Jim Boeheim's 47 Season Syracuse Coaching Career Ends Unceremoniously

Jim Boeheim's Syracuse coaching career is over. The circumstances surrounding his departure are bizarre and murky, but it is clear that he will not be returning because the university issued a statement noting that Associate Head Coach Adrian Autry will be Syracuse's coach next season without indicating if Boeheim retired, if the parties mutually decided that Boeheim would not return, or if Syracuse fired Boeheim without wanting to say so explicitly (it is also not clear why the statement capitalized "Associate Head Coach" but did not capitalize coach).

At a press conference after Wake Forest beat Syracuse 77-74 in the ACC Tournament, Boeheim stubbornly refused to answer a simple question: Is he retiring or not? Boeheim said that whether or not he retires "is up to the university." That is not how retirement works; that is how firing works: the employee decides whether or not to retire, while the employer decides whether or not to fire the employee. Boeheim also said, "I gave my retirement speech last week and nobody picked up on it." 

One gets the impression that Boeheim did not want to leave and Syracuse did not want to admit to firing him, so the parties are just acknowledging the breakup without applying a label to it. I cannot recall another coach of Boeheim's prominence whose coaching career ended in such a disjointed fashion; there have been successful coaches who received a farewell tour and there have been successful coaches who were fired after sticking around too long, but it is unusual for a successful coach to just abruptly disappear while hinting that he is not ready to go.

Before Boeheim became a coach, he played for Syracuse alongside future Hall of Famer Dave Bing, who told me, "Jimmy was one of those players who was just totally underrated. He came to Syracuse as a non-scholarship player and he did not get a scholarship until his sophomore year. We roomed together as sophomores and juniors and became very good friends and talked basketball quite a bit. It was evident to me way back then that Jimmy would become a good coach. He was a steady player. He was smart in that he knew how to get open and he was a good shooter. Whenever I drove to the basket he was smart enough to get to the open spot and he could put it down. He had a very good senior year."

Boeheim was inducted in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as a coach in 2005, two years after he won his first and only national championship with a squad headlined by Carmelo Anthony. Boeheim led Syracuse to the Final Four five times in four different decades (1987, 1996, 2003, 2013, 2016). He posted a 1015-441 record, ranking second all-time on the Division I wins list behind Mike Krzyzewski. Boeheim played a significant role in the Big East's emergence as a dominant college basketball conference in the 1980s, and he later served as an assistant coach for Team USA's Olympic gold medal winning teams in 2008, 2012, and 2016. 

However, there is a less glamorous side to sustained high level success in college sports. Danny Tarkanian, an attorney and the son of Hall of Fame coach Jerry Tarkanian, insists that it is not possible to have great success at the top level of college basketball while running a clean program, as I discussed in my review of his book Rebel With a Cause: The True Story of Jerry Tarkanian:

He asserts that no current big-time collegiate sports program can survive without violating the NCAA's rules, quoting former American University Coach Ed Tapscott (p. 112): "The crime in the NCAA is not in breaking the rules. It's in getting caught. We have our own MAD--Mutually Assured Destruction. There's a threshold of dirty linen we can all build up, and know that all of us agree tacitly not to disclose it. Because none of us could succeed without breaking the rules."

Sam Gilbert, a so-called "booster," provided a host of improper/illegal benefits to UCLA's basketball players from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s, during which time Coach John Wooden led UCLA to an unprecedented run of 10 championships in a 12 year span, including seven in a row (1967-73). The NCAA did not take any action against UCLA during Wooden's run of championships, but in 1981--long after Wooden had retired, and after the Los Angeles Times conducted an in depth investigation--the NCAA determined that UCLA had committed over a decade's worth of violations. The NCAA did not vacate any of Wooden's championships, but only vacated UCLA's 1980 Final Four run, while also placing the basketball team on probation for two years. Coach Wooden denied having knowledge of Gilbert's activities, and it was never proven that Coach Wooden knew, but Coach Wooden also admitted that during that time he had "tunnel vision" and "trusted too much."

In 2015, Boeheim joined the long list of coaches punished by the NCAA for violating NCCA rules. The NCAA suspended Boeheim for nine games, and vacated 101 of his wins from 2004-2012. That is the third most wins ever vacated for a single school.

An even more disturbing scandal involving the Syracuse basketball program became public knowledge in 2011. Bernie Fine, Boeheim's right hand man for 36 years, was not criminally charged, but credible allegations of child abuse cost him his job at Syracuse. In a recorded conversation with former Syracuse ball boy (and Bernie Fine accuser) Bobby Davis, Fine's wife Laurie indicated that she knew that her husband's behavior with minors had been inappropriate. Boeheim publicly defended and excused Fine well past the point that it was acceptable or reasonable to do so, to the extent that two of Fine's accusers sued Boeheim and Syracuse for slander. Before the case proceeded to trial, Boeheim and Syracuse paid an undisclosed settlement to resolve the matter, with the university issuing this statement: "Coach Boeheim regrets that he made those statements and that he questioned the integrity of Bobby Davis and Michael Lang. Since then, he has publicly committed to focus his charitable efforts on providing assistance to victims of sexual abuse, which he continues to do. We are glad to announce that we have resolved the defamation case that Mr. Davis and Mr. Lang brought, and look forward to putting this behind us."

On February 20, 2019, Boeheim drove a car that struck and killed Jorge Jimenez, who had been standing at the side of the road next to a disabled car. Boeheim had been speeding on an icy road prior to the fatal accident, but after a police investigation the authorities declined to press charges against Boeheim. In 2020, the Jimenez estate filed a civil suit against Boeheim and Syracuse, alleging that Boeheim's negligent driving caused Jimenez' death. I found no public record of that case being resolved yet.

Boeheim's fans will understandably focus on Syracuse's 2003 NCAA title and nearly five decades of sustained on court success, but there are other aspects of Boeheim's career and life story that do not get nearly as much attention as the shortcomings exhibited by other similarly prominent figures who are regularly excoriated by media members who specialize in practicing selective outrage.