SWC75
Bored Historian
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2011
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What a school year it’s been. We entered September flying high. The football team was back, baby! We’d had a 10 win season and we were going to have another one of those long streaks of winning seasons, (like 1914-35, 1950-71 – actually there were a couple of even years there- and 1987-2001). We would breeze past Liberty and Maryland and then, for the first time ever in football, host ESPN’s College GameDay for the Clemson game against a powerhouse team we’d beaten here two years ago and almost beaten in their place last year. Rece, Lee and Kirk would be set up next to the Quad with the Dome and its huge cranes in the background, advertising how we are a building program that players will want to come here to play for. Jim Boeheim….or maybe Jim Brown - would be the guest picker. They’d show the Ernie Davis statue and do a story on him. Maybe something on John Mackey or Tim Green, too.
Then came that afternoon at College Park where a Maryland team that would win one more game that year, (over Rutgers) steamrolls us, 20-63. GameDay, which already had hotel reservations, leaves town for an Iowa-Iowa State game. And Clemson clobbered us too, 6-41. We develop a pattern of handling non-power conference teams but getting handled by power conference teams. We also tend to fall way behind at halftime and mount unsuccessful comebacks. We still have hopes of somehow scraping out way to a bowl game. Then comes the dreadful second quarter against Boston College where they have four 50+ touchdowns in 8 plays from scrimmage. Dino fires his long-time defensive coordinator and elevates his line coach who comes up with a clever scheme to have the defensive ends and tackles do a stunt with the ends going inside and the tackles around them to the outside. This totally flummoxes Duke and we look like world beaters in a 49-6 road win. Louisville realizes that our tackles couldn’t get outside fast enough to stop their speedy running backs and spends the whole game running sweeps on their way to 34-56 win that ends our bowl hopes. We should also have lost the season ender against Wake Forest in overtime but Trill Williams picked the pocket of a receiver and went the distance, a grand ending to a very disappointing season. Oh, well, there’s always basketball…
The basketball team has already begun its own disappointing season. We’d lost three starters so the best we could be was hopeful. The same trend the football team had developed for the basketball team: We could handle the mid-majors but not the power conference teams. One difference was that we could compete with the power conference teams for a while but they would put on a run at some point in the game that we couldn’t answer. Double figure losses to Virginia, (another parallel: our home opener in both sports was against the defending national champions), Oklahoma State, Penn State, Iowa and Georgetown made it obvious we weren’t an NCAA team and questionable whether we were an NIT team or would even have a winning record, which we’d done 49 times in arrow. In some of those years we were 13-0 going into the conference season. This time we were 8-5 and 1-5 against ACC level teams with 18 ACC games to come. Then we opened the ACC season with home losses to Notre Dame and Virginia Tech, neither of whom were expected to be among the leading lights of the conference. Now we were 8-7.
But the team hitched up its hip pads, (oops – wrong sport), and put together a 5 game winning streak to move to 13-7 and rekindle hopes we could somehow make the Big Dance. It was an illusion. We let a game at Clemson get away from us in the final seconds. Duke pulled away late in the first half and we never got back in it. We got a last second win over Wake, (they haven’t enjoyed their trips to the Dome this year). Our star player couldn’t go in a close loss to NC State. A late lead slipped away against Florida State. But the most disappointing game was at Louisville. For the first time all season we just didn’t show up. We got out-hustled the whole game by a superior team and got crushed on the scoreboard 66-90 in a game that wasn’t even that close. Had the team packed it in?
We rallied to beat Georgia Tech at home and handled Pittsburgh again on the road. The North Carolina game was a star-studded home finale with Tom Brady and Jimmy Fallon in attendance. Unfortunately, they watched North Carolina, a disappointing team all year, run us off the court, 79-92. Still, we easily beat Boston College before a mostly SU crowd in their own arena. That, at least, clinched a continuation of “the streak”, giving us our 50th straight winning season. Then our star, Elijah Hughes, injured himself again, (thanks to Bourama Sidibe’s knee), and missed the second half against Miami, giving us another defeat and 17-14 regular season record.
That got us a rematch with North Carolina in the ACC tournament and a dream-sequence 81-53 vengeance against the Tar Heels. It was the 7th time we’d come back to beat a team that had beaten us previously and the next night we were going for #8 against Louisville. If we could keep playing like that, anything was possible: the ACC championship, a trip to the Big Dance and beyond.
Meanwhile everyone was excited about our men’s lacrosse team which was looking like our powerhouses of years past and had risen to a #1 ranking. And our women’s team was ranked #4. They might both with the national championship. And then….
