We've Gone About as Far as We Can Go - updated
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SWC75
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The 2004 post:
That’s a line from “Oklahoma” but it’s a phrase that has a lot of application this time of year. Teams from all kinds of places- big cities, small cities, small towns, places where it’s warm, places where it’s cold, mountains, plains, lakes and ocean fronts, schools that have always been good, schools that are sometimes good, schools that have never been good, etc. etc., have and will have their seasons end this week or next or, hopefully the week after that. The ultimate is to win the whole thing but 65 heads don’t fit into one crown. Failing that, you want to be able to say “We we’ve gone about as far as we can go”- that the team beat the teams they should have, played well in their final game and lost to a team that was just better or played better that day. You also would like to avoid controversy or “boners”, (the Merkle definition- the other kind comes when you winJ). It’s also nice if the team that beats you beat some other people, too, so you don’t feel so badly. Finally, there’s a stigma to losing in the sub-regionals, the first two rounds of the tournament, even though the ever increasing competitiveness of the tournament makes them nearly as difficult a place to win as the regionals. If you can survive the sub-regionals, you know you accomplished something and that whoever beats you is likely to be a top team.
I decided to review how Syracuse’s NCAA runs have ended over the years, to see how many times the ending seemed at least acceptable, even if only last year was truly a “happy” ending.
1957: I was a toddler when the Orange lost in the Eastern Regional finals to North Carolina’s undefeated eventual national champions, 58-67. That was the high-water mark of the program for many years and certainly nothing to be ashamed of. However the background story of why Jim Brown was not on that team was. The team had two black starters in Vinnie Cohen and Manny Breland. With Jim, who had been a high school All-American who averaged 38ppg, they would have had a better team, perhaps one that might have upset the Tar Heels. But that would have meant having a majority of starters on the team who were “not white” and that was not done in those days. Jim left the team over this and the chance to do something really special slipped away for all the wrong reasons.
1966: I remember following the team for the first time in the newspapers as SU almost became the first team to score 100 points a game. I remember them going out to the coast to play in the Bruin Classic, where they might have had a chance to get a shot at the two time defending national champions, UCLA, but got beat by Vanderbilt before it could happen, despite Dave Bing’s then school record 46 points. But I have no memory of SU’s final defeat against Duke, again in the Eastern Regional finals, 81-91. I know from reading about it that Bing ended his collegiate career on a disappointing note, going 4 for 14 and scoring 10 points. Duke was 24-3 and ranked #2. The game was played in Raleigh, (naturally). Those are reasons to think that team “went about as far as they could go”, but somehow I doubt they felt that way. The Blue Devils lost to Kentucky in the national semi-finals, a game most people thought was for the “real championship”, not expecting Texas Western or Utah to handle either one of them. It was not the last time a mistake like that would be made.
1973: Roy’s Runts had added 6-8 Rudy Hackett, the Hakim Warrick of his day and we were a sparkling 23-4. But for the third time in two years, Lefty Driesell had all the answers and we lost to Maryland, 75-91. But it was pretty obvious they had the better team and when SU beat Penn, (a big power in those days), 69-68 on two steals in the last few seconds, the year ended with a pretty good feeling. It would be the last time for 30 years the year ended with a win. The Terps lost to Providence, with Ernie D’Gregorio Marvin Barnes, in the regional finals.
1974: SU had a solid 19-6 record when, in the first year that teams were sent out of their geographical region, they went to Denton Texas to play Oral Roberts, not the evangelist but the team representing the school he named after himself. The Titans had just recently emerged from the small college ranks and SU’s 82-86 Overtime loss was a considerable disappointment. It was assuaged somewhat when ORU bumped off Louisville, 96-93 in the next round. The Titans went down fighting against Kansas, 90-93, also in overtime, the regional final.
1975: This was the year our dreams began to come true. It ended with a 79-95 loss to a deep, physical Kentucky team in a game where the refs decided to call 61 fouls, resulting in three SU starters fouling out while the other two had four fouls. The Wildcats lost to John Wooden’s final UCLA team in the finals. Then we gave Louisville all they could handle, losing in OT in the consey, as Jimmy Lee’s lay-up went around, around and out at the end of regulation. Still, there wasn’t much unhappiness as the team returned from San Diego, just a lot of pride.
1976: This was the interregnum after Hackett and Lee had left and before Louie and Bouie showed up. SU was a fairly weak 18-8, having closed the regular season with a 4 game losing streak before beating Manhattan and Niagara in the old ECAC Playoffs to get the NCAA bid. They again shopped us out to Denton, Texas again, (not our favorite place), and we went down in the first round again, to Texas Tech, who had a 6-9, 240 pound center named Rickey Bullock we had no answer for. It was a disappointing ending but that just wasn’t that strong a team. We might have been better off in the NIT. Tech lost in the Sweet 16 to Missouri.
1977: The Louie and Bouie show was a big hit in the ‘Cuse. We were a sterling 26-3, having just closed out the Ernie and Bernie show at Tennessee. We were paired with something called North Carolina Charlotte, another former small college team. In the other half of the Mideast regional bracket were Michigan and Detroit, coached by a mouthy young coach named Vitale who announced to anyone who would listen that Syracuse and Charlotte might as well go home as neither of them would have a chance vs. the winner of the Michigan-Detroit game. It made you kind of hope these Titans upset the Wolverines so Louie and Bouie could crush them like a soda can in the regional finals. All the dreams when up in flames as Charlotte took over midway through the first half and just built and built their lead, (I think it reached 28 points), finally winning by the shocking score of 59-81. It would be the largest margin of defeat in the Boeheim era until the trip to Chapel Hill to take on Michael Jordan six years later. This was the game where I found out how much difference that height made in the backcourt. We went 5-9. 5-11 vs. 6-4, 6-6 and could neither pass nor shoot over their defenders. Meanwhile they fed Cornbread Maxwell in the post and he got our guys in foul trouble. It’s ironic that SU later began known for tall backcourts and their effectiveness in the zone defense. I’ll bet JB has never forgotten the lesson of Charlotte. The 49ers, (why do they call them that?) then upset Michigan, who had handled Detroit, in the regional finals. They lost on a Jerome Whitehead lay-in at the buzzer to Marquette’s national title team in the final four. The one piece of good news was that the Louie and Bouie show had three years to run.
1978: This team was every bit as good as the previous year’s team, maybe better as they had more experience. This was the team that beat Magic Johnson’s Spartans in the first Carrier Classic. They were 22-4 going into the ECAC playoffs at Rochester against St. Bonaventure, probably our biggest rival at that point, who we had blown out of the Manley Dome, 107-81, In December. The Bonnies shocked SU, 69-70. The team showed up in Knoxville, Pennsylvania the next week in a funk after this, much as they would be 13 years later after blowing a BET game to Villanova before taking on Richmond. Against a 15-13 Western Kentucky team, the Orange made the mistake of letting the underdog stay in the game too long and found themselves down 85-87 with seconds left in overtime. Marty Byrnes drove to the basket and went up for the shot. A Hilltopper defender brought his arm down across Marty’s chest as he began his jump. Marty somehow managed to muscle up a shot as he headed under the basket and out of bounds. The thing miraculously kissed in to tie the score at 87. The whistle blew and Marty went to the basket for the foul shot that would give SU the lead with a single second left in the game. We had survived! At this point, Billy Packer began screaming “There’s no continuation!...There’s no continuation!”. The referees huddled for at least five minutes, leaving Marty standing around. Then they announced the foul was before the shot and took the tying points off the board, handling Marty the ball with chance to tie the game on a one and one. He made the first and missed the second. Several hands batted the ball around and it went out of bounds and the season was over. I was as pissed off as I’ve ever been about a sporting event. I can only imagine what Marty and JB felt. Magic and his Spartans wiped out the Hilltoppers by 21 points in the Sweet 16. At least there were two more years left of the Louie and Bouie show.
1979: Another splendid season for SU. We were again 26-3 going into the Eastern Regional. We’d expected to have another confrontation with North Carolina but Penn, by now an underdog, had knocked off UNC in the second round, 72-71. We’d beaten Connecticut, (the Big East was still a twinkle in Dave Gavitt’s eye at this point), 89-81 and were in an ideal situation. We were getting Cinderella after their big upset, a time when the coach usually turns back into a pumpkin, (both Cinderella’s coach and the team’s). Not this time. Again, the problem was in the backcourt. We had one guard with speed, Eddie Moss, and one without, Marty Headd. Penn had two incredibly quick guards and we simply could not keep up with them. Incredibly, the halftime score was 29-50. The Quakers were on top at the end, too. 76-84. It helped a little when Penn knocked off St. John’s to make it to the final four for the only time in their history. Unfortunately they ran into a buzzsaw: Magic’s Spartans again, who killed them 101-67 in the national semi-finals. At least Louie and Bouie had one more year.
