Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim is retiring after 47 years at the helm

Jim Boeheim’s tenure reflects a coach whose career at Syracuse spanned nearly half a century. From his alma mater’s national championship in 2003, to winning the second-most games of any college basketball coach, to launching and ending the Big East Conference (as we knew and loved it), to his patented zone defense and press conferences (both sometimes equally so infuriating) and a highly contentious retirement (he pretty much forced the university to retire him after Wednesday’s loss), Boeheim’s legacy isn’t easily summed up.

One of the themes that last Emerge is the trainer’s relationship to Syracuse and how synonymous it is with the school’s basketball program. We’ve had some of these coaching types retire after the last few seasons, with Mike Krzyzewski and Roy Williams retiring from Duke and North Carolina respectively, and Jay Wright leaving Villanova.

College basketball’s Blue Bloods are still as relevant to the game as ever, but it’s the game that’s changed. The best prospects might not wear a college uniform at all, and that’s still intact with the one-and-done rule. In the end, Boeheim was a dinosaur in every connotation of the word – a relic of the past, a towering presence, and a dying breed.

One of the last celebrity coaches in sports

From the crowd of larger-than-life guest appearances, only one coach is still active Blue chips, the classic ’90s college basketball cult movie starring Nick Nolte, and this is Rick Pitino, so disgraced he’s in Iona Exile. The other coaches were Bobby Knight, Lou Campanelli, Jerry Tarkanian and Boeheim. (Technically there are two other active coaches who made an appearance, Bobby Hurley and Matt Painter, but they were still players and years away from their coaching careers.)

Blue chips is ripe for a Hollywood reboot, but the script would need so much rewriting to modernize it that I don’t even know who the antagonist is. More importantly, and equally relevant to this article, which coaches are making cameos, and aside from John Calipari and Bill Self, could the average sports fan name the other two?

You sure can’t run Pitino out there. It’s probably Hurley and Painter as a throwback to the original, but they would be Easter eggs as well as cameos. There was a time when college hoops had the appeal of their football brethren, and Boeheim was on par with the Nick Sabans, Dabo Swinneys and Brian Kellys of the world.

Best and worst Boeheim moments

We start with the bad so we can end on a positive note. In his final years, essentially starting in 2015, when he was more of a scathing critic than a persuasive coach, threatening anyone who threatened to resign him, Boeheim was exasperatingly open about everything, which annoyed him (which many things were) and often confrontational with the media. Of course, being in the media I’ll mention it, but Syracuse has produced a number of talented and remarkable journalists through its J-School, and Boeheim’s quirkiness was neither cute nor endearing.

There was also a post-game incident in 2019 when he was driving home from a game hit and killed a pedestrian involved in a previous accident. He was not charged with a crimeand the family later filed a lawsuit against him in 2020.

OK, now the good. The 2003 Orangemen team that won the title had one of my favorite runs through a tournament of all time. Diaper dandy Carmelo Anthony, Hakim Warrick and Gerry McNamara led the group past four Big 12 schools in six tournament games, including Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas and Kansas in the finals. The title game was a thriller, with Warrick coming out of his position in the zone with a timely block and Melo going on 20, 10 and 7.

It was the one piece missing from Boeheim’s trophy cabinet, and it was admittedly cool to see him (and his defence) get the justification he’d been looking for for so long. Speaking of goodbye coaches.