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
It's certainly a tremendous challenge. I don't know if it'll be any tougher than when we had three Final Four teams and two teams get to the Sweet Sixteen. It can't be much tougher than that, but it'll be difficult.
It seemed for a long time there that we made the finals every year and took it for granted. It has been a while.
If you win, it doesn't matter if a Martian coaches your team. I hope I'm not hurting any Martians' feelings that are listening, but Indiana fans are like any other fans. They liked Mike Davis when they went to the Final Four, didn't they?
We've been to the finals a lot and we want to play well. It will be a tough game.
We've got some really good teams. It's going to take a major upset for somebody to beat Connecticut. And three or four of our other teams are good enough to make a Final Four, maybe five.
I'm never concerned about how many players a team has. Some of the best teams we've ever play only had five guys. In basketball, it's not about numbers, you don't need 10 guys, you only need five.
Everybody wants the opportunity, no matter what you do in the regular season, to get to your league tournament, but we knew the rules.
The Big East, I think, we belong here. Even though we've added some teams from outside, we're still fundamentally the Big East. And I think we're better off than we would be in a southern conference.
Syracuse, New York, is like Hawaii for eight months of the year, ... The other four months, I don't care about the weather because we're playing basketball.
They would have loved (Davis) like they love Bruce Pearl at Tennessee.
They won't let you shoot it. But if they do, shoot it!
I'm glad we won a couple of games because I would have said this anyway. But people would have thought I was just upset because we lost three games, which we could have. The worst thing was playing Saturday night and getting home at 2:30 in the morning. At least play an afternoon game in Cincinnati or something. The way that we're scheduling is just not going to work.
I'm going to be very nervous, ... You give hundreds, probably thousands of speeches in this business, but you only get one chance to make an acceptance speech at the Hall of Fame. That's pressure.
I'm disappointed at this stage of the year that we're not a better defensive team, and that's why we're in the position we're in.