1980: This was the strongest team yet and one of the best teams SU has ever had. They had Louie and Bouie, Moss and Headd, Tony Bruin and Eric Santifer, Danny Schayes backing up Bouie, and Ron Payton coming off the bench. The one guy we really needed to win it all was Leo Rautins, who was sitting out a year after transferring from Minnesota. This team didn’t have quite enough perimeter shooting and had trouble feeding the post. Leo would have been the answer to both problems. Still we won our first 14, including a nationally televised game where Rosey Bouie blocked 7-1 Joe Barry Carroll’s shot, much as Hak Warrick did to Michael Lee’s shot 13 years later except that Lee was only 6-3. Then we blew a 13 point lead to lose on the road to Old Dominion on a shot replays showed was after the clock had run out, 67-68. Then we won seven in a row, blowing out St. Bonaventure in Manley 105-80, to go 21-1. We were ranked #2 and #1 DePaul was losing so we went to bed thinking SU would be #1 in the morning. Big time high school prospect Sam Perkins was seen in the stands, smiling as SU dazzled on the court. Word was that he would replace Bouie for the ’80-81 Orangemen. Life was good. But DePaul came back to win and Georgetown “closed” Manley Field House in the next game. Later the Hoyas beat us again in the finals of the first Big East Tournament. The season and the whole Louie and Bouie era came to down to a Sweet 16 game against Iowa. We had “that” record again: 26-3. It was like a dead man’s hand for SU. The game was back and forth all the way. SU finally pulled out to about a seven point lead midway through the second half. Jim Boeheim decided at this point to abandon the half-court defense that had given us the lead and try to put the Hawkeyes away with his leaky press. Iowa totally dominated down the stretch, repeatedly breaking the press to beat us 77-88 and end the Louie and Bouie show for good. Lute Olson’s team then bumped off the Hoyas in the regional final before losing to Louisville’s eventual national champions in the Final Four. After the season Sam Perkins announced he was going to North Carolina. That was one time I really felt a strategical decision by the coach cost us an NCAA game. I really feel that if we’d stayed with the defense that was winning the game for us, we’d have advanced. Maybe the third time would have been the charm against the Hoyas and then who knows? As it was I was devastated that the Louie and Bouie show was over and we’d never gotten back to the Final Four, much less won the national title. Would we ever be that good again?
1983: We finally got back to the Big Dance with a team that, led by the famous “tricaptains”: Leo Rautins, Tony Bruin and Eric Santifer, had won their first 11 games, including a terrific 92-87 win over the University of Houston, in the Dome on 12/11/82. Phi Slamma Jama lost their next game to Ralph Sampson’s Virginia team and then won 26 in a row until Lorenzo Charles dunked in the national championship in Albuquerque. team The next game we beat another pretty good team, Ohio State, 91-85. The streak ended with consecutive losses to UNC and Georgetown. That was a pretty impressive start but the Orange slumped after that, finishing the regular season 19-8 and splitting two games in the Big East tournament. The Eastern Regionals were scheduled for the Carrier Dome that year and all we had to do to get there was beat Morehead State, (which we did easily, 74-59), and then beat Ohio State again. But the Buckeyes dominated the boards down the stretch and got repeated follow-shots to ruin the dream, 74-79. UNC took care of State, 64-51 before a Carrier Dome crowd that would have been a lot bigger if SU was playing.
1984: It was the first year of the Pearl and the first year without Ralph Sampson for Virginia, who we met in the Sweet 16 in the Omni in Atlanta. This game is not that well remembered but I remember it because it was the worst performance by a team that beat SU in the NCAAs. They stunk. We just stunk worse. The game would be won by the first team to play five minutes of decent basketball. It was the Cavaliers, just after the half. They won, 63-55 and then upset Indiana, who had just ended Michael Jordan’s career in their semifinal game. Then they lost to Houston in OT in the final four. Somehow that Virginia game has always bugged me, maybe more than any other season ender, because they were there for the taking and we just wouldn’t take them.
1985: We had one good big man, Rony Seikaly. Georgia Tech had two of them, John Sally and Yvon Joseph. They also had Mark Price, a tough guard named Bruce Dalrymple and a defensive ace named Duane Ferrell that shadowed Raf Addison the whole game. They beat us, again in the Omni, 53-70. I remember some grousing about Boeheim after the game, but basically we just lost to a better team in their own backyard. They then beat Illinois and gave Georgetown all they could handle in the regional final, losing 54-60.
1986: The program had been building since the beginning of the decade, helped by Boeheim, the Louie and Bouie Era, the Dome, the big east, ESPN and the pearl. Now we became a real powerhouse. Seikaly came into his own at center. Raf Addison and Wendell Alexis were excellent forwards. Pearl Washington was Pearl Washington. We had Sherman Douglas, Greg Monroe, Howie Triche, Michael Brown, Derrick Brower, Herman Harried and Rodney Walker on the bench. After a 102-68 thumping of a Southern Cal team that had a young Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble, (before they transferred to Loyola Marymount), USC coach Stan Morrison said SU was the best collegiate team since the Walton Gang. We blew away David Robinson and Navy in the Carrier Classic finals, 89-67, reigning jump shots on the Middies. The team’s defense was so good that there were three stretches that year in which an opponent went without a basket for more than ten minutes. Mike Lupica, in his typical style, said “At last Jim Boeheim has a team even he can’t ruin”. But injuries and defections did. Brown left the team in midseason and then Seikaly and Addison got hurt in a win over Seton Hall. Washington took over and SU went from being a perimeter-oriented team to a team that drove to the basket for its points. That made them a very different team when they again met Navy in the Carrier Dome in the second round of the tournament. Robinson swallowed SU whole and we lost 85-97. Navy lost to Duke in the regional finals a week later.
1987: You know the story of this one, although the interpretation of it differs somewhat. I look at the tape I have of that game and I just see SU missing some foul shots and Keith Smart making some great plays and we lose. The subsequent pro careers of the players involved make it pretty clear we had the more talented team. But it doesn’t mean we had the better one. I remember a feeling of pride, rather than pain or anger after the game. Others have reacted differently.
1988: Sherman Douglas had the flu- and he had it real bad. During time-outs, he was stretched out, prone on the floor, trying to make the world stop spinning. Rhode Island got off to a very hot start and held on to win a fast-paced game, 94-97. I remember my brother telling me: “Boeheim: doesn’t he always lose in the second round?” Duke took care of the Rhodies in the Sweet 16.
1989: This one may have been our best team. Seikaly was gone but we had Sherman Douglas, Derrick Coleman, Stevie Thompson, and a newcomer named Billy Owens. We had a delightful revenge game vs. Bobby Knight in the Big Apple NIT, 102-78. I’ve always wondered what it would have been like if the ’87 title game could have gone like that one. We had a brief mid-season slump and got beat twice by Georgetown again but were rolling along at 30-7 when we met a strange but excellent Illinois team in the Midwest Regional Finals. The entire team was 6-5. Each one was a jumping jack who could do everything. They beat us, 86-89 and, as if to add insult to injury, the game ended with a flurry of alley-oops by the Illini against a taller team. Sherman Douglas’s career ended with him watching the other team throw down alley-oops. Illinois lost to Michigan in the national semi-finals by two. The Wolverines then beat Seton Hall by one in OT for the title. Six points separated us and the national championship.
1990: SU, 26-6 met Minnesota in the Sweet 16 in New Orleans. The Orange went down, 75-82, thanks to some ill-advised shots by Tony Scott in the final moment of play. Tony then showed some more bad judgement, taking advice from Rob Johnson, and transferred to Texas A&M. The Gophers Lost to Georgia Tech in the regional final.
1991: Billy Owens carried SU on his back to a sterling 26-4 regular season that featured SU’s only outright Big East Championship. We led Villanova by 16 in the Big East Quarterfinals with 4 minutes to go. JB started to take his starters out. I remember Doug Logan and whoever was his broadcast partner that season talking about the reasons SU had won the game. Meanwhile, Nova kept scoring and scoring and SU kept scoring and not scoring. The lead slipped to 12, 10, 8, 6, 4 points. SU never did score again as the Wildcats pulled off the shocker, 68-70, having been down 68-52. SU was so shocked they sleep-walked through the opening round NCAA game against Richmond, losing 69-73, the “first ever loss by a 2 seed to a 15 seed”, that we’ve heard about ever since. The Spiders went down to Temple by 13 in the next round.
1992: In what passes at Syracuse for a rebuilding year, we met rising power Massachusetts in the NCAA second round and lost, 71-77 in overtime. There was an out of bounds play at the end of regulation that went against us that the refs admitted a week later was wrong. They apologized, which was very nice of them. L UMASS lost to Kentucky in the Sweet 16.
1994: I missed this one because my brother screwed up the settings on his VCR. I was vacationing in Hawaii and we decide to tape the game while we saw the sights. When we got back, we had a great copy of the wrong channel. I missed Adrian Autry scoring 31 points after halftime, (33 if the ref had counted a shot from the seat of his pants) in another OT loss to Missouri in the Sweet 16. The Tigers lost to Arizona in the regional finals.
1995: This one will always be a spear in the chest. We didn’t almost win this game. We had it won until Moten’s time out. Why can’t they just ignore time out requests from a team that has none? Why does it have to be a technical foul? It was SU’s third straight overtime loss in NCAA season-enders. Considering what happened the next year, who knows what might have happened in these years? The 1995 team had virtually everyone the 1996 team had plus Lawrence Moten, Lucious Jackson and Michael Lloyd. Defending national champion Arkansas went back to the national finals, where they lost to UCLA.
1996: This time we won our overtime game, on John Wallace’s amazing inbounds pass in regulation and three pointer in overtime. Then we zoned out Kansas and Mississippi State before giving Kentucky all they could handle in the final. We were down five with a little over a minute to go when we got a fast break going. John Wallace was ahead of the field, with two defenders trailing him. “Z” Sims had the ball just past midcourt. He made one of his few mistakes that year, trying to line the pass to J-Dub rather than lofting it. It was tipped. Wallace committed his fifth foul trying to get it. UK got two free throws and we were down 7 with a minute to go and our star on the bench forever. Game over. But everybody knew the ‘Cuse was in the house.
