SWC75
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This is my annual look back at statements I made in my pre-season SU basketball preview with the hindsight of what happened during the season. I’ll add in a look at next season as it appears now.
My pre-season comments are in italics and my current comments are not.
THE SITUATION
I recently called into one of the local radio shows. They were discussing the expectations for this year’s SU basketball team and what criteria should be used. One guy asked “Do you see this as a Final Four team? Elite 8? Sweet 16? I called in to say that you really can’t judge a season by NCAA tournament results because it’s a single-elimination tournament where every team can beat you, (ask Virginia)…. You can lose NCAA tournament games for all same reasons you can lose regular season games: bad match-ups, injuries, foul trouble, the ball goes around and out rather than around and in, etc. The regular season where you play all kinds of teams in all kinds of games and can have some off nights but come back to excel in other games, is a better measure of a teams’ quality. I argued that the best way to look at it is that what we want out of the regular season is to be curious, rather than nervous on selection Sunday and hopeful after that. The radio guy pronounced that “backwards”, saying “Most people judge seasons by what happens in the NCAA tournament.”
Actually people judge the team from time the season starts and they care very much what happens in the regular season. SU fans have been complaining for years that we’ve been in a rut of having double figure loss seasons, that we keep finishing in the middle of the ACC when we are supposed to be an elite program and that we are “always on the bubble”. Their greatest desire is to win another national championship, especially since so many schools we consider ourselves to be the equal of or superior to have surpassed our relatively meager total of one. Mediocre regular seasons make us feel farther and farther away from that goal…. We long for the types of teams we had a decade ago, when we had three teams achieve that #1 ranking in six years and won 28, 27 and 30 games, (and went to a Final Four), in the years we didn’t. We also want to continue our nation-leading streak of 51 consecutive winning seasons, there short of UCLA’s record of 54. It would be a tragedy to lose that streak before we get the record. Once we lose that streak, we’ll never see it again… But we’d really like to have a team that proves early on that they are one of the best teams in the country, breaks into the rankings early and stays there all year and allows us to dream of great post-season success for four months before we actually find out what happens.
The big difference between 2009-14 and 2015-21 are that in the first era we were strong at both ends of the court and the defense and offense complimented each other. In the second era, we’ve tended to be good on defense or on offense but not both. We’ve found out that the defensive teams tend to do better getting to the NCAA tournament and winning games there but neither is as good as being strong on both ends…. So I think SU fans care very much about the regular season. Then they will care very much about the post season. If the regular season doesn’t go well, they will spend four months griping about it. If they aren’t griping, they will dream of a Hollywood ending in which Jim Boeheim and his two sons cut down the nets at the end, (and give Julie a snip). It will be a lot more fun if the regular season allows them to spend those four months dreaming of that moment.
We started poorly, losing-badly- to Colgate for the first time since Kennedy was president, getting clobbered at Atlantis, rallying slightly against lesser competition, bobbling away some winnable games, finally going a sort of hot streak, then coming up short in some more games. When the dust settled we had our first losing season – by one game – since Johnson was president. We were weak defensively at worst, mediocre at best. Our ball handling and passing were inconsistent. We had trouble getting shots off against aggressive defenses.
Discontent built all season long, much of it valid, some of it over-the-top but still emotionally understandable. People were saying that Jim Boeheim no longer cared if we won or not or that he only cared that his sons could play entire games and had structured the roster to allow for that at the expense of the program. I invite anyone who believes that to watch his press conference after the Miami game in the Dome, where we blew a 10 point lead with 2 ½ minutes to go:
The team did improve as the season progressed, as did the ACC itself. Conferences get downrated if their top teams are rebuilding and if they lose some early games to other conferences. Then their teams start playing each other and have no way to increase their ranking because they aren’t playing ranked teams. As we enter the Sweet 16, the ACC has the best record in the tournament at 9-2 and is tied for the most steams still alive with three. Syracuse, playing without it’s starting center who had become probably the best player on the team, almost beat all three those teams in the final couple of weeks of the season, losing to Miami by 3, the North Carolina in overtime and to Duke by 9 in a game where we were also without our leading scorer and yet was even with 3 minutes left. Somebody had posted that “we don’t have the players to compete with the teams we are playing” and yet we were obviously competitive with Sweet 16 teams even when we didn’t have all our players.
And yet we lost those games. We were 2-7 in games decided by 5 points or less or in overtime. We seemed to run out of gas and to have trouble handling the ball or getting shots off against late game pressure. We didn’t deserve to win any of the games we lost. We were what our record said we were and we were a good deal short of what Syracuse fans have been used to during the Boeheim Era. The thought of contending for conference or national titles seems to be getting farther and farther away, causing many to conclude that such goals will continue to recede until we have a different coaching staff. There are assertions that another losing season was coming up next year and if Jim Boeheim stayed as coach or was replaced by one of his assistants, things will just get progressively worse. No one can know those things for sure but they are getting harder to argue with.
