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Message: [QUOTE="moqui, post: 2010097, member: 214"] You'll miss him when he's gone. You have no idea how much. Syracuse basketball is Jim Boeheim. The Dome helped, the rise of the Big East helped, but Boeheim was the real difference. In college basketball, a great coach can make all the difference, and for most of his run Boeheim was one of the four or five best minds in all of college hoops. Lucky for SU fans, he was a local and a lifer, otherwise SU would not have been able to afford him and he would have left long ago. Absent him, Syracuse runs the risk of becoming Providence or Seton Hall or any other small, private Northeast school. A local power that on occasion, if everything fell into place, could make a nice run. And, when that happens, the coach gets courted by big schools with deep pockets and bolts. A vicious circle: Steppingstone University. Look at SU's traditional, regional peers – Georgetown post-Thompson, Uconn post-Calhoun, St. John's post-Carnesseca. It's hard to hit that kind of homerun twice. Villanova was a middling program post-Massimino until they got lucky with Wright, who also looks to be a lifer. SU fans better pray that Hopkins is a winner, because he, too, is a lifer. Even if Hop is everything you hope, it likely will be into the next decade before Syracuse will be able to consistently compete at the highest levels again. And if he's not all that . . . If he fails, then Syracuse becomes just another program. Then you're looking for a coach with a limited budget – any money the AD has will be dedicated to keeping Babers & his staff, because football drives the bus, even at a basketball school. All that being said, it is time for Boeheim to go. The NCAA sanctions were designed to hamstring Syracuse, and that's exactly what they've done. And those sanctions were richly deserved. I scoffed at the notion that the Orange deserved punishment for the drug policy thing and the YMCA stuff, and maybe they wouldn't have been . . . if not for the Fab Melo stuff. That was unconscionable. The Athletic Director chairing a meeting seeking extraordinary intervention to keep eligible a clearly ineligible player? It was outrageous. It is nearly the worst kind of violation a program can have – a complete abdication of educational responsibility. If anyone ever deserved a show cause penalty, it was Daryl Gross; its stunning to me that he didn't get one, probably only because it was JB they really wanted. And Boeheim deserves condemnation, too, for his studious efforts to keep plausible deniability on things, even when he probably really did know that something underhanded was up. Reading that report turned me off on Boeheim, and the “our poop doesn't stink” attitude of SU fans turned me off of SU basketball. I still follow it; I still lurk here from time to time, but it will never again be the same for me. It's almost Faustian – the obsessive pursuit of that 2nd title has instead put a stake into the heart of the program. [/QUOTE]

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