1998: We got snookered in the South Regional with UCLA, Kentucky and Duke, three of the very few schools with better credentials that we have in this sport, (We’re better in football!). Those guys have won 21 national titles to our one, which hadn’t happened yet. We gave a credible performance against the Blue Devils, rallying to tie the game midway thought the second half before losing, 67-80 in a game that was closer than that. Kentucky then beat them in the regional final and went on to its seventh national title. SU finished at 26-9, which I thought was a pretty good record for their talent level.
1999: They had at least as much talent the next year and got off to a 6-0 start, beating Bobby Knight for the third time running in Hawaii. But the team struggled after that, going 15-12 the rest of the way and losing to Oklahoma State, 61-69 in a desultory 8-9 game, the only “upset” Syracuse has suffered in the tournament, according to the seedings, in the last 13 years (this was written in 2004). Something was missing from that team. I don’t know what it was but when Providence successfully rebounded nine consecutive missed free throws down the stretch of a 58-67 loss in the Dome, that gave us a clue. It was not so much that the NCAA loss was a disappointment. It seemed a merciful end to disappointing year. The Cowboys went down in the second round. I remember Steve Hyder saying after the season to people who wondered why the team had gotten worse: “Maybe they didn’t. Maybe the other teams just did a better job of getting better.”
2000: Whatever the 1999 team lacked, the 2000 team had. The bolted out of the gate with a 19-0 surge, giving us dreams about an unbeaten national champion. I remember JB saying he liked that: that basketball is all about dreams. Whatever we had, however, disappeared down the stretch in a 7-6 finish. The end came in a game that looked like it might be one of SU’s greatest wins. We led #1 Michigan State, 40-26 early in the second half in their own backyard, (Auburn Hills). But that tough, savvy team of veteran players cracked the SU zone and went off on a tear. Preston Shumpert had been knocked upside the head in the first half and was unable to provide us with any sort of outside game. JB staunchly refused to go man for man. The game was still tied at 58 but the Spartans scored all the rest of the points to win 58-75, having do
2001: SU again had a great start, going 15-1 and again faded, going only 10-8 after that. The end came in SU worst NCAA loss, to Kansas, 58-87 in the Midwest region second round. They looked so powerful that I had hopes they would clobber some other teams and not make us look so bad. Instead they got beat in the next round by Illinois, 64-80. Then Illinois got handled by Arizona, 81-87. The Wildcats stopped the run by also beating Michigan State before bowing, 72-82 to Duke in the finals. Comparative scores suggest we were 55 points worse than Duke, but I don’t think so.
2003: Everybody’s dreams have to come true sometime. It’s what keeps you going.
We’ve lost 28 NCAA games by a total of 277 points, (9.9 per game). Seventeen losses have been by less than ten points, six by less than five. Judging by seedings, byes and rankings, ten of the losses were upsets. Believe it or not, both Oral Roberts and Texas Tech were ranked back in ’74 and ’76. We weren’t. There were no seedings yet and both those games were first round games. Ohio State in ’83 and Massachusetts in ’92 had higher seeds than we did. In ’89 Illinois was a #1 seed, we a #2 seed, (we are 4-1 vs. 15 seeds). The upsets were the four Louie/Bouie years, Virginia in ’84, Navy in ’86, Rhode Island in ’88, Minnesota in ’90, the Richmond game and Oklahoma State in the 8-9 game in ’99. The other 18 times, including seven of the last 8, the team we lost to was better than we were, or at least was supposed to be.
The teams we’ve lost to have gone on to win four national tiles. Two others have played for the big one and four more have made the Final Four. Ten of the 24 teams we have lost two made the final four. Six more went to regional finals and another six made it to the Sweet 16. Our only first game losses are 1974, 1976, 1978. 1991 and 1999. The first thee were in the round of 32, the last two in the round of 64. Four of the five teams lost in the next round.
I would say that if I had been paying attention to them the 1957 and 1966 losses would not have bothered me that much because I would have felt that SU had “gone about as far as they could go, losing to national powers that were simply better teams. That’s the way I felt in 1973, 75, 85, 96, 98, 00 and 01. The 1987, 1989, 1992 and 1994 losses were to comparable teams and all were close, the last two in overtime and the first two by a total of 4 points. Somebody has to lose. That’s 13 of the 28 losses.
The 1974, 76 and ’99 losses were simply the end of disappointing years. The other teams were probably a little better than we were, not a lot. That leaves the ones that hurt the most.
I was certain that we’d win a national championship, or at least go back to the Final Four in the Louie and Bouie era. Those teams were 15-20 points better than the ’75 team that got hot and lucky at the right time. We lost to Charlotte because of the backcourt match-up. But it was so unexpected that it was almost a surreal experience. We got our doors blown off by a team we’d never heard of just when we thought something great was about to happen. The Western Kentucky game was an aftershock of the loss the Bonnies and a screw job by Packer and the refs at the end. I’m still mad about that. Penn was another backcourt match-up problem and another shocker. The Iowa game was one we were going to win until JB just made a bad decision. It seemed like a tragedy at the time because who knew if we would ever be that good again.
The Ohio State game galls because we’d beaten those guys that year and a chance to play a regional in the Dome- not a sub-regional, a regional- loomed. Of course North Carolina and Michael Jordan, who had crushed us, 87-64 earlier that year also awaited but they got bumped off by Georgia in the Dome. Why Georgia and not us?
The Virginia game is a pea under the mattress because the Cavaliers didn’t deserve to beat anybody that day, except maybe us.
The Navy game was set up by the injuries in the Seton Hall game. Also, the refs sent the Middies to the line 54 times. 54 times!! We had only had 21 attempts. One of best teams we ever had lost by 12 in its own place to a team they’d already beaten by 22.
With a healthy Sherman Douglas, we beat Rhode Island. Maybe not by a lot but he was worth a lot more than the 3 point deficit.
I don’t know what would have happened against Minnesota if Tony Scott had had any brains but I would have liked to have found out.
Then there were the three straight OT losses- UMASS, Mizzou and Arkansas. In each case, the refs played a role. There was the out of bounds call, the disallowed shot and the time-out. I can’t say the last two were wrong calls but they mattered. It was very frustrating. The Arkansas game is maybe the single most painful NCAA loss for SU, Keith Smart notwithstanding.
Overall, I’d say SU’s NCAA history has been a pretty good one. There have been 47 wins and 28 losses, (including conseys) and only a dozen of them really hurt that much.
Today’s game? I don’t have a good feeling about it. We played poorly in the second half vs. BC and, except for GMAC and DNIC, the whole game vs. BYU. The magic that allowed us to beat Pitt and UCONN seems to have worn off. Maryland is averaging 88 points a game since the ACC tournament began. Yes, they are giving up 84 but we couldn’t get that many vs. BYU with GMAC scoring 43. We haven’t scored that many since the Miami game a month ago. This is another team with plenty of big bodies up front to crash the boards and we have been outrebounded 31-60 in the last 60 minutes of play. I hope I’m wrong but I have a feeling that “we’ve gone about as far as we can go”.
If I’m right, will there be any shame in this? Maryland is a talented young team that struggled most of the year and is now coming into their own. With four sophomores in the starting line-up, they could be a national title contender in the years to come. For now, they are a tough out for anybody. If we play ‘em tough and don’t’ get blown out and if there are no “boners” or bad calls that seem to have cost us the game, I will be satisfied. Not happy, but satisfied.
I just don’t want to be still thinking about this one a decade from now.
That’s a line from “Oklahoma” but it’s a phrase that has a lot of application this time of year. Teams from all kinds of places- big cities, small cities, small towns, places where it’s warm, places where it’s cold, mountains, plains, lakes and ocean fronts, schools that have always been good, schools that are sometimes good, schools that have never been good, etc. etc., have and will have their seasons end this week or next or, hopefully the week after that. The ultimate is to win the whole thing but 65 heads don’t fit into one crown. Failing that, you want to be able to say “We we’ve gone about as far as we can go”- that the team beat the teams they should have, played well in their final game and lost to a team that was just better or played better that day. You also would like to avoid controversy or “boners”, (the Merkle definition- the other kind comes when you winJ). It’s also nice if the team that beats you beat some other people, too, so you don’t feel so badly. Finally, there’s a stigma to losing in the sub-regionals, the first two rounds of the tournament, even though the ever increasing competitiveness of the tournament makes them nearly as difficult a place to win as the regionals. If you can survive the sub-regionals, you know you accomplished something and that whoever beats you is likely to be a top team.
I decided to review how Syracuse’s NCAA runs have ended over the years, to see how many times the ending seemed at least acceptable, even if only last year was truly a “happy” ending.
1957: I was a toddler when the Orange lost in the Eastern Regional finals to North Carolina’s undefeated eventual national champions, 58-67. That was the high-water mark of the program for many years and certainly nothing to be ashamed of. However the background story of why Jim Brown was not on that team was. The team had two black starters in Vinnie Cohen and Manny Breland. With Jim, who had been a high school All-American who averaged 38ppg, they would have had a better team, perhaps one that might have upset the Tar Heels. But that would have meant having a majority of starters on the team who were “not white” and that was not done in those days. Jim left the team over this and the chance to do something really special slipped away for all the wrong reasons.
1966: I remember following the team for the first time in the newspapers as SU almost became the first team to score 100 points a game. I remember them going out to the coast to play in the Bruin Classic, where they might have had a chance to get a shot at the two time defending national champions, UCLA, but got beat by Vanderbilt before it could happen, despite Dave Bing’s then school record 46 points. But I have no memory of SU’s final defeat against Duke, again in the Eastern Regional finals, 81-91. I know from reading about it that Bing ended his collegiate career on a disappointing note, going 4 for 14 and scoring 10 points. Duke was 24-3 and ranked #2. The game was played in Raleigh, (naturally). Those are reasons to think that team “went about as far as they could go”, but somehow I doubt they felt that way. The Blue Devils lost to Kentucky in the national semi-finals, a game most people thought was for the “real championship”, not expecting Texas Western or Utah to handle either one of them. It was not the last time a mistake like that would be made.
