96. The Titans were a 15-10 team, the Blue Demons a 13-10 team and SU was a lousy team at 2-22, (we were 0-22 and got so sick of it we upset BC and UCONN to end the season).
SU 0-2 Cumulative 7-13. with 2 second place finishes.
12/27-28/1963 Hurricane Classic, Miami Florida
This was a legendary and historical tournament that has been much discussed in the SU histories. This was the second year of the Fred Lewis Era, which had begun modestly with an 8-13 record in 1962-63. We had a young star in Dave Bing but this was at the beginning of his sophomore year, (remember freshmen were not eligible for the varsity at this point), and he was not yet well- known. But there were some well-known players at this four team tournament. The host team, Miami had Rick Barry, who averaged 32 points a game that year. Princeton had Bill Bradley who averaged 30ppg. The fourth team was Army, coached by Tates Locke, who had just given a young assistant his first coaching job: Bobby Knight.
Then there were the things going on off the court. SU trainer Julie Reichel had worked with the 1960 Olympic team and had gotten to know Cassius Clay, who won the light heavyweight boxing gold. Clay, who subsequently changed his name to Muhammed Ali, was training in Miami for the first Sonny Liston fight. Reichel took Dave Bing and Sam Penceal, a good defensive guard, to meet Ali, (I’m guess they were the only black players on the team at the time). Penceal: “Ali offered to take us around in his big, red convertible but we had to get back to practice. So, instead, he came to the Princeton game to watch us play. He came in with his whole retinue and sat us in the first row and talked to us all the time. If I remember correctly, Fred Lewis, our coach, wasn’t too happy that we were having a running conversation with Muhammed Ali during the course of the game. But we did, anyway.”
Everyone expected a confrontation between Barry and Bradley in the finals, (and in those days, the game was as much about individual confrontations between the stars of teams as between the tams themselves: the national scoring race got as much scrutiny as the team rankings.) Syracuse spoiled the party by beating Princeton 76-71. Ali watched his new friend Penceal hold Bradley to 17 points, (Bill fouled out midway through the second half). Miami struggled pas the Cadets, 79-71. Barry was laid low by an illness, (I’m guessing the flu), and spent time outs under a blanket, shivering. He still managed to score 25 points against Penceal’s best efforts. But the Orange prevailed in overtime 86-85 to in its first ever in-season tournament. The winning score was by on Rob Murray, a little-used reserve who was one of two seniors on the roster. It was a tournament full of glamour won by a couple of unsung heroes.
Princeton won the Ivy heavy, was 20-9 overall but unraked despite the presence of Bradley. Miami was 20-7 and also unranked, despite Barry. SU would be 17-8 and unranked, despite Bing.
SU: 2-0 Cumulative: 9-13 with one win and two second place finishes.
12/28-30/1964 Holiday Festival NY, NY
Bill Bradley got his revenge by dropping 36 on the Orange in a 69-79 SU loss. But our guys rebounded from that to crush Manhattan 87-64. SU had gotten off to an amazing start- amazingly good then amazingly bad. They beat American U. 127-67, the large margin of victory in the school’s history. Then they lost 6 in a row before beating Manhattan. Then they lost two more before righting the ship for a 11-2 finish and a final 13-10 record. It hadn’t helped that 5 of those early losses were road games, not even counting the loss to Princeton and that they were playing top teams, including Kentucky and Louisville. JB: “We weren’t quite there yet.” Princeton went 23-6 and won 3rd place in the Final Four with a 118-82 rout of Wichita State in which Bradley had 58 points, at the time a record total for an NCAA tournament game. Manhattan finished 11-11.
SU: 1-1 Cumulative: 10-14 with one win and two second place finishes.
12/28-30/1965 Los Angeles Classic
I recall this being referred to as the “Bruin Classic” at the time. It was a huge opportunity for Syracuse. This was the team we had in Dave Bing’s and Jim Boeheim’s senior year that averaged a national record, (at the time) 99 points per game. And they were invited to the home tournament of mighty UCLA, who had won the last two national championships and 58 of 60 games in the previous seasons. Beyond that, Fred Lewis was patterning Syracuse after UCLA, using a full court zone press to create racehorse basketball. What a game it would have been!
