![]() Wooden’s run – 10 titles in 12 years and seven straight from 1967-’73 – unfolded in the print journalism era. Maybe it’s fair to argue that it began with Wooden, but his career unfolded in the pre-cable age, with no more than a few regular season UCLA games available for a wide audience (and seemingly most of those against Notre Dame). (I wrote about this afternoon for Sports Illustrated a decade ago and stand by its relevance, the shoulders upon which everything March Madness-related stands today).Īnd in that same era, something else: The Cult of the Coach. Magic in 1979 and began evolving into the brackets/buzzer-beaters/upsets extravaganza of today, two years later on the second Saturday in March, when NBC introduced the country en masse to the cutaway moment, three times. After that: You’re on your own to a large degree.īut there are fuzzy truths: College basketball’s modern-era popularity (I’m leaving the UCLA Wooden era just prior) was built on a few things: The explosion of the NCAA Tournament that began in earnest with Bird vs. There are absolutes in this discussion: The NFL is now king, boxing and horse racing are relics of a distant past, hockey has a ceiling, college football’s religiosity is so intense that it turns a regional game into a national one. It is worth noting the moment of Boeheim’s departure, not just as a passage of great and unmistakable importance in Syracuse, but as another milepost of broader (and perhaps less obvious) significance in the college game writ large – the passing of a certain type of celebrity coach.ĭrawing a timeline of a sport’s relevance is a slippery operation at best, educated guesswork at the vagaries of cultural preferences. He was deservedly elected to the Hall of Fame 18 years ago. It’s a fool’s errand to rank coaches across eras, but Boeheim is on whatever short list you might construct. His teams went to the NCAA Tournament 35 times, reached five Final Fours, won the national championship in 2003 and on two other occasions lost in the championship game. They will be replaced by more enduring ones: Boeheim arrived as a walk-on player in Syracuse in 1962, and eventually coached his alma mater for 47 years and 1,557 games. ![]() (It was appropriate that all of this happened in Greensboro, a place where neither Syracuse nor Boeheim ever belonged, in a conference with which he won’t be enduringly associated).Īlso: The passage of time will render all of these details insignificant, likely sooner than later. Fitting, because his last public appearance, in the postgame press conference after a 77-74 loss to Wake Forest in the ACC Tournament, was prickly and cryptic in a way that many will see as classically Boeheimian – giving no quarter and revealing little, stubborn and borderline immature (no small feat at the age of 78), almost funny, but not quite. Confusing, because it remains uncertain whether Boeheim retired, was retired or forced out, parted ways or was effectively fired. Or it came to the most appropriate end imaginable, depending on your perspective and home address. ![]() Late Wednesday afternoon in Greensboro, North Carolina, Jim Boeheim’s tenure as head coach of basketball at Syracuse came to a befuddling and resoundingly ignominious finish. ![]()
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