The basketball season was not without its accomplishments. That 50 year streak is the longest in the country and the second longest ever, (UCLA had 54 in a row from 1949-2002. North Carolina’s season (14-19) is something we’ve avoided for half a century. Every other school in the country has had at least two non-winning seasons in that time, (this was the Tar Heel’s second). We have that 7-0 streak in rematches. We won four ACC games by at least 23 points. Only Duke had more, (6) and the other members of the league’s Top 4 teams: Virginia, Florida State and Louisville, had just two such wins between them. We won 6 conference road games, another on a not very neutral court and nearly won three more.
The natural thing to do after a season is over is to imagine what next season might be like. But you have to know who will be on next year’s team and these days, that involves a very cloudy crystal ball. This year the ball rolled off the table and shattered on the floor. We had 12 recruited players under scholarship, all underclassmen. But the best player, Elijah Hughes, is heavily rumored to be ready to declare for the NBA draft. Jim Boeheim and his staff have commitments from high schoolers Woody Newton, a 6-8 forward and Kadary Richmond, a 6-5 guard. He’s trying to recruit Patrick Tape, a 6-10 center and Seth Towns, a 6-7 forward as grad transfers from the Ivy League. But that gives us 16 guys and there are only 13 scholarships. Three guys had to go. I thought it would likely be Hughes, going to the NBA, Tape, who seeing Bouama Sidibie’s improvement, Jesse Edward’s flashes of talent, John Bol Ajak coming off of his redshirt year and the playing time Marek Dolezaj got at center would decide to go elsewhere plus one of the reserve guards transferring. So this week ALL THREE reserve guards decided to transfer and back-up forward Robert Braswell was considering the same thing. That’s four guys and I still wonder about Tape. Boeheim says that he’s still looking for recruits both from high schools and the grad transfer route.
I think Brycen Goodine, Jalen Carey and Howard Washington all left and Braswell may be joining them because JB has been predicting, (with dread), that the rule about undergrad transfers transferring but having to sit out a year will be rescinded before next season. (They were also aware that they were playing behind a freshman and sophomore and that one, maybe two 5 star guards would be arriving for the 2021-22 season). We may be entering an era where guys who have been beaten out leave instead of waiting to see if they will get a chance down the road. A school like SU may lose their bench every year. Then the coaching staff will have the unenviable job of recruiting players to be back-ups. Who goes to a school to be a back-up? Most likely that will be Division 2 or 3 players who would want to show they could play, even in a limited capacity in Division 1. In other words, glorified walk-ons. We could pursue other team’s transfers but why would they come here to ride our bench instead of the one they were on? So Jim and his team will continue to recruit high school players, D2-3 guys, D-1 undergrad transfers, D-1 grad transfers, foreign players and, essentially, even his own players – to get them to stay. All while keeping track of the scholarship limit of 13 and being unable to recruit in the physical presence of anyone until the coronavirus scare is over. You wonder if a 75 year old man wants to put up with this stuff anymore.
Then came that afternoon at College Park where a Maryland team that would win one more game that year, (over Rutgers) steamrolls us, 20-63. GameDay, which already had hotel reservations, leaves town for an Iowa-Iowa State game. And Clemson clobbered us too, 6-41. We develop a pattern of handling non-power conference teams but getting handled by power conference teams. We also tend to fall way behind at halftime and mount unsuccessful comebacks. We still have hopes of somehow scraping out way to a bowl game. Then comes the dreadful second quarter against Boston College where they have four 50+ touchdowns in 8 plays from scrimmage. Dino fires his long-time defensive coordinator and elevates his line coach who comes up with a clever scheme to have the defensive ends and tackles do a stunt with the ends going inside and the tackles around them to the outside. This totally flummoxes Duke and we look like world beaters in a 49-6 road win. Louisville realizes that our tackles couldn’t get outside fast enough to stop their speedy running backs and spends the whole game running sweeps on their way to 34-56 win that ends our bowl hopes. We should also have lost the season ender against Wake Forest in overtime but Trill Williams picked the pocket of a receiver and went the distance, a grand ending to a very disappointing season. Oh, well, there’s always basketball…
The basketball team has already begun its own disappointing season. We’d lost three starters so the best we could be was hopeful. The same trend the football team had developed for the basketball team: We could handle the mid-majors but not the power conference teams. One difference was that we could compete with the power conference teams for a while but they would put on a run at some point in the game that we couldn’t answer. Double figure losses to Virginia, (another parallel: our home opener in both sports was against the defending national champions), Oklahoma State, Penn State, Iowa and Georgetown made it obvious we weren’t an NCAA team and questionable whether we were an NIT team or would even have a winning record, which we’d done 49 times in arrow. In some of those years we were 13-0 going into the conference season. This time we were 8-5 and 1-5 against ACC level teams with 18 ACC games to come. Then we opened the ACC season with home losses to Notre Dame and Virginia Tech, neither of whom were expected to be among the leading lights of the conference. Now we were 8-7.