But it didn’t happen. In the first round the Orange came up against 4th (3rd in the coach’s poll) ranked Vanderbilt and 6-10 Clyde Lee. Bing was magnificent, scoring a school record 46 points. But Lee scored 39 and pulled down 24 rebounds and the Commodores won 98-113. Thrown into the loser’s bracket, Syracuse blew out Northwestern 105-75 and ran past St. John’s 113-97. Bing scored 38 points in that game wand was named MVP even though SU technically finished 5th in the tournament. They did, eventually, get to play UCLA – in 1999. Vanderbilt wound up 24-4, 5th ranked and won the SEC with a 15-1 record. They lost to Cazzie Russell’s Michigan team 87-85 in Elite 8, so they’d been a tough opening draw in the Bruin Classic.
SU: 2-1 Cumulative: 12-15 with one win and two second place finishes.
12/20-21/1966 Christmas Tournament, Boston Massachusetts
The Bing Era piqued my interest in the team but this was the year I really fell in love with SU basketball. We had a Cinderella team that wasn’t supposed to amount to much because we’d lost Bing and Boeheim but we got off to a 19-2 start and rose to ##8 in the country before running out of gas at the end of the year. The two losses were in two different Holiday Tournaments the Orange played in.
The first was this tournament in Boston. Bob Cousy had become BC’s coach and had them ranked #10 in the country. They handled us 75-87. But good ole Manhattan was there to give us a 99-87 bounce-back. The Eagles wound up 21-3 and lost by a point to St. John’s in the Sweet 16. The Jaspers wound up 13-8.
SU: 1-1 Cumulative: 13-16 with one win and two second place finishes.
12/27-30/1966 Quaker City Classic, Philadelphia, Pa.
The Quaker City Classic was the second most renown holiday tournament of the time after the Holiday Festival in new York. We opened by beating LaSalle 88-84, then took on the #2 team in the country, Louisville with Wes Unseld and Butch Beard. This was the game that really hooked me. Syracuse would fall behind by 10-15 points and come back, whittling it down to single digits and even to 2 points at one point. That happened at least 3 different time. I remember listening to Joel Mareiness’s voice, rising with anticipation each time that we might be seeing an historical Syracuse victory. We came up just short, 71-75 and I cried myself to sleep that night. In fact, Mom ordered me to bed on time and I hid a transistor radio under my pillow and heard the end of the game through the pillow. I also remember a Sports Illustrated article on the tourney that had a picture of Vaughn harper scoring over Unseld. We rebounded with an anti-climatic 81-71 win over Villanova.
Louisville wound up 23-5and ranked #2 but were upset in the Sweet 16 by SMU. LaSalle was 14-12 and Villanova 17-9. SU was 20-6 and lost in the first round of the NIT, (this in an ERA when the NCAA was a 24 team tournament, so the NIT had a strong field), to New Mexico and Mel Daniels.
SU: 2-1 Cumulative: 15-17 with one win and two second place finishes.
12/26-30/1967 Holiday Festival NY, NY
We were expecting a big year with 4 starters back from a 20-6 team being joined by a 16-0 freshman team. But after a 108-68 opening win over George Washington we stumbled to a 4-2 start, losing to Cornell and Bowling Green. Things really began to unravel in New York as we got easily handled by St. John’s 55-70. We beat Penn State 83-73 but then lost to LaSalle 68-78 to fall to 5-4. That began a stretch of 9 losses in 10 games and t ball rolled back down the hill. We wound up 11-14. The Johnnies wound up 19-8 and lost to Davison in the round of 32 in the NCAAs. LaSalle was 20-8 and lost to Columbia in the same round. Penn State wound up 10-10. None were ranked.
SU: 1-2 Cumulative: 16-19 with one win and two second place finishes.
12/27-31/1968 Far West Classic Portland, Oregon
This was the last year SU wound up with a losing record, (if you ignore the NCAA’s silly rulings). And we earned it, stari8ng out 4-14 before rallying to 9-16.. We’d lost our first five games but rallied a bit to win 3 in a row, including an improbably 77-74 victory over Brigham Young in Provo, followed b y a another victory in the brawl with the Mormons that closed the game. We went to Portland feeling we’d turned the season around and proceeded to lay the biggest egg we’ve ever laid in an in-season to9runament. We lost three straight games to win up last. It was the margins of victory and the opposition that made it really special. Washington State was pretty good at 18-8 that season and beat us by 19, 67-86. But Arizona State was an 11-15 WAC team and they beat us by 16, 77-93. Finally we were matched with Yale, a 9-16 Ivy League team. They beat us by 18, 65-83. The kids were ready to come home by then, where they managed to beat Pitt- and then lost six more games in a row. Yeech!
SU: 0-3 Cumulative: 16-22 with one win and two second place finishes.
12/29-30/1969 Charlotte Invitational, Charlotte, NC.
