Jim Boeheim’s career getting ended by a team he said was 'bought' was too perfect

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We’re about to start March Madness in earnest, so I know there will be lots of stunning finishes ahead in the coming weeks.

But before we’re consumed by the, uh, madness, I don’t want what happened to Syracuse Men’s head coach Jim Boeheim Wednesday to get lost in the shuffle. Because not only was it perfect poetic justice for an ornery member of college basketball’s “old guard,” it was also really funny!

And I can’t overlook the comedy.

Sorry, sorry, I should say former Syracuse head coach Jim Boeheim. Wow, what a sentence to write after all this time.

After 47 years at the helm of the Orange, Boeheim “stepped down” and finally retired with Syracuse’s buzzer-beating loss to Wake Forest. I put stepped down in quotation marks because it didn’t seem like Boeheim was actually intent on walking away until … yesterday.

But it sure looks like Syracuse was done with him based on Boeheim’s strange (hostile?) attitude after the game!

Via the ACC presser transcript:

“REPORTER: You want to come back?

BOEHEIM: I didn’t say that.

REPORTER: So what are you saying? You’re not saying you’re retiring …

BOEHEIM: I just said it don’t know.

REPORTER: So you don’t know?

BOEHEIM: I said this up to the university.”

If I didn’t know any better, that sounds like the 78-year-old Boeheim is bitter he didn’t have much of a choice. That he thought he somehow deserved better after all these years leading the program?

To that, I say: Sorry, Jim. Not everyone gets to take a hollow “victory lap” like Duke’s past steward Mike Krzyzewski. And let’s be honest: As annoying (and hoo boy, was it annoying) as it was last year, you’re no Coach K in terms of resume. Not even close.

In the end, though, Boeheim probably got what he deserved.

An early February interview with ESPN saw him call the current state of college basketball an “awful place.” Boeheim clearly didn’t appreciate the advent of NIL deals for players and took his critique way too far to insinuate that ACC programs like Wake Forest just flat-out bought their teams. He would later offer a weak non-apology for what he said.

The damage was done.

I would normally make a joke about Abe Simpson yelling at a cloud, but the joke was already made for me. Instead of going on one last hopeful Cinderella run, the Demon Deacons buried Boeheim with a poetic last-second shot. Essentially, one of the teams he maintained didn’t deserve their place in college basketball, got to throw roses on the coffin of his career. Amazing.

If you weren’t a believer in karma before, Wake Forest officially ending Boeheim’s time at Syracuse should change your mind. I, for one, think it’s beautiful.

Quick Hits: NFL free agent forecast … Giannis at Duke … and more. 

• NFL free agency is just around the corner and my pal Christian D’Andrea has a forecast for all 32 teams.
• Bryan Kalbrosky got to talk to Giannis Antetokounmpo, who revealed he wanted to … play at Duke?
• In a World Baseball Classic exhibition, Jose Altuve did the unthinkable: he got a weird hit against the Astros.