1973: Roy’s Runts had added 6-8 Rudy Hackett, the Hakim Warrick of his day and we were a sparkling 23-4. But for the third time in two years, Lefty Driesell had all the answers and we lost to Maryland, 75-91. But it was pretty obvious they had the better team and when SU beat Penn, (a big power in those days), 69-68 on two steals in the last few seconds, the year ended with a pretty good feeling. It would be the last time for 30 years the year ended with a win. The Terps lost to Providence, with Ernie D’Gregorio Marvin Barnes, in the regional finals.
1974: SU had a solid 19-6 record when, in the first year that teams were sent out of their geographical region, they went to Denton Texas to play Oral Roberts, not the evangelist but the team representing the school he named after himself. The Titans had just recently emerged from the small college ranks and SU’s 82-86 Overtime loss was a considerable disappointment. It was assuaged somewhat when ORU bumped off Louisville, 96-93 in the next round. The Titans went down fighting against Kansas, 90-93, also in overtime, the regional final.
1975: This was the year our dreams began to come true. It ended with a 79-95 loss to a deep, physical Kentucky team in a game where the refs decided to call 61 fouls, resulting in three SU starters fouling out while the other two had four fouls. The Wildcats lost to John Wooden’s final UCLA team in the finals. Then we gave Louisville all they could handle, losing in OT in the consey, as Jimmy Lee’s lay-up went around, around and out at the end of regulation. Still, there wasn’t much unhappiness as the team returned from San Diego, just a lot of pride.
1976: This was the interregnum after Hackett and Lee had left and before Louie and Bouie showed up. SU was a fairly weak 18-8, having closed the regular season with a 4 game losing streak before beating Manhattan and Niagara in the old ECAC Playoffs to get the NCAA bid. They again shopped us out to Denton, Texas again, (not our favorite place), and we went down in the first round again, to Texas Tech, who had a 6-9, 240 pound center named Rickey Bullock we had no answer for. It was a disappointing ending but that just wasn’t that strong a team. We might have been better off in the NIT. Tech lost in the Sweet 16 to Missouri.
1977: The Louie and Bouie show was a big hit in the ‘Cuse. We were a sterling 26-3, having just closed out the Ernie and Bernie show at Tennessee. We were paired with something called North Carolina Charlotte, another former small college team. In the other half of the Mideast regional bracket were Michigan and Detroit, coached by a mouthy young coach named Vitale who announced to anyone who would listen that Syracuse and Charlotte might as well go home as neither of them would have a chance vs. the winner of the Michigan-Detroit game. It made you kind of hope these Titans upset the Wolverines so Louie and Bouie could crush them like a soda can in the regional finals. All the dreams when up in flames as Charlotte took over midway through the first half and just built and built their lead, (I think it reached 28 points), finally winning by the shocking score of 59-81. It would be the largest margin of defeat in the Boeheim era until the trip to Chapel Hill to take on Michael Jordan six years later. This was the game where I found out how much difference that height made in the backcourt. We went 5-9. 5-11 vs. 6-4, 6-6 and could neither pass nor shoot over their defenders. Meanwhile they fed Cornbread Maxwell in the post and he got our guys in foul trouble. It’s ironic that SU later began known for tall backcourts and their effectiveness in the zone defense. I’ll bet JB has never forgotten the lesson of Charlotte. The 49ers, (why do they call them that?) then upset Michigan, who had handled Detroit, in the regional finals. They lost on a Jerome Whitehead lay-in at the buzzer to Marquette’s national title team in the final four. The one piece of good news was that the Louie and Bouie show had three years to run.
1978: This team was every bit as good as the previous year’s team, maybe better as they had more experience. This was the team that beat Magic Johnson’s Spartans in the first Carrier Classic. They were 22-4 going into the ECAC playoffs at Rochester against St. Bonaventure, probably our biggest rival at that point, who we had blown out of the Manley Dome, 107-81, In December. The Bonnies shocked SU, 69-70. The team showed up in Knoxville, Pennsylvania the next week in a funk after this, much as they would be 13 years later after blowing a BET game to Villanova before taking on Richmond. Against a 15-13 Western Kentucky team, the Orange made the mistake of letting the underdog stay in the game too long and found themselves down 85-87 with seconds left in overtime. Marty Byrnes drove to the basket and went up for the shot. A Hilltopper defender brought his arm down across Marty’s chest as he began his jump. Marty somehow managed to muscle up a shot as he headed under the basket and out of bounds. The thing miraculously kissed in to tie the score at 87. The whistle blew and Marty went to the basket for the foul shot that would give SU the lead with a single second left in the game. We had survived! At this point, Billy Packer began screaming “There’s no continuation!...There’s no continuation!”. The referees huddled for at least five minutes, leaving Marty standing around. Then they announced the foul was before the shot and took the tying points off the board, handling Marty the ball with chance to tie the game on a one and one. He made the first and missed the second. Several hands batted the ball around and it went out of bounds and the season was over. I was as pissed off as I’ve ever been about a sporting event. I can only imagine what Marty and JB felt. Magic and his Spartans wiped out the Hilltoppers by 21 points in the Sweet 16. At least there were two more years left of the Louie and Bouie show.
1979: Another splendid season for SU. We were again 26-3 going into the Eastern Regional. We’d expected to have another confrontation with North Carolina but Penn, by now an underdog, had knocked off UNC in the second round, 72-71. We’d beaten Connecticut, (the Big East was still a twinkle in Dave Gavitt’s eye at this point), 89-81 and were in an ideal situation. We were getting Cinderella after their big upset, a time when the coach usually turns back into a pumpkin, (both Cinderella’s coach and the team’s). Not this time. Again, the problem was in the backcourt. We had one guard with speed, Eddie Moss, and one without, Marty Headd. Penn had two incredibly quick guards and we simply could not keep up with them. Incredibly, the halftime score was 29-50. The Quakers were on top at the end, too. 76-84. It helped a little when Penn knocked off St. John’s to make it to the final four for the only time in their history. Unfortunately they ran into a buzzsaw: Magic’s Spartans again, who killed them 101-67 in the national semi-finals. At least Louie and Bouie had one more year.
1980: This was the strongest team yet and one of the best teams SU has ever had. They had Louie and Bouie, Moss and Headd, Tony Bruin and Eric Santifer, Danny Schayes backing up Bouie, and Ron Payton coming off the bench. The one guy we really needed to win it all was Leo Rautins, who was sitting out a year after transferring from Minnesota. This team didn’t have quite enough perimeter shooting and had trouble feeding the post. Leo would have been the answer to both problems. Still we won our first 14, including a nationally televised game where Rosey Bouie blocked 7-1 Joe Barry Carroll’s shot, much as Hak Warrick did to Michael Lee’s shot 13 years later except that Lee was only 6-3. Then we blew a 13 point lead to lose on the road to Old Dominion on a shot replays showed was after the clock had run out, 67-68. Then we won seven in a row, blowing out St. Bonaventure in Manley 105-80, to go 21-1. We were ranked #2 and #1 DePaul was losing so we went to bed thinking SU would be #1 in the morning. Big time high school prospect Sam Perkins was seen in the stands, smiling as SU dazzled on the court. Word was that he would replace Bouie for the ’80-81 Orangemen. Life was good. But DePaul came back to win and Georgetown “closed” Manley Field House in the next game. Later the Hoyas beat us again in the finals of the first Big East Tournament. The season and the whole Louie and Bouie era came to down to a Sweet 16 game against Iowa. We had “that” record again: 26-3. It was like a dead man’s hand for SU. The game was back and forth all the way. SU finally pulled out to about a seven point lead midway through the second half. Jim Boeheim decided at this point to abandon the half-court defense that had given us the lead and try to put the Hawkeyes away with his leaky press. Iowa totally dominated down the stretch, repeatedly breaking the press to beat us 77-88 and end the Louie and Bouie show for good. Lute Olson’s team then bumped off the Hoyas in the regional final before losing to Louisville’s eventual national champions in the Final Four. After the season Sam Perkins announced he was going to North Carolina. That was one time I really felt a strategical decision by the coach cost us an NCAA game. I really feel that if we’d stayed with the defense that was winning the game for us, we’d have advanced. Maybe the third time would have been the charm against the Hoyas and then who knows? As it was I was devastated that the Louie and Bouie show was over and we’d never gotten back to the Final Four, much less won the national title. Would we ever be that good again?
1983: We finally got back to the Big Dance with a team that, led by the famous “tricaptains”: Leo Rautins, Tony Bruin and Eric Santifer, had won their first 11 games, including a terrific 92-87 win over the University of Houston, in the Dome on 12/11/82. Phi Slamma Jama lost their next game to Ralph Sampson’s Virginia team and then won 26 in a row until Lorenzo Charles dunked in the national championship in Albuquerque. team The next game we beat another pretty good team, Ohio State, 91-85. The streak ended with consecutive losses to UNC and Georgetown. That was a pretty impressive start but the Orange slumped after that, finishing the regular season 19-8 and splitting two games in the Big East tournament. The Eastern Regionals were scheduled for the Carrier Dome that year and all we had to do to get there was beat Morehead State, (which we did easily, 74-59), and then beat Ohio State again. But the Buckeyes dominated the boards down the stretch and got repeated follow-shots to ruin the dream, 74-79. UNC took care of State, 64-51 before a Carrier Dome crowd that would have been a lot bigger if SU was playing.