We seemed to have righted the ship at least with 6 wins to open the season before losing to American University, 88-91. They beat providence 94-83 in the first round in Charlotte, which was a big deal because Providence was, from the beginning of the 60’s thro9ugh the mid 70’s, the most successful program in the East, although this was kind of a down year for them at 14-11. We met Davidson in the final. Lefty Driesell had moved on to Maryland but the cupboard wasn’t bare for Terry Holland whose team went 22-5, ranked 15th in the nation and lost to St. Bonaventure in the round of 32. They played maybe their best game of the year and blew SU out, 81-103. Unfortunately, it heralded another agonizing slump for the Orange as we finished the year with a 5-11 stretch to break even at 12-12 after the promising start. Basically we stopped playing defense. The Davidson game was the first of five games where we gave up over 100 points, including the all-time SU record of 127 points surrendered to Pittsburgh, a team that had been averaging 65 points a game.
SU: 1-1 Cumulative: 17-23 with one win and three second place finishes.
12/26-29/1970 Quaker City Classic, Philadelphia, PA.
This time we opened 5-0 before getting crushed 75-98 by Fordham, a team that would go 26-3 that year and get Digger Phelps the Notre Dame job. We opened with Pennsylvania a team that won its first 28 games that year and was ranked #3 behind Marquette, who did the same and UCLA who had one defeat. But we gave them all they could handle, losing 77-85 in overtime. Then we beat Army in OT 71-68, (this was Bob Knights last year at the point). But after those two impressive performances, we managed to lost to St. Francis of Pa, 83-86. The Quaker’s bubble burst in an amazing 47-90 loss to a Villanova team they had earlier beaten. They wound up 28-1. Army was 11-14. St. Francis was 15-10. Instead of their usual collapse, SU, after another loss to Holy cross, ended the season on a 13-2 run that got us into the NIT, where we lost to Michigan 76-82. We finished 197, the first of our 45 straight winning seasons.
SU: 1-2 Cumulative: 18-25 with one win and three second place finishes.
12/27-30/1971 Holiday Festival, NY NY
For the third straight year we started the season on a winning streak, (6-0) and then lost, (74-78 to American U. again: their coach was Tom Young, who later got the job at Rutgers and became an early thorn in Jim Boeheim’s side), then proceeded to a holiday tournament with a 1 game losing streak.
We were a bug on the windshield of Louisville, 81-103. The Cardinals went 26-5 under their new coach, Denny Crum. They rose to a #4 national ranking and wound up I the Final Four. But then we beat Duke, 74-72. The Blue Devils were in the fallow period between Vic Bubas in the 60’s and Coach K in the 80’s and beyond and went 14-11 that year. Then we beat a 17-8 Penn state team 92-77 and went on to a 22-6 record, losing to Maryland in the NIT.
SU: 2-1 Cumulative: 20-26 with one win and three second place finishes.
12/15-16/1972 Volunteer Classic Knoxville, Tennessee
In-season tournaments were becoming all the rage and we played, incredibly, in three of them this season. Tennessee had become a power in the SEC under Ray Mears. His team this year went 19-6 but couldn’t crack the rankings, didn’t win the SEC, didn’t go to the NCAAs and didn’t got to the NIT. But they were a good team and beat us 83-87. We then beat a 9-17 Holy Cross team 84-76 in the consy.
SU: 1-1 Cumulative: 21-27 with one win and three second place finishes.
SU played in "The Connecticut Classic 12/22-23/72 but this, like the Boston Round-Robin was not a true tournament. The host team, Connecticut, played Harvard and SU played Yale ion the opening night. The Huskies, in this pre-Calhoun era, lost to the Crimson 70-80 while the Orange squeaked by the Bulldogs, 78-72. Syracuse blew the hosts way second night 104-73, (wouldn’t we love to beat UCONN like that now) while Harvard beat their arch-rival 79-72. But I have the SU yearbook for that season and the schedule in it says “UCONN Classic Dec 22 Yale vs. Syracuse Dec 23 Connecticut vs. Syracuse.” In other words, the match-ups were already scheduled before the tournament began. It was just a pair of double-headers. Which is why, when SU won the ECAC playoffs in 1975, (which put them in the NCAA tournament), it was stated that that was our first tournament victory of any kind wince the Hurricane Classic back in 1963. Since it wasn’t a true tournament, I won’t add it to the SU’s running in-season tournament record.