But the team hitched up its hip pads, (oops – wrong sport), and put together a 5 game winning streak to move to 13-7 and rekindle hopes we could somehow make the Big Dance. It was an illusion. We let a game at Clemson get away from us in the final seconds. Duke pulled away late in the first half and we never got back in it. We got a last second win over Wake, (they haven’t enjoyed their trips to the Dome this year). Our star player couldn’t go in a close loss to NC State. A late lead slipped away against Florida State. But the most disappointing game was at Louisville. For the first time all season we just didn’t show up. We got out-hustled the whole game by a superior team and got crushed on the scoreboard 66-90 in a game that wasn’t even that close. Had the team packed it in?
We rallied to beat Georgia Tech at home and handled Pittsburgh again on the road. The North Carolina game was a star-studded home finale with Tom Brady and Jimmy Fallon in attendance. Unfortunately, they watched North Carolina, a disappointing team all year, run us off the court, 79-92. Still, we easily beat Boston College before a mostly SU crowd in their own arena. That, at least, clinched a continuation of “the streak”, giving us our 50th straight winning season. Then our star, Elijah Hughes, injured himself again, (thanks to Bourama Sidibe’s knee), and missed the second half against Miami, giving us another defeat and 17-14 regular season record.
That got us a rematch with North Carolina in the ACC tournament and a dream-sequence 81-53 vengeance against the Tar Heels. It was the 7th time we’d come back to beat a team that had beaten us previously and the next night we were going for #8 against Louisville. If we could keep playing like that, anything was possible: the ACC championship, a trip to the Big Dance and beyond.
Meanwhile everyone was excited about our men’s lacrosse team which was looking like our powerhouses of years past and had risen to a #1 ranking. And our women’s team was ranked #4. They might both with the national championship. And then….
The basketball season was not without its accomplishments. That 50 year streak is the longest in the country and the second longest ever, (UCLA had 54 in a row from 1949-2002. North Carolina’s season (14-19) is something we’ve avoided for half a century. Every other school in the country has had at least two non-winning seasons in that time, (this was the Tar Heel’s second). We have that 7-0 streak in rematches. We won four ACC games by at least 23 points. Only Duke had more, (6) and the other members of the league’s Top 4 teams: Virginia, Florida State and Louisville, had just two such wins between them. We won 6 conference road games, another on a not very neutral court and nearly won three more.
The natural thing to do after a season is over is to imagine what next season might be like. But you have to know who will be on next year’s team and these days, that involves a very cloudy crystal ball. This year the ball rolled off the table and shattered on the floor. We had 12 recruited players under scholarship, all underclassmen. But the best player, Elijah Hughes, is heavily rumored to be ready to declare for the NBA draft. Jim Boeheim and his staff have commitments from high schoolers Woody Newton, a 6-8 forward and Kadary Richmond, a 6-5 guard. He’s trying to recruit Patrick Tape, a 6-10 center and Seth Towns, a 6-7 forward as grad transfers from the Ivy League. But that gives us 16 guys and there are only 13 scholarships. Three guys had to go. I thought it would likely be Hughes, going to the NBA, Tape, who seeing Bouama Sidibie’s improvement, Jesse Edward’s flashes of talent, John Bol Ajak coming off of his redshirt year and the playing time Marek Dolezaj got at center would decide to go elsewhere plus one of the reserve guards transferring. So this week ALL THREE reserve guards decided to transfer and back-up forward Robert Braswell was considering the same thing. That’s four guys and I still wonder about Tape. Boeheim says that he’s still looking for recruits both from high schools and the grad transfer route.
I think Brycen Goodine, Jalen Carey and Howard Washington all left and Braswell may be joining them because JB has been predicting, (with dread), that the rule about undergrad transfers transferring but having to sit out a year will be rescinded before next season. (They were also aware that they were playing behind a freshman and sophomore and that one, maybe two 5 star guards would be arriving for the 2021-22 season). We may be entering an era where guys who have been beaten out leave instead of waiting to see if they will get a chance down the road. A school like SU may lose their bench every year. Then the coaching staff will have the unenviable job of recruiting players to be back-ups. Who goes to a school to be a back-up? Most likely that will be Division 2 or 3 players who would want to show they could play, even in a limited capacity in Division 1. In other words, glorified walk-ons. We could pursue other team’s transfers but why would they come here to ride our bench instead of the one they were on? So Jim and his team will continue to recruit high school players, D2-3 guys, D-1 undergrad transfers, D-1 grad transfers, foreign players and, essentially, even his own players – to get them to stay. All while keeping track of the scholarship limit of 13 and being unable to recruit in the physical presence of anyone until the coronavirus scare is over. You wonder if a 75 year old man wants to put up with this stuff anymore.