1984: It was the first year of the Pearl and the first year without Ralph Sampson for Virginia, who we met in the Sweet 16 in the Omni in Atlanta. This game is not that well remembered but I remember it because it was the worst performance by a team that beat SU in the NCAAs. They stunk. We just stunk worse. The game would be won by the first team to play five minutes of decent basketball. It was the Cavaliers, just after the half. They won, 63-55 and then upset Indiana, who had just ended Michael Jordan’s career in their semifinal game. Then they lost to Houston in OT in the final four. Somehow that Virginia game has always bugged me, maybe more than any other season ender, because they were there for the taking and we just wouldn’t take them.
1985: We had one good big man, Rony Seikaly. Georgia Tech had two of them, John Sally and Yvon Joseph. They also had Mark Price, a tough guard named Bruce Dalrymple and a defensive ace named Duane Ferrell that shadowed Raf Addison the whole game. They beat us, again in the Omni, 53-70. I remember some grousing about Boeheim after the game, but basically we just lost to a better team in their own backyard. They then beat Illinois and gave Georgetown all they could handle in the regional final, losing 54-60.
1986: The program had been building since the beginning of the decade, helped by Boeheim, the Louie and Bouie Era, the Dome, the big east, ESPN and the pearl. Now we became a real powerhouse. Seikaly came into his own at center. Raf Addison and Wendell Alexis were excellent forwards. Pearl Washington was Pearl Washington. We had Sherman Douglas, Greg Monroe, Howie Triche, Michael Brown, Derrick Brower, Herman Harried and Rodney Walker on the bench. After a 102-68 thumping of a Southern Cal team that had a young Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble, (before they transferred to Loyola Marymount), USC coach Stan Morrison said SU was the best collegiate team since the Walton Gang. We blew away David Robinson and Navy in the Carrier Classic finals, 89-67, reigning jump shots on the Middies. The team’s defense was so good that there were three stretches that year in which an opponent went without a basket for more than ten minutes. Mike Lupica, in his typical style, said “At last Jim Boeheim has a team even he can’t ruin”. But injuries and defections did. Brown left the team in midseason and then Seikaly and Addison got hurt in a win over Seton Hall. Washington took over and SU went from being a perimeter-oriented team to a team that drove to the basket for its points. That made them a very different team when they again met Navy in the Carrier Dome in the second round of the tournament. Robinson swallowed SU whole and we lost 85-97. Navy lost to Duke in the regional finals a week later.
1987: You know the story of this one, although the interpretation of it differs somewhat. I look at the tape I have of that game and I just see SU missing some foul shots and Keith Smart making some great plays and we lose. The subsequent pro careers of the players involved make it pretty clear we had the more talented team. But it doesn’t mean we had the better one. I remember a feeling of pride, rather than pain or anger after the game. Others have reacted differently.
1988: Sherman Douglas had the flu- and he had it real bad. During time-outs, he was stretched out, prone on the floor, trying to make the world stop spinning. Rhode Island got off to a very hot start and held on to win a fast-paced game, 94-97. I remember my brother telling me: “Boeheim: doesn’t he always lose in the second round?” Duke took care of the Rhodies in the Sweet 16.
1989: This one may have been our best team. Seikaly was gone but we had Sherman Douglas, Derrick Coleman, Stevie Thompson, and a newcomer named Billy Owens. We had a delightful revenge game vs. Bobby Knight in the Big Apple NIT, 102-78. I’ve always wondered what it would have been like if the ’87 title game could have gone like that one. We had a brief mid-season slump and got beat twice by Georgetown again but were rolling along at 30-7 when we met a strange but excellent Illinois team in the Midwest Regional Finals. The entire team was 6-5. Each one was a jumping jack who could do everything. They beat us, 86-89 and, as if to add insult to injury, the game ended with a flurry of alley-oops by the Illini against a taller team. Sherman Douglas’s career ended with him watching the other team throw down alley-oops. Illinois lost to Michigan in the national semi-finals by two. The Wolverines then beat Seton Hall by one in OT for the title. Six points separated us and the national championship.
1990: SU, 26-6 met Minnesota in the Sweet 16 in New Orleans. The Orange went down, 75-82, thanks to some ill-advised shots by Tony Scott in the final moment of play. Tony then showed some more bad judgement, taking advice from Rob Johnson, and transferred to Texas A&M. The Gophers Lost to Georgia Tech in the regional final.
1991: Billy Owens carried SU on his back to a sterling 26-4 regular season that featured SU’s only outright Big East Championship. We led Villanova by 16 in the Big East Quarterfinals with 4 minutes to go. JB started to take his starters out. I remember Doug Logan and whoever was his broadcast partner that season talking about the reasons SU had won the game. Meanwhile, Nova kept scoring and scoring and SU kept scoring and not scoring. The lead slipped to 12, 10, 8, 6, 4 points. SU never did score again as the Wildcats pulled off the shocker, 68-70, having been down 68-52. SU was so shocked they sleep-walked through the opening round NCAA game against Richmond, losing 69-73, the “first ever loss by a 2 seed to a 15 seed”, that we’ve heard about ever since. The Spiders went down to Temple by 13 in the next round.
1992: In what passes at Syracuse for a rebuilding year, we met rising power Massachusetts in the NCAA second round and lost, 71-77 in overtime. There was an out of bounds play at the end of regulation that went against us that the refs admitted a week later was wrong. They apologized, which was very nice of them. L UMASS lost to Kentucky in the Sweet 16.
1994: I missed this one because my brother screwed up the settings on his VCR. I was vacationing in Hawaii and we decide to tape the game while we saw the sights. When we got back, we had a great copy of the wrong channel. I missed Adrian Autry scoring 31 points after halftime, (33 if the ref had counted a shot from the seat of his pants) in another OT loss to Missouri in the Sweet 16. The Tigers lost to Arizona in the regional finals.
1995: This one will always be a spear in the chest. We didn’t almost win this game. We had it won until Moten’s time out. Why can’t they just ignore time out requests from a team that has none? Why does it have to be a technical foul? It was SU’s third straight overtime loss in NCAA season-enders. Considering what happened the next year, who knows what might have happened in these years? The 1995 team had virtually everyone the 1996 team had plus Lawrence Moten, Lucious Jackson and Michael Lloyd. Defending national champion Arkansas went back to the national finals, where they lost to UCLA.
1996: This time we won our overtime game, on John Wallace’s amazing inbounds pass in regulation and three pointer in overtime. Then we zoned out Kansas and Mississippi State before giving Kentucky all they could handle in the final. We were down five with a little over a minute to go when we got a fast break going. John Wallace was ahead of the field, with two defenders trailing him. “Z” Sims had the ball just past midcourt. He made one of his few mistakes that year, trying to line the pass to J-Dub rather than lofting it. It was tipped. Wallace committed his fifth foul trying to get it. UK got two free throws and we were down 7 with a minute to go and our star on the bench forever. Game over. But everybody knew the ‘Cuse was in the house.
1998: We got snookered in the South Regional with UCLA, Kentucky and Duke, three of the very few schools with better credentials that we have in this sport, (We’re better in football!). Those guys have won 21 national titles to our one, which hadn’t happened yet. We gave a credible performance against the Blue Devils, rallying to tie the game midway thought the second half before losing, 67-80 in a game that was closer than that. Kentucky then beat them in the regional final and went on to its seventh national title. SU finished at 26-9, which I thought was a pretty good record for their talent level.
1999: They had at least as much talent the next year and got off to a 6-0 start, beating Bobby Knight for the third time running in Hawaii. But the team struggled after that, going 15-12 the rest of the way and losing to Oklahoma State, 61-69 in a desultory 8-9 game, the only “upset” Syracuse has suffered in the tournament, according to the seedings, in the last 13 years (this was written in 2004). Something was missing from that team. I don’t know what it was but when Providence successfully rebounded nine consecutive missed free throws down the stretch of a 58-67 loss in the Dome, that gave us a clue. It was not so much that the NCAA loss was a disappointment. It seemed a merciful end to disappointing year. The Cowboys went down in the second round. I remember Steve Hyder saying after the season to people who wondered why the team had gotten worse: “Maybe they didn’t. Maybe the other teams just did a better job of getting better.”
2000: Whatever the 1999 team lacked, the 2000 team had. The bolted out of the gate with a 19-0 surge, giving us dreams about an unbeaten national champion. I remember JB saying he liked that: that basketball is all about dreams. Whatever we had, however, disappeared down the stretch in a 7-6 finish. The end came in a game that looked like it might be one of SU’s greatest wins. We led #1 Michigan State, 40-26 early in the second half in their own backyard, (Auburn Hills). But that tough, savvy team of veteran players cracked the SU zone and went off on a tear. Preston Shumpert had been knocked upside the head in the first half and was unable to provide us with any sort of outside game. JB staunchly refused to go man for man. The game was still tied at 58 but the Spartans scored all the rest of the points to win 58-75, having do
2001: SU again had a great start, going 15-1 and again faded, going only 10-8 after that. The end came in SU worst NCAA loss, to Kansas, 58-87 in the Midwest region second round. They looked so powerful that I had hopes they would clobber some other teams and not make us look so bad. Instead they got beat in the next round by Illinois, 64-80. Then Illinois got handled by Arizona, 81-87. The Wildcats stopped the run by also beating Michigan State before bowing, 72-82 to Duke in the finals. Comparative scores suggest we were 55 points worse than Duke, but I don’t think so.
