WASHINGTON, D.C. — It’s the end of the Big East as we know it and Jim Boeheim feels fine.
The 68-year-old Boeheim has already quashed the retirement talk by saying he will return next season, and he has told 2014 stud recruit Chris McCullough he’ll be around for 2014-15, too.
With the way he’s going now, there’s nothing to stop Boeheim from coaching another two or three years, either.
Why else would associate head coach Mike Hopkins — a Southern California native and Boeheim’s longtime heir apparent — be on the brink of taking the USC job if offered?
“[Boeheim] is unbelievable,” Syracuse assistant Gerry McNamara told SNY.tv inside the Syracuse locker room at the Verizon Center.
“He hasn’t lost a step. He’s been as good as I’ve ever watched him, in-game adjustments and personnel. He’s got the same intensity that he did from the time he recruited me as a player. He could do this for a long time, and if you’re winning and you’re in a good situation, why not?”
Boeheim has spent months lamenting the collapse of the only conference he has ever known — even hinting that he might just go play golf — and now he has the opportunity to represent the Big East Conference in the Final Four one last time before Syracuse moves on to the ACC.
With Syracuse facing off against Big East rival Marquette in the East Region final here Saturday, the Big East is guaranteed to send at least one team to Atlanta.
And if Rick Pitino and Louisville can negotiate the Midwest Region beginning Friday night against Oregon, the Big East could have have half of the teams in the Final Four.
Either way, the Big East will have an opportunity to win its fourth championship since Carmelo Anthony and Syracuse in 2003. Since then, the Big East, ACC and SEC have each won three titles, with the Big 12 (Kansas) winning one.
“We’re going to get to the Final Four, I think we’ll get two teams to the Final Four this year,” Boeheim said one day after the No. 4 Orange destroyed No. 1 Indiana, 61-50. “Our league has been good. It’s been good all year. You never know what’s going to happen in the NCAA Tournament, how things work.”
One of two things will happen here Saturday.
Either Syracuse will head to its first Final Four since 2003 and the Orange will continue to represent the Big East for at least another week before jumping ship to the ACC this summer.
Or Marquette will win and coach Buzz Williams’ club will make a major statement that the new Big East — featuring the Catholic 7 plus Butler, Creighton and Xavier — is a serious player on the national stage.
“Maybe if we were in different regions, maybe we could both continue to play,” Williams said.
Williams could join some elite Big East company by beating Boeheim and Syracuse and taking his team to the Final Four.
“When I think about the Big East, I think about Coach Jim Boeheim, I think about Coach Calhoun, Coach Pitino, Coach Thompson, Sr.,” he said.
All of those coaches have either won a national championship or been to a Final Four, and now Williams can put his name into that group, too.
As for Syracuse, McNamara won the Big East Tournament championship at Madison Square Garden in 2006 and said this last year in the Big East is sentimental for Boeheim and the whole program.
“Certainly it’s sentimental for us in our last year, for me as a player and now as a coach,” McNamara told SNY.tv. “I know it is for Coach Boeheim and Coach Hopkins and Coach Autry. It means a lot to us, as it does to a lot of people that are very, very sad to see the Big East in the situation that it’s come to.”
Boeheim seems to have come to grips intellectually with the collapse of his old friend Dave Gavitt’s conference and is already looking ahead to life in the ACC — and how the reconstituted Big East will be without Syracuse.
“It’s sad the way — it was almost inevitable that the football schools would need to get with football schools, and I think it will work for the basketball schools now that they’re going to get together, and they will have a really good basketball league,” Boeheim said. “I think that’s for the best. I think it will work out, and we have a great challenge going to what will be a tremendous basketball league.”
And with a five-man class coming in next year joining Syracuse’s returning players, the Orange have the potential to be tremendous again next year.
And the year after that, too.
It may be the end of the Big East Conference as we know it, but Jim Boeheim feels fine.