At least we know that the regular season is as important to SU fans as the post season. They want success in both. This season was not much fun and if next season starts out the same way, it won’t be much fun, either.
My pre-season comments are in italics and my current comments are not.
THE SITUATION
I recently called into one of the local radio shows. They were discussing the expectations for this year’s SU basketball team and what criteria should be used. One guy asked “Do you see this as a Final Four team? Elite 8? Sweet 16? I called in to say that you really can’t judge a season by NCAA tournament results because it’s a single-elimination tournament where every team can beat you, (ask Virginia)…. You can lose NCAA tournament games for all same reasons you can lose regular season games: bad match-ups, injuries, foul trouble, the ball goes around and out rather than around and in, etc. The regular season where you play all kinds of teams in all kinds of games and can have some off nights but come back to excel in other games, is a better measure of a teams’ quality. I argued that the best way to look at it is that what we want out of the regular season is to be curious, rather than nervous on selection Sunday and hopeful after that. The radio guy pronounced that “backwards”, saying “Most people judge seasons by what happens in the NCAA tournament.”
Actually people judge the team from time the season starts and they care very much what happens in the regular season. SU fans have been complaining for years that we’ve been in a rut of having double figure loss seasons, that we keep finishing in the middle of the ACC when we are supposed to be an elite program and that we are “always on the bubble”. Their greatest desire is to win another national championship, especially since so many schools we consider ourselves to be the equal of or superior to have surpassed our relatively meager total of one. Mediocre regular seasons make us feel farther and farther away from that goal…. We long for the types of teams we had a decade ago, when we had three teams achieve that #1 ranking in six years and won 28, 27 and 30 games, (and went to a Final Four), in the years we didn’t. We also want to continue our nation-leading streak of 51 consecutive winning seasons, there short of UCLA’s record of 54. It would be a tragedy to lose that streak before we get the record. Once we lose that streak, we’ll never see it again… But we’d really like to have a team that proves early on that they are one of the best teams in the country, breaks into the rankings early and stays there all year and allows us to dream of great post-season success for four months before we actually find out what happens.
The big difference between 2009-14 and 2015-21 are that in the first era we were strong at both ends of the court and the defense and offense complimented each other. In the second era, we’ve tended to be good on defense or on offense but not both. We’ve found out that the defensive teams tend to do better getting to the NCAA tournament and winning games there but neither is as good as being strong on both ends…. So I think SU fans care very much about the regular season. Then they will care very much about the post season. If the regular season doesn’t go well, they will spend four months griping about it. If they aren’t griping, they will dream of a Hollywood ending in which Jim Boeheim and his two sons cut down the nets at the end, (and give Julie a snip). It will be a lot more fun if the regular season allows them to spend those four months dreaming of that moment.
We started poorly, losing-badly- to Colgate for the first time since Kennedy was president, getting clobbered at Atlantis, rallying slightly against lesser competition, bobbling away some winnable games, finally going a sort of hot streak, then coming up short in some more games. When the dust settled we had our first losing season – by one game – since Johnson was president. We were weak defensively at worst, mediocre at best. Our ball handling and passing were inconsistent. We had trouble getting shots off against aggressive defenses.
Discontent built all season long, much of it valid, some of it over-the-top but still emotionally understandable. People were saying that Jim Boeheim no longer cared if we won or not or that he only cared that his sons could play entire games and had structured the roster to allow for that at the expense of the program. I invite anyone who believes that to watch his press conference after the Miami game in the Dome, where we blew a 10 point lead with 2 ½ minutes to go:
The team did improve as the season progressed, as did the ACC itself. Conferences get downrated if their top teams are rebuilding and if they lose some early games to other conferences. Then their teams start playing each other and have no way to increase their ranking because they aren’t playing ranked teams. As we enter the Sweet 16, the ACC has the best record in the tournament at 9-2 and is tied for the most steams still alive with three. Syracuse, playing without it’s starting center who had become probably the best player on the team, almost beat all three those teams in the final couple of weeks of the season, losing to Miami by 3, the North Carolina in overtime and to Duke by 9 in a game where we were also without our leading scorer and yet was even with 3 minutes left. Somebody had posted that “we don’t have the players to compete with the teams we are playing” and yet we were obviously competitive with Sweet 16 teams even when we didn’t have all our players.
And yet we lost those games. We were 2-7 in games decided by 5 points or less or in overtime. We seemed to run out of gas and to have trouble handling the ball or getting shots off against late game pressure. We didn’t deserve to win any of the games we lost. We were what our record said we were and we were a good deal short of what Syracuse fans have been used to during the Boeheim Era. The thought of contending for conference or national titles seems to be getting farther and farther away, causing many to conclude that such goals will continue to recede until we have a different coaching staff. There are assertions that another losing season was coming up next year and if Jim Boeheim stayed as coach or was replaced by one of his assistants, things will just get progressively worse. No one can know those things for sure but they are getting harder to argue with.
At least we know that the regular season is as important to SU fans as the post season. They want success in both. This season was not much fun and if next season starts out the same way, it won’t be much fun, either.