The Syracuse Orange In Big Trouble
A down year for Syracuse Basketball.
If you take a quick peek at my extensive bio next to my flawless photo down below, you’ll notice that I’m a ‘Cuse alum ’13 who heavily bleeds orange. Graduating from Syracuse University left me with 4 years of indelible basketball memories. From Andy Rautin’s sharpshooting during my freshman year, to my senior year when Michael Carter-Williams led us to the venerable final four.
Throughout his 39-year journey with The Orange, coach Jim Boeheim has established an image representative of Syracuse University as a powerhouse basketball school. Boeheim boasts Nine Big East regular season championships, five Big East tournament championships, 3 appearances in the national title game, including one NCAA tournament championship in 2003 led by the New York Knicks own Carmelo Anthony.
For nearly 4 decades, coach Boeheim maintained an almost impeccable track record…until now. According to ESPN.com, Syracuse University “has self-imposed a postseason ban on its men’s basketball team this season in response to an ongoing NCAA investigation into potential past infractions by the team.” Oh brudder.
This Means No NCAA Tournament
Don’t go jotting them down in your brackets this year. Also, no Big East…I mean ACC tournament (still getting over that). Heck they won’t even be able to participate in the NIT tournament had they got in this year. “I am very disappointed that our basketball team will miss the opportunity to play in the postseason this year. However, I supported this decision and I believe the University is doing the right thing by acknowledging that past mistakes occurred,” said Boeheim in a news release.
“Mistakes”
They entail academic violations (student-athletes not maintaining the minimum GPA allowable to play) between the year 2007-2012. Other violations consist of drug tests the players indeed failed, and a local YMCA granting athletes benefits that should not have been accepted. Boeheim and co. hopes this handful of problems will all go away with the university placing a self imposed ban on their post season. Syracuse has been playing their worst basketball in as long as I can even remember, so in a sense it seems like a cop out to most. They figured “hey, we’re not playing our best ball, might not even make the tournament, why not punish ourselves this year instead of risking our future teams postseason hopes when we should be a whole lot better.”
And a Whole Lot Better They Will Be
The Orange already have 4 high school recruits fully committed to attending SU next year. The site also mentions that the powerhouse basketball university is considered to have the 2nd best recruiting class this upcoming year right behind the Arizona Wildcats. This is all judged on a point system developed by the folks at 247sports.com, and boy I hope they’re right.
The downside of all this of course is, if the NCAA feels ‘Cuse’s self imposed ban isn’t enough and they want to further punish us by say…banning us from next years post season, then the immediate fear is that all these high schoolers get scared away and scurry on to other big D1 basketball schools. Yikes. I like the move by ‘Cuse management but boy do I hope that’s all the punishment we get. For now…all we can do is pray. Go Orange.
