Jim Boeheim
Jim Boeheim
James Arthur "Jim" Boeheimis the head coach of the men's basketball team at Syracuse University. Boeheim has guided the Orange to nine Big East regular season championships, five Big East Tournament championships, and 28 NCAA Tournament appearances, including three appearances in the national title game. In those games, the Orange lost to Indiana in 1987, on a last-second jump shot by Keith Smart, and to Kentucky in 1996, before defeating Kansas in 2003 with All-American Carmelo Anthony...
ProfessionCoach
Date of Birth17 November 1944
CityLyons, NY
This was a heck of a comeback from that kind of deficit against a team that controls the game. You just can't give anybody that kind of lead and expect to come back, but we just keep plugging away and as long as we get Gerry some looks he's going to make his share.
Our inside people can't score against you. Our centers haven't contributed for a couple games now, and that doesn't make it easier.
Jim and I talked before the game (Monday) about this. It just doesn't make sense. Too many good teams. It's too difficult to stack the deck against people.
We've been way behind against quality teams, but we keep fighting back. This team fights hard. They make some mistakes, but they keep fighting. When you lose four in a row and do what we had to do to win tonight, I'm very proud of them. This is a great lesson for all the guys. They can win without Gerry.
We gave them four wide open shots at the beginning of the game. You can't do that against a quality team like Villanova.
Eric took the same shots he did against Connecticut except they blocked them.
They could be in third place with a little luck. That's how close the league is. The difference is so minute between teams. Look at West Virginia, (they've had) one after the other of close, tough games, and as good as Connecticut is, against Pitt, it's a one-point game late at home. It makes for great games, I guess.
Connecticut really dominated inside, as they are going to do against most people. We've got to get our offense going if we're going to have any chance to be where we would like to be at the end of the year.
This was a heart-and-soul type of game. I've questioned the toughness of our players a couple times. When you lose four in a row and you do what we had to do to win, that's a tremendous tribute to the toughness of these kids.
We made a couple bad mistakes at the end of the game. And fortunately Gerry corrected them.
Without Gerry McNamara, we wouldn't have won 10 games this year.
When Connecticut caught us, and they caught us a lot, we kept going. Gerry wouldn't let it get away. He was playing on half a leg today. He's got more guts than anybody I've ever coached.
We knew the first stretch in this league will be the hardest stretch in this league. We have another tough game, and we'll see how we are after that.
We keep playing all these teams, we're going to find that assistant coach who thinks he's overrated. Or that guy is already home.