Jim Boeheim coached Syracuse University’s men’s basketball team for 47 years. He won a national title in 2003, when he had Carmelo Anthony pouring in buckets for his Orange. He made the NCAA tournament 34 other times and got to five Final Fours. He guided Syracuse from independence to the Big East, a new, basketball-centric conference that started operating in 1979. He put his stamp on that league, splitting its title his first year and being its coach of the year four times. Boeheim’s work with the basketball program was a key reason, maybe the reason, that Syracuse was deemed good enough to get a life-raft when the old Big East fell apart in the 2010s and the Orange landed in the Atlantic Coast Conference. The list of coaches who changed their schools’ fortunes more sharply than Boeheim is not a long one.
That success, for a while, made Boeheim teflon. In 2011, he passionately defended Bernie Fine, an assistant coach whom multiple men accused of molesting them as children. (Four men accused Fine, but one recanted and said he had lied.) The school saw enough reason to fire Fine but did not discipline Boeheim, who had cast two of Fine’s other accusers as liars out for money. (The school and the coach later settled a defamation lawsuit that those two accusers brought.) In 2019, Boeheim struck and killed a man with his car. Police never charged Boeheim with a crime, but investigators said he was speeding by at least 10 miles per hour in the seconds immediately before the crash. A later lawsuit filed by the estate of the man he hit did not get Boeheim bounced either. Boeheim took a nine-game suspension and lost some scholarships and wins from his 2015 record, as the result of an NCAA infractions case. Nobody has to care about that sort of thing, and Syracuse didn’t seem that put off. Boeheim had made the school into his house, and good luck evicting him.
Things have dragged in recent years, though. The school’s tournament appearances have been roughly an every-other-year thing since 2015, when Cuse started a streak of double-digit loss seasons that ran to nine this year. The past two seasons have been particularly flat, with a combined record that hit 33–32 on Wednesday, without a March Madness bid in either season. Boeheim has had curmudgeonly qualities for ages, but he has looked downright on edge this year. He bullied a student reporter for asking a benign question after a loss, then extensively defended himself by arguing he hadn’t done what he’d done. He accused a couple of ACC teams of “buying” players, then pretended he hadn’t. Gallup had not polled Orange fans on whether they wanted the 78-year-old to keep coaching, but Boeheim was wildly defensive about his status, telling a reporter that “95 percent of Syracuse people want me to coach” (it seemed doubtful) and that “everyone I see comes up to me and says, ‘Coach, don’t retire.’ ” (OK.)
Did Boeheim retire? Uh, I don’t know if that’s the term. But his Syracuse coaching career did end on Wednesday, shortly after Wake Forest knocked the Orange out of the ACC tournament with a buzzer-beating 3-pointer. Boeheim’s postgame press conference was odd. He gave a long-winded answer to a question about his future plans and then said he’d given “a retirement speech” on the court after Syracuse’s home game the prior Saturday, giving way to this exchange:
Q: Are you saying right now that you’re going to retire?
Jim Boeheim: This is up to the university.
You want to come back?
I didn’t say that.
So what are you saying? You’re not saying you’re retiring—
I just said it. I don’t know.
So you don’t know?
I said this is up to the university.
You’re not sure whether—how will you make a determination about when you will come back?
You’re talking to the wrong guy.
The video is odder, somehow. Anyway, that was shortly before 3 p.m. on Wednesday. Two hours later, Syracuse demonstrated that the coach’s fate really was up to the university by—there’s not really a good word for it—facilitating a conscious uncoupling between itself and its Hall of Fame coach. “Today, as his 47th season coaching his alma mater comes to an end, so too does his storied career at Syracuse University,” the school wrote in a statement, naming assistant coach Adrian Autry the new head of the Orange at the same time. They probably did not write the whole press release after the game.
There were not many more verbs to give hints as to what had happened. An exhaustive Ctrl F–ing of the release reveals no sign of the word “resigned” or “retired” or even “sailed off into the sunset.” Did Boeheim retire of his own accord? It doesn’t seem like that, no, but perhaps eventually either Boeheim or one of his bosses will elaborate. No one did so in the press release, which includes glowing statements about Boeheim but not a word from Boeheim. Did Syracuse fire the guy after 47 years? Did he quit on his own? Was it a more nebulous-but-everyone-still-gets-the-idea “pushing out” of the head coach?
He wouldn’t be, or isn’t, the first legendary college coach to end his career this way. Even for god-king coaches who do not embroil themselves in scandals that force their school to fire them, like Joe Paterno at Penn State, a graceful exit is not a guarantee, and an unforgiving one is sometimes inevitable. Florida State did it to Bobby Bowden, the coach who oversaw an FSU ascent that looked a lot like what Syracuse had done in basketball under Boeheim. Adolph Rupp built Kentucky basketball into a powerhouse and managed to keep his job through various scandals and should’ve-been-scandals, but when he threatened to fight Kentucky’s mandatory retirement age for public employees, he lost. Indiana fired Bobby Knight because he couldn’t stop being Bobby Knight.
But Boeheim’s departure is a standout in its weirdness and potential to be gawked at. Wake Forest, the team that looks to have sent Boeheim out of the sport for good, is also one of the schools that Boeheim said had “bought a team” under loosened NCAA rules about players taking money from third parties. The game was played in Greensboro, North Carolina, a place Boeheim disdained as the site of the conference tournament. To get exited via press release after that? It is a cold, cold world sometimes.
Boeheim’s exit is maybe not as harsh as Mike Krzyzewski’s from Duke a year ago, but at least Krzyzewski got a glowing farewell tour and looked to leave on his terms. The North Carolina Tar Heels ruined it from there, and if Boeheim can take any heart in his parting of the ways with Syracuse, it is this: Because the Orange left the Big East years ago, Boeheim didn’t have a chance for his last two losses to come against his rival UConn Huskies.
