Rapid Reaction: An ode to Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim

Jim Boeheim will not return for a 48th season as Syracuse's head basketball coach, the University announced on Wednesday.

The Hall of Fame coach will be replaced by Adrian Autry, who has been an assistant coach since 2011 with the Orange. The announcement came following Syracuse's 77-74 loss to Wake Forest in the quarterfinals of the ACC Tournament.

"I gave my retirement speech last week, and nobody picked up on it," Boeheim said in his postgame press conference following the loss.

Boeheim concluded his career with 35 NCAA Tournament appearances, five Final Four trips, and a National Championship in 2003. He finishes with a 1,015-441 record officially, though 101 wins were stripped following NCAA sanctions.

"There is no doubt in my mind that without Jim Boeheim, Syracuse basketball would not be the powerhouse program it is today," Chancellor Kent Syverud said in a statement. "Jim has invested and dedicated the majority of his life to building this program, cultivating generations of student-athletes and representing his alma mater with pride and distinction. I extend my deep appreciation and gratitude to an alumnus who epitomizes what it means to be 'Forever Orange.'"

Quite simply the dates April 3, 1976, and March 8, 2023 will be historic for Syracuse athletics, and in particular, Syracuse basketball because those are the dates around a legendary 47 year Hall of Fame career of Jim Boeheim.

I’m privileged to be one of the few media members that have covered the entirety of his career starting as a student in the late 1970s.

Back then, Boeheim was an emerging young head coach at the beginning era of the Syracuse basketball metamorphosis from an upstate New York regional program to taking over the national stage and competing with the likes of blue-bloods Duke, Kentucky, Kansas and North Carolina.

Later I had the privilege of working with Coach Boeheim on his Weekly Coaches show during my career at WSYR radio in Syracuse, and it was great to interact with him on a week-in and week-out basis.

I got to spend time with him behind the scenes, getting to know him on a personal level, which was much different than the public persona he displayed as the head coach at Syracuse, especially in the early tenure of his career.

I learned a lot from him, and he was a loyal mentor. He was extremely intelligent on a variety of subjects. He was a great teacher, a great developer of players, and always remember the very first basketball lesson he gave me was that basketball was a game of runs.

I never forgot that watching the Orange over the years, especially in games when there would be many lead changes in the back-and-forth nature of a 40 minute college basketball game.

In the beginning of the era of Syracuse basketball in the Carrier Dome in 1980, and he’d be the first to tell you, he didn’t want that to happen with the success of the program at Manley Fieldhouse. But he adjusted, and it expanded recruiting across the country, and he built one of the great programs in college basketball.

Now that his retirement is official, I wanted to extend a big thank you to Jim Boeheim for all he’s done for Syracuse University and the basketball program, and all the best moving forward as he gets to enjoy the well-known well earned fruits of his labor and retirement with his wife, Juli and his four children.

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