2003: Everybody’s dreams have to come true sometime. It’s what keeps you going.
We’ve lost 28 NCAA games by a total of 277 points, (9.9 per game). Seventeen losses have been by less than ten points, six by less than five. Judging by seedings, byes and rankings, ten of the losses were upsets. Believe it or not, both Oral Roberts and Texas Tech were ranked back in ’74 and ’76. We weren’t. There were no seedings yet and both those games were first round games. Ohio State in ’83 and Massachusetts in ’92 had higher seeds than we did. In ’89 Illinois was a #1 seed, we a #2 seed, (we are 4-1 vs. 15 seeds). The upsets were the four Louie/Bouie years, Virginia in ’84, Navy in ’86, Rhode Island in ’88, Minnesota in ’90, the Richmond game and Oklahoma State in the 8-9 game in ’99. The other 18 times, including seven of the last 8, the team we lost to was better than we were, or at least was supposed to be.
The teams we’ve lost to have gone on to win four national tiles. Two others have played for the big one and four more have made the Final Four. Ten of the 24 teams we have lost two made the final four. Six more went to regional finals and another six made it to the Sweet 16. Our only first game losses are 1974, 1976, 1978. 1991 and 1999. The first thee were in the round of 32, the last two in the round of 64. Four of the five teams lost in the next round.
I would say that if I had been paying attention to them the 1957 and 1966 losses would not have bothered me that much because I would have felt that SU had “gone about as far as they could go, losing to national powers that were simply better teams. That’s the way I felt in 1973, 75, 85, 96, 98, 00 and 01. The 1987, 1989, 1992 and 1994 losses were to comparable teams and all were close, the last two in overtime and the first two by a total of 4 points. Somebody has to lose. That’s 13 of the 28 losses.
The 1974, 76 and ’99 losses were simply the end of disappointing years. The other teams were probably a little better than we were, not a lot. That leaves the ones that hurt the most.
I was certain that we’d win a national championship, or at least go back to the Final Four in the Louie and Bouie era. Those teams were 15-20 points better than the ’75 team that got hot and lucky at the right time. We lost to Charlotte because of the backcourt match-up. But it was so unexpected that it was almost a surreal experience. We got our doors blown off by a team we’d never heard of just when we thought something great was about to happen. The Western Kentucky game was an aftershock of the loss the Bonnies and a screw job by Packer and the refs at the end. I’m still mad about that. Penn was another backcourt match-up problem and another shocker. The Iowa game was one we were going to win until JB just made a bad decision. It seemed like a tragedy at the time because who knew if we would ever be that good again.
The Ohio State game galls because we’d beaten those guys that year and a chance to play a regional in the Dome- not a sub-regional, a regional- loomed. Of course North Carolina and Michael Jordan, who had crushed us, 87-64 earlier that year also awaited but they got bumped off by Georgia in the Dome. Why Georgia and not us?
The Virginia game is a pea under the mattress because the Cavaliers didn’t deserve to beat anybody that day, except maybe us.
The Navy game was set up by the injuries in the Seton Hall game. Also, the refs sent the Middies to the line 54 times. 54 times!! We had only had 21 attempts. One of best teams we ever had lost by 12 in its own place to a team they’d already beaten by 22.
With a healthy Sherman Douglas, we beat Rhode Island. Maybe not by a lot but he was worth a lot more than the 3 point deficit.
I don’t know what would have happened against Minnesota if Tony Scott had had any brains but I would have liked to have found out.
Then there were the three straight OT losses- UMASS, Mizzou and Arkansas. In each case, the refs played a role. There was the out of bounds call, the disallowed shot and the time-out. I can’t say the last two were wrong calls but they mattered. It was very frustrating. The Arkansas game is maybe the single most painful NCAA loss for SU, Keith Smart notwithstanding.
Overall, I’d say SU’s NCAA history has been a pretty good one. There have been 47 wins and 28 losses, (including conseys) and only a dozen of them really hurt that much.
Today’s game? I don’t have a good feeling about it. We played poorly in the second half vs. BC and, except for GMAC and DNIC, the whole game vs. BYU. The magic that allowed us to beat Pitt and UCONN seems to have worn off. Maryland is averaging 88 points a game since the ACC tournament began. Yes, they are giving up 84 but we couldn’t get that many vs. BYU with GMAC scoring 43. We haven’t scored that many since the Miami game a month ago. This is another team with plenty of big bodies up front to crash the boards and we have been outrebounded 31-60 in the last 60 minutes of play. I hope I’m wrong but I have a feeling that “we’ve gone about as far as we can go”.
If I’m right, will there be any shame in this? Maryland is a talented young team that struggled most of the year and is now coming into their own. With four sophomores in the starting line-up, they could be a national title contender in the years to come. For now, they are a tough out for anybody. If we play ‘em tough and don’t’ get blown out and if there are no “boners” or bad calls that seem to have cost us the game, I will be satisfied. Not happy, but satisfied.
I just don’t want to be still thinking about this one a decade from now.
SWC75
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2018 Update
2004: We beat Maryland 72-70 in the what was advertised as first ever confrontation between the last two national champions in the NCAA tournament but wasn’t, (Cincinnati vs. Ohio State for the 1962 title). Then we lost to Alabama 71-80 in our old ides of March, the Sweet 16. The only thing I remember about that game is that Alabama’s coach Mark Gottfried became the latest ‘hot thing’ and got the NC State job, where he gott fired. We were the 5 seed, the Tide the 8 seed so it was the first real upset since the Richmond game 13 years before, (discounting the 8-9 game of 1999). Alabama lost to eventual national champion Connecticut in the next round, 71-87.
2005: We roared out to a 20-1 start and again faded to a 4-5 regular season finish. But we redeemed ourselves by winning the BET for the first time in in 13 years, (that number comes up a lot). We were 26-7, ranked #11 and a 4 seed in the NCAA tournament when we shockingly lost to Vermont 57-60 in overtime, the margin of victory being a 25 foot shot by one T. J. Sorrentine that we are still sore about.
2006: We got off to another great start, 16-2 and again slumped badly late in the regular season, 4-9. But that led to the legendary GMAC run in the BET. We might have needed every one of the four wins we got there just to get into the tournament. Unfortunately, it took about all Gerry McNamara had to make that run and he was unable to play in our 58-66 loss to Texas A&M in the NCAA tourney. It was our second straight first round loss and might have been a third straight if Gerry as a sophomore hadn’t exploded for 43 points in an 80-75 win over BYU. This was also our third straight up, this time in a 5-12 game. The next two years we were in the NIT and some fans were openly suggesting that Jim Boeheim be forced into retirement because “the game has passed him by”.
2009: Broken record: we got off to a 16-1 start and then lost 7 of 10 games. Then we started playing almost fanatical defense, beating St. John’s 87-58, Cincinnati 87-63 and Rutgers 70-40 before ending the regular season with an overtime 86-79 win over Marquette. Then came the BET and three more straight wins, the second of those the legendary 6 overtime win over #1 ranked Connecticut. Then we won another OT game vs. West Virginia and led Louisville at halftime by double figures before the cardinal’s press and our fatigue did us in, 66-76. Then we won a couple NCAA game to stretch our comeback to 9 wins in 10 games before getting slam dunked 71-84, by Blake Griffin and his friends. We were the 3 seed and they were the 2 seed, so that wasn’t an upset.
2010: Maybe my favorite SU team. We had two of everything: two inside scorers in Arinze Onuaku and Rick Jackson; two +40% three point shooters win Wes Johnson and Andy Rautins; Two guys who could slash to the basket to score in Johnson and Kris Joseph and two point guards in Scoop Jardine and Brandon Triche. We crushed defending national champion North Carolina 87-71 in New York and also handled Florida 85-73 on the way to an amazing 24-1 start. Rick Pitino and Louisville got us twice down the stretch but we ended the regular season ranked #1 in the country. Then came the BET and an 84-91 loss to Georgetown. But that wasn’t the big news: Onuaku went down hard in a pile-up in the lane and was severely injured, being helped off the court. It looked like his season had ended. And it had but Jim Boeheim, to keep our opponents guessing, never confirmed that.
It appeared not to be a problem when we crushed our old pals, Vermont 79-56 and Gonzaga 87-65 in the sub-regionals. We expected to do the same thing to Butler in the Sweet 16. But the Bulldogs were a different deal. They were one of the best defensive teams in the country, coached by a great young coach, Brad Stevens and had a future NBA star in forward Gordon Heyward. What they did not have is a shot-blocking center so we tried to beat them getting the ball into Rick Jackson. But the Bulldogs shut off the passing lanes and we had 8 first half turnovers trying to pass to Rick. If we had had Arinze, we had two potential inside targets who could also play a two man game with each other. We would have had fewer turnovers and more scores going inside. We stopped trying to force it into Rick in the second ahlf and made a comeback, even taking a brief lead late in the game. I remember another bad out of bounds call that might have made a difference and the game slipped away as we had to foul to get the ball back. We lost 59-63. We were a #1 seed and they a #5. Butler went on to play Duke for the title and lost when Heyward’s half-court shot rimmed out. I’ll always believe we had the best team in the country that year and with Arinze, we would have won a second national title. Put that with the 1987 title that we would have won if we made our free throws and we’d have three titles, which would be about right for a school with our historical record. Instead we have one- for now.