12/29-30/1972 Maryland Invitational, College Park Maryland
This was a real tournament and SU went into the finals against second ranked Maryland after barely beating a Bowling Green team that wound up 13-13 by 78-74. Maryland and Louisville were two national power of the time that we always seemed to run into in these years and found out that we were not on that level yet. We found that out 76-91 in the final and found it out again in the Sweet 16, by almost the same score 75-91.Maryland then lost to Providence, (the Ernie DIGregorio- Marvin Barnes team) in the regional final. They wound up 23-7 and ranked #8-10 in the two polls. Syracuse actually had a better numerical record, 24-5, including a miracle win requiring two steals in the final second against Penn in the Easter Regional consolation game, the last time Syracuse would end the season with a win until the 2003 national champions.
SU: 1-1 Cumulative: 22-28 with one win and four second place finishes.
12/28-29/1973 Charlotte Invitational, Charlotte, NC
There was a lot of talk that we might finally be able to win a tournament again going into this one. Davidson was still pretty good but no longer a national power, (18-9). The other teams were Miami of Ohio (13-13) and Loyola of Chicago (12-14). We seemed like the best team. They we laid a huge egg with one of the worst performances a good Syracuse team even had, getting blown out by the Redskins, (they are now the Red Hawks), 74-96. After what I assume was a Roy Danforth tongue-lashing, they beat the greyhounds 78-59 but went home disappointed again, nonetheless.
SU: 1-1 Cumulative: 23-29 with one win and four second place finishes.
12/27-28/1974 Kodak Classic, Rochester, NY
Now this one was truly a set up. Our opposition was Georgetown , which had been a 3-23 team when they hired John Thompson, Bill Russell’s old back-center with the Celtics, who had become a successful high school coach in the DC area. They Hoyas had gone 12-14 and 13-13 in their first two years. The home team, Rochester would got 9-16 that season and the fourth team, Dartmouth would go 8-18.
It seemed like a lead-pipe cinch when SU built a 16 point halftime lead. But the Hoyas shot 75% in the second half, (21 for 28) and SY missed three makeable shots in the final minute to lose 70-71. Per Rod McDonald’s book: “After the game, Danforth was still in a daze: “I just don’t believe it. I know I have said that a hundred times but I don’t believe it.” It was the first of three double figure leads blown that year: the others were back-to-back 13 points and 21 point leads in losses to Rutgers and West Virginia in Manley on 1/6-8/1975, which caused a lot of fans to give up on the team that would get us to our first Final Four and finish ranked #6 in the country, our best finish ever to that date. (Meanwhile the Hoyas were showing signs of life at 18-10, despite amazing losing to Dartmouth 56-57 in the final).
SU: 1-1 Cumulative: 24-30 with one win and four second place finishes.
11/28-29/1975 IPTAY Classic, Clemson, SC
We were on Cloud Nine after going to the Final Four the year before. We were a national power now? We opened the season in something called the IPTAY Classic at Clemson. This may have been the first ”pre-season” tournament, really meaning a beginning of the season tournament. The name was an acronym meaning “I pay ten a year”, perhaps the first booster club, formed by Clemson in 1934 where, in the depths of the depression, supporters could pay Clemson $10 a year to help the athletic program. Our first round opposition was Austin Peay State, a pretty good team in those days, (20-7) and they beat us 83-93. Again, we rallied to win the next one, 83-70 over an 8-18 Harvard team. I guess we shoulda paid the ten bucks.
SU: 1-1 Cumulative: 25-31 with one win and four second place finishes.
12/5-6/75 Steel Bowl, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania
We opened against a new National power, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, coached by Jerry Tarkanian who that year obliterated the national scoring record by averaging 110 points per game. (Jacksonville had topped our record with 99.9ppg in 1970-71Oral Roberts had upped it to 105.1 the next year. UNLV’s record was later broken by Loyola Marymount with 122.4 in 1989-90.) I guess we could congratulate ourselves on holding them under their average but we still lost 83-105. Again, we rebounded to beat the home team, Pittsburgh 90-80. The Rebels wound up 29-2, ranked #3 but got knocked off by Arizona in the Sweet 16. Pitt was a 12-15 team that year and SU wound up 20-9, losing to Texas Tech in the round of 32.
SU: 1-1 Cumulative: 26-32 with one win and four second place finishes.
Roy Danforth then decided to back to his southern roots at Tulane and his assistant, Jim Boeheim, who had been interviewing for the job at Rochester, was chosen to replace him. So SU’s pre-Boeheim in-season tournament record wound up 26-32 with one win and four second place finishes in 25 actual tournaments.