2011: This team had the potential be as good as their book-ends but fell a bit short. We won our first 18 games, only to have a 4 game losing streak beginning with a game at Pitt where the 18-0 team got off to a 0-18 start. (Pitt has stopped a lot of our opening winning streaks over the years). Particularly disturbing was a 68-90 home loss to Seton hall. The season ended with a strange 62-66 loss to Marquette featuring a traveling call on Scoop Jardine as he tried to avoid an over-an-back call on an inbounds pass, for which there is no such thing as over-and-back. That was a #3 vs. #11game and so another upset. Marquette got blown out by North Carolina in the next round.
2012: Ten deep and anchored on defense by Fab Melo who blocked shots and drew charges, this team had the greatest regular season and best numerical record any SU team ever had. As in so many seasons, we started with a huge winning streak: 20-0 in this case. We’d been ranked #1 for more than a month when we got new that Melo was suspended for academic reasons. Jim Boeheim said “He just has to complete something”. This coincided with a trip to Notre Dame where they love to beat Syracuse and did so, 58-67. But we rallied to win the next one at Cincinnati, 60-53. Melo came back and the annual slump never happened. We completed the regular season 30-1 with no losses with Fab in the line-up. We were ranked #2 behind Kentucky who was also 30-1. Nobody else had fewer than 4 losses. It seemed inevitable that the two teams would meet for all the marbles.
Then Fab was permanently suspended by the NCAA. It was the second time in three years that we lost our starting center just before the NCAA tournament. As in 2010, it didn’t mean our dream had ended as the team was strong enough to make a run anyway. This time we made it to the elite 8 where we lost to Ohio State in a game where 48 fouls were called, 28 of them on Syracuse. Ohio State went to the line 42 times to our 25 and score 11 more points there in a 70-77 loss. But the real impact of all those fouls was that SU’s running game, (this was our last real fast breaking team) was more disrupted by all the whistles than their half court, back-to-basket style game. It was our third straight season to end with an NCAA upset. Ohio State then lost to Kansas who lost to Kentucky in the final. That Kentucky team, led by Anthony Davis, a player we had basically discovered and recruited hard before John Calipari came into the picture, would probably win any vote for the outstanding team of the decade. Davis certainly turned out to be a far greater player than Melo. This suggests to me that Kentucky, not Syracuse was the best team that year. But I would have liked a shot at them with our full line-up and referees who minded their own business.
2013: Another great start: 18-1 and back to having a slump at the end of the regular season: 5-7, including a terrible 39-61 loss at Georgetown in our last game there as a big eats team. But like 2009, we started playing fanatical defense. I think this team was aour best defensive team ever with Baye Keita and Rakeem Christmas completely shutting down the paint and 6-6 Michael Carter-Williams out front. We gave up an average of 59 ppg in three BET wins and led Louisville 35-22 at halftime before succumbing to their press in the second half. Then we ‘upset’, Montana (per Seth Davis 81-34, held off California 66-60, dominated #1 seed Indiana 61-50 and sat on Marquette 55-39. Against Michigan, we were both #4 seeds but they were the higher ranked team in the AP poll (#7 vs. #17). Our defense finally let up in the first half as we fell behind 25-36 at the half. We revved up the defense again in the second half and out-scored the Wolverines 31-25 but it wasn’t quite enough, especially when the whistle-happy refs fouled out our backcourt on some dubious calls. Louisville then beat Michigan for the title. I don’t think anyone was going to stop the Cardinals that year.
2014: The greatest star of all: 25-0 and our third team of the decade to achieve a #1 ranking. But it was deceiving. We were not a dominant team. Our biggest strength is that, with Tyler Ennis at the point, we didn’t turn the ball over and typically had a 5-10 plus difference in that stat. We were winning a lot of close games, including miracle finishes against Pitt and NC State for #s 24 and 25. But we were already in a severe offensive slump. We scored 61-57-58-56-59-60-57-56-62 in successive games and lost 4 of the last 5 of those games. The offense showed some life with a 74-58 win at Florida State. Then NC State got revenge in the ACCT, 63-66. We looked going disposing of West Michigan 77-53 but went 0 for 10 from three point range in losing to Dayton, an 11 seed in the Round of 32.
2016: We didn’t even get off to a strong start. We won our first 6 but then got beat by Wisconsin and Georgetown, beat Colgate but lost at a bad St. John’s team. We won 3 in a row but lost 4 in a row. Then we finally put something together with 8 wins in 9 games, only to lose 5 of 6, including a first round ACCT game to our old friends at Pitt. We were 19-13 and 9-10 in the ACC. It’s still a shock that we not only got into the tournament but were a 10 seed and didn’t have to play in a play-in game. A bigger shock was that we won 4 NCAA games in a row to become the first 10 seed to ever make the Final Four. We got revenge on Dayton, then crushed Middle Tennessee, the team that had knocked off #2 seed Michigan State. Then came miracle comebacks against Gonzaga and our other old pals, Virginia. The coach, (not Boeheim) turned into a pumpkin in the national semi-finals against North Carolina.
2018: Another bumpy ride during the regular season. We had a credible but not spectacular 11-2 non-conference record. In the conference we never won more than 3 games in a row, and that only once on the way to an 8-10. The feeling seemed unanimous that we need to win a couple game in New York to get in but when we got easily handled by the Tar Heels, 59-78. But we just made the field as the 68th team. That made us the underdog in every game. But we held four teams to an average of 25 points under their scoring average, playing the best defense since the 2013 team. Unfortunately, we came up just short against Duke in the Sweet 16, 65-69. We looked like the better team with Marek Dolezaj in there but he got into foul trouble and wasn’t there for the 0-10 run at the end of the half that was the real difference in the game.
I’ve gone through the Boeheim years, stroke tallying the wins and losses when we were favorites and underdogs. Seedings were fires revealed in 1979. For 1977 and 1978 I used the last writer’s poll of the regular season to determine who was the favorite. In 2013 SU and Michigan were both #4 seeds but Michigan was the higher ranked team and thus the favorite. This year neither SU or Arizona State even got votes for the final Top 25. But SU was the last team in and thus the underdog. I have Jim Boeheim at 44-18 as an NCAA favorite. That’s a 71.0% winning percentage, not far from Jim’s overall winning percentage of 73.6%. As an underdog, Jim is 16-14, 53%, so he’s more likely to win as an underdog than to lose. But there’s an interesting breakdown of that. Through 1995, 9the Arkansas game where Moten called the time out we didn’t have), Jim was 2-8 as an underdog. Beginning with the 1996 run to the title game, which is when he started to really emphasize the zone, (although he didn’t play it exclusively until 2010), Jim is 14-6 as an underdog, nearly the same winning percentage (70.0%) as a favorite.
In the NCAA losses since my original post, we were favorites 7 times and underdogs 4 times. I think Oklahoma in 2009 was clearly the better team. I’m not sure Michigan was in 2013. North Carolina clearly was in 2016. Duke was this year but not really on the day we played them. I think we would have beaten them if Dolezaj didn’t get in foul trouble. But in all four of those years, my pride for what the team had accomplished was greater than my disappointment at the ending. Adding that to the dozen games I mentioned in the original post that didn’t hurt so much I’d say we were dancing with Gene Nelson in that clip 16 times in 39 NCAA losses. We had gone about as far as we could go.
2004: We beat Maryland 72-70 in the what was advertised as first ever confrontation between the last two national champions in the NCAA tournament but wasn’t, (Cincinnati vs. Ohio State for the 1962 title). Then we lost to Alabama 71-80 in our old ides of March, the Sweet 16. The only thing I remember about that game is that Alabama’s coach Mark Gottfried became the latest ‘hot thing’ and got the NC State job, where he gott fired. We were the 5 seed, the Tide the 8 seed so it was the first real upset since the Richmond game 13 years before, (discounting the 8-9 game of 1999). Alabama lost to eventual national champion Connecticut in the next round, 71-87.
2005: We roared out to a 20-1 start and again faded to a 4-5 regular season finish. But we redeemed ourselves by winning the BET for the first time in in 13 years, (that number comes up a lot). We were 26-7, ranked #11 and a 4 seed in the NCAA tournament when we shockingly lost to Vermont 57-60 in overtime, the margin of victory being a 25 foot shot by one T. J. Sorrentine that we are still sore about.
2006: We got off to another great start, 16-2 and again slumped badly late in the regular season, 4-9. But that led to the legendary GMAC run in the BET. We might have needed every one of the four wins we got there just to get into the tournament. Unfortunately, it took about all Gerry McNamara had to make that run and he was unable to play in our 58-66 loss to Texas A&M in the NCAA tourney. It was our second straight first round loss and might have been a third straight if Gerry as a sophomore hadn’t exploded for 43 points in an 80-75 win over BYU. This was also our third straight up, this time in a 5-12 game. The next two years we were in the NIT and some fans were openly suggesting that Jim Boeheim be forced into retirement because “the game has passed him by”.
2009: Broken record: we got off to a 16-1 start and then lost 7 of 10 games. Then we started playing almost fanatical defense, beating St. John’s 87-58, Cincinnati 87-63 and Rutgers 70-40 before ending the regular season with an overtime 86-79 win over Marquette. Then came the BET and three more straight wins, the second of those the legendary 6 overtime win over #1 ranked Connecticut. Then we won another OT game vs. West Virginia and led Louisville at halftime by double figures before the cardinal’s press and our fatigue did us in, 66-76. Then we won a couple NCAA game to stretch our comeback to 9 wins in 10 games before getting slam dunked 71-84, by Blake Griffin and his friends. We were the 3 seed and they were the 2 seed, so that wasn’t an upset.
2010: Maybe my favorite SU team. We had two of everything: two inside scorers in Arinze Onuaku and Rick Jackson; two +40% three point shooters win Wes Johnson and Andy Rautins; Two guys who could slash to the basket to score in Johnson and Kris Joseph and two point guards in Scoop Jardine and Brandon Triche. We crushed defending national champion North Carolina 87-71 in New York and also handled Florida 85-73 on the way to an amazing 24-1 start. Rick Pitino and Louisville got us twice down the stretch but we ended the regular season ranked #1 in the country. Then came the BET and an 84-91 loss to Georgetown. But that wasn’t the big news: Onuaku went down hard in a pile-up in the lane and was severely injured, being helped off the court. It looked like his season had ended. And it had but Jim Boeheim, to keep our opponents guessing, never confirmed that.
It appeared not to be a problem when we crushed our old pals, Vermont 79-56 and Gonzaga 87-65 in the sub-regionals. We expected to do the same thing to Butler in the Sweet 16. But the Bulldogs were a different deal. They were one of the best defensive teams in the country, coached by a great young coach, Brad Stevens and had a future NBA star in forward Gordon Heyward. What they did not have is a shot-blocking center so we tried to beat them getting the ball into Rick Jackson. But the Bulldogs shut off the passing lanes and we had 8 first half turnovers trying to pass to Rick. If we had had Arinze, we had two potential inside targets who could also play a two man game with each other. We would have had fewer turnovers and more scores going inside. We stopped trying to force it into Rick in the second ahlf and made a comeback, even taking a brief lead late in the game. I remember another bad out of bounds call that might have made a difference and the game slipped away as we had to foul to get the ball back. We lost 59-63. We were a #1 seed and they a #5. Butler went on to play Duke for the title and lost when Heyward’s half-court shot rimmed out. I’ll always believe we had the best team in the country that year and with Arinze, we would have won a second national title. Put that with the 1987 title that we would have won if we made our free throws and we’d have three titles, which would be about right for a school with our historical record. Instead we have one- for now.
2011: This team had the potential be as good as their book-ends but fell a bit short. We won our first 18 games, only to have a 4 game losing streak beginning with a game at Pitt where the 18-0 team got off to a 0-18 start. (Pitt has stopped a lot of our opening winning streaks over the years). Particularly disturbing was a 68-90 home loss to Seton hall. The season ended with a strange 62-66 loss to Marquette featuring a traveling call on Scoop Jardine as he tried to avoid an over-an-back call on an inbounds pass, for which there is no such thing as over-and-back. That was a #3 vs. #11game and so another upset. Marquette got blown out by North Carolina in the next round.
2012: Ten deep and anchored on defense by Fab Melo who blocked shots and drew charges, this team had the greatest regular season and best numerical record any SU team ever had. As in so many seasons, we started with a huge winning streak: 20-0 in this case. We’d been ranked #1 for more than a month when we got new that Melo was suspended for academic reasons. Jim Boeheim said “He just has to complete something”. This coincided with a trip to Notre Dame where they love to beat Syracuse and did so, 58-67. But we rallied to win the next one at Cincinnati, 60-53. Melo came back and the annual slump never happened. We completed the regular season 30-1 with no losses with Fab in the line-up. We were ranked #2 behind Kentucky who was also 30-1. Nobody else had fewer than 4 losses. It seemed inevitable that the two teams would meet for all the marbles.
Then Fab was permanently suspended by the NCAA. It was the second time in three years that we lost our starting center just before the NCAA tournament. As in 2010, it didn’t mean our dream had ended as the team was strong enough to make a run anyway. This time we made it to the elite 8 where we lost to Ohio State in a game where 48 fouls were called, 28 of them on Syracuse. Ohio State went to the line 42 times to our 25 and score 11 more points there in a 70-77 loss. But the real impact of all those fouls was that SU’s running game, (this was our last real fast breaking team) was more disrupted by all the whistles than their half court, back-to-basket style game. It was our third straight season to end with an NCAA upset. Ohio State then lost to Kansas who lost to Kentucky in the final. That Kentucky team, led by Anthony Davis, a player we had basically discovered and recruited hard before John Calipari came into the picture, would probably win any vote for the outstanding team of the decade. Davis certainly turned out to be a far greater player than Melo. This suggests to me that Kentucky, not Syracuse was the best team that year. But I would have liked a shot at them with our full line-up and referees who minded their own business.
2013: Another great start: 18-1 and back to having a slump at the end of the regular season: 5-7, including a terrible 39-61 loss at Georgetown in our last game there as a big eats team. But like 2009, we started playing fanatical defense. I think this team was aour best defensive team ever with Baye Keita and Rakeem Christmas completely shutting down the paint and 6-6 Michael Carter-Williams out front. We gave up an average of 59 ppg in three BET wins and led Louisville 35-22 at halftime before succumbing to their press in the second half. Then we ‘upset’, Montana (per Seth Davis 81-34, held off California 66-60, dominated #1 seed Indiana 61-50 and sat on Marquette 55-39. Against Michigan, we were both #4 seeds but they were the higher ranked team in the AP poll (#7 vs. #17). Our defense finally let up in the first half as we fell behind 25-36 at the half. We revved up the defense again in the second half and out-scored the Wolverines 31-25 but it wasn’t quite enough, especially when the whistle-happy refs fouled out our backcourt on some dubious calls. Louisville then beat Michigan for the title. I don’t think anyone was going to stop the Cardinals that year.
2014: The greatest star of all: 25-0 and our third team of the decade to achieve a #1 ranking. But it was deceiving. We were not a dominant team. Our biggest strength is that, with Tyler Ennis at the point, we didn’t turn the ball over and typically had a 5-10 plus difference in that stat. We were winning a lot of close games, including miracle finishes against Pitt and NC State for #s 24 and 25. But we were already in a severe offensive slump. We scored 61-57-58-56-59-60-57-56-62 in successive games and lost 4 of the last 5 of those games. The offense showed some life with a 74-58 win at Florida State. Then NC State got revenge in the ACCT, 63-66. We looked going disposing of West Michigan 77-53 but went 0 for 10 from three point range in losing to Dayton, an 11 seed in the Round of 32.
2016: We didn’t even get off to a strong start. We won our first 6 but then got beat by Wisconsin and Georgetown, beat Colgate but lost at a bad St. John’s team. We won 3 in a row but lost 4 in a row. Then we finally put something together with 8 wins in 9 games, only to lose 5 of 6, including a first round ACCT game to our old friends at Pitt. We were 19-13 and 9-10 in the ACC. It’s still a shock that we not only got into the tournament but were a 10 seed and didn’t have to play in a play-in game. A bigger shock was that we won 4 NCAA games in a row to become the first 10 seed to ever make the Final Four. We got revenge on Dayton, then crushed Middle Tennessee, the team that had knocked off #2 seed Michigan State. Then came miracle comebacks against Gonzaga and our other old pals, Virginia. The coach, (not Boeheim) turned into a pumpkin in the national semi-finals against North Carolina.
2018: Another bumpy ride during the regular season. We had a credible but not spectacular 11-2 non-conference record. In the conference we never won more than 3 games in a row, and that only once on the way to an 8-10. The feeling seemed unanimous that we need to win a couple game in New York to get in but when we got easily handled by the Tar Heels, 59-78. But we just made the field as the 68th team. That made us the underdog in every game. But we held four teams to an average of 25 points under their scoring average, playing the best defense since the 2013 team. Unfortunately, we came up just short against Duke in the Sweet 16, 65-69. We looked like the better team with Marek Dolezaj in there but he got into foul trouble and wasn’t there for the 0-10 run at the end of the half that was the real difference in the game.
I’ve gone through the Boeheim years, stroke tallying the wins and losses when we were favorites and underdogs. Seedings were fires revealed in 1979. For 1977 and 1978 I used the last writer’s poll of the regular season to determine who was the favorite. In 2013 SU and Michigan were both #4 seeds but Michigan was the higher ranked team and thus the favorite. This year neither SU or Arizona State even got votes for the final Top 25. But SU was the last team in and thus the underdog. I have Jim Boeheim at 44-18 as an NCAA favorite. That’s a 71.0% winning percentage, not far from Jim’s overall winning percentage of 73.6%. As an underdog, Jim is 16-14, 53%, so he’s more likely to win as an underdog than to lose. But there’s an interesting breakdown of that. Through 1995, 9the Arkansas game where Moten called the time out we didn’t have), Jim was 2-8 as an underdog. Beginning with the 1996 run to the title game, which is when he started to really emphasize the zone, (although he didn’t play it exclusively until 2010), Jim is 14-6 as an underdog, nearly the same winning percentage (70.0%) as a favorite.
In the NCAA losses since my original post, we were favorites 7 times and underdogs 4 times. I think Oklahoma in 2009 was clearly the better team. I’m not sure Michigan was in 2013. North Carolina clearly was in 2016. Duke was this year but not really on the day we played them. I think we would have beaten them if Dolezaj didn’t get in foul trouble. But in all four of those years, my pride for what the team had accomplished was greater than my disappointment at the ending. Adding that to the dozen games I mentioned in the original post that didn’t hurt so much I’d say we were dancing with Gene Nelson in that clip 16 times in 39 NCAA losses. We had gone about as far as we could go.
SWC75
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Dinkyspond
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Sam Perkins was at Shaker High in Latham. Killed me when we didn't get him. King Rice of Bingo going to UNC was another big disappointment.
HoustonCuse
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My god SWC. Impressive recaps but reading all that in one shot has me reaching for the hemlock.
kcsu
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You are a machine!!
SWC75
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HoustonCuse
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It's even better, I had this thread up for so long to read it, that my next click after posting that revealed the Bazley thread which I did not know about yet. Awesome.
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