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NCAA MEN'S 1ST AND 2ND ROUNDS: ST. LOUISMarch 17, 2016Jim BoeheimSt. Louis, Missouri THE MODERATOR: Head coach of Syracuse is here, Jim Boeheim. JIM BOEHEIM: We're happy to be here. This team has worked very, very hard this year, and we're excited to be in the tournament and to be playing a team like Dayton that obviously is a tremendous basketball team. We have an experience with them two years ago, and know how good they are. And then I think they won one of the toughest conferences this year in the country. So we have tremendous respect for them and know just how good they are. Q. You said you watched Dayton play eight times this season. Do you like seek out their games, and do you ever think about? JIM BOEHEIM: I just watch the games that are on. They've been on a number of times, so I saw them early in the year. And, of course, we've now seen tapes and everything. We have a good understanding of how good they are. Q. Do you ever think about the game two years ago when you're watching, especially since they have a lot of the same guys on their roster? JIM BOEHEIM: No, not too much, not when I'm watching, no. Q. Why was this the happiest you've ever been on Selection Sunday? JIM BOEHEIM: Well, because 31 times we were in the tournament before the Selection Sunday came. Four other times we were on the bubble and we didn't make it in any of the four. So, this was the first time that we were on the so-called bubble that we actually made it. And so that was one of the reasons, and then I think this team is really -- it's obviously been a difficult year for them to go through everything that's happened. And then we had the unbelievable start really to our year, which is why we got in the tournament, that we won a tournament with six teams that are in the NCAA Tournament. And two, Connecticut and Texas A&M, obviously Connecticut won their tournament at the end of the year and Texas A&M went to overtime in their tournament. So, we had two neutral sites early, and then we go to Duke and win. So this team has proven that they can play well at a very high level away from home. And I think that is something that can make a good tournament team. But I think that just the idea that we hadn't made it before was big, and then for this team, what they had to fight through this year, start 0-4 in the league. You have to go to Miami and Pittsburgh and then you've got North Carolina in your first four games. So it was not a great way to start. They had a difficult schedule to start. Then they had to end up at North Carolina and at Florida State their last two games. So it was a very, very difficult schedule. We are the only team in the league that played the top five teams on the road. We were at North Carolina, at Virginia, at Louisville, at Pittsburgh, at Miami and at North Carolina. Q. During those nine games you were absent, I wonder what you may have learned about yourself or about the NCAA or your program or life? JIM BOEHEIM: I learned that it's not fun sitting at home for 32 days when you haven't been able to plan it. So it's a good lesson for retirement. Make sure you have a plan. Obviously I didn't have a plan for 32 days. I mean, the plans that were talked to me, people told me, Jay Bilas and Sean McDonough, good friends of mine, 'well, go play golf.' How do you go play golf when your team's getting beat by 10, 15 points someplace? I don't think that's a good picture to put in the paper, which I'm sure they would -- Jim Boeheim playing golf and his team's losing. So there was never an alternative that you could do. There wasn't anything I thought about it for the six months ahead of time, what am I going to do, what am I going to do. And there is nothing. You sit home, you watch the games. Nobody really wanted to watch them with me, I guarantee you that. And I now realize what fans do when I always laugh at them that you're yelling at the television. And that's what you do when you're not there. And so it was difficult. And I got to go see my kids play a little bit more. But I usually get to see their games anyway. But I got I think a couple of extra games in. Q. Would you mind discussing the advantages to playing a zone defense especially in a tournament format, the quick turnaround and possibly the teams have not seen you, your zone? JIM BOEHEIM: If your defense is good, it helps you in tournaments. It doesn't matter what defense you play. Everybody now sees zone. Dayton, we've got miles of tape on them playing against the zone. So they've seen a zone. I think sometimes, during the regular season, you'll play a game and the team has played six straight games against man-to-man. And now they've got two days to prepare for you and they're playing against your zone. Well, that's not what happens here. Dayton plays against zone all year, and they've had five days, six days to prepare to play against us. So it's not, if our zone is good, it will help us. But any defense is good. It will help you. The turnaround is slightly easier in terms of the other team is not used to playing against it and they only have a day. But like most teams in this tournament that are going to have a chance to play us, they will be practicing against the zone during the week this week. I don't know if it's really that big of an advantage. I hope it is. But we really can't prove that. Some teams have come out and shot great against us in tournaments. I think it helps us in the preseason tournaments because you're playing back to back to back. I think there it probably does help you. And we've won a lot of those tournaments, a lot. So we haven't won a lot of NCAA tournaments, but -- it's a little bit hard. Q. You talked about getting in from the bubble. Given last year's postseason ban, did that feel kind of vindicating? And with the benefit of hindsight do you feel like self-imposing the ban last year was the right call? JIM BOEHEIM: Well, it was the right call, but not for that reason. I mean, when we did the ban we were 14-7, better than we were this year. And we won 18 games and we narrowly lost a couple of games at the end of the year. So we could have made it last year if we would have gone to the tournament and done something, we certainly could have. We had great wins last year. We beat Louisville. We won at Notre Dame. We had some other wins. But the misconception is that you don't have to take this ban, you can wait. I don't know where the media gets that from. There is no waiting. When you feel that you need to, you're going to be out of the tournament, you don't -- you say, well, we're just going to wait a year. You have to make that decision. It turned out to be beneficial because we might not have made it last year, and we did make it this year. And the other reason that I wanted to take the ban, and I thought it was the right move, is there was only two months left. We only had one senior last year, and he had played in three tournaments and one Final Four. The two other seniors we had were coming back. So we only really took it away from one guy, and it turned out we didn't take it away from him anyway because he wouldn't have gone. But he had been there three times. So it was -- and the other thing is one month knowing you're not going to the tournament is one thing. To sit in Syracuse and for ten months know we're not going to the tournament next year, that would not have been good. So there's a lot of reasons. It's not just that part. Really the overriding reason is, if you're going to take it you gotta take it. You just can't wait. But all those other factors that I just talked about, all play into it a little bit as well. Q. How have you seen Frank Howard evolve over the season and how ready is he to be receiving the minutes he's receiving in the NCAA Tournament? JIM BOEHEIM: Good question. Next question. I don't know. Some involvement. Q. Allen Griffin is a guy you really embraced. He played for you. He was on your staff and you helped him get the job at Dayton. What is it about this guy? JIM BOEHEIM: I love Allen Griffin. He's the best. He's rooting for Dayton, trust me, but there's a little part of him inside that's he's got Orange, don't worry, you know that. The most unique thing, Allen Griffin started as a sophomore, had a pretty good year. His junior year I sat him, I started somebody else. And that normally is transfer or I hate you, I'm not going to ever do anything for you. He worked right through it and ended up contributing, making a big contribution that year after that. And he's one of the best I've ever had. And when I knew there was an opening, I called Archie and I said 'this is a guy that would be an absolute great coach for you' and I think he has been, I think he's one of the best ever. Q. When you talk about it being a difficult year for your players, how difficult was it for Mike Hopkins to sort of be put in that situation, and do you think that what he went through will benefit him? JIM BOEHEIM: Oh, yeah, it was a tremendous benefit. And really when you analyze it, the two-day window we had wasn't enough. We were trying to prepare a little bit, because we were thinking, 'okay,' and when we hadn't heard from them we're thinking, 'well, it's going to be the first nine games of the conference.' We had no reason to think otherwise. So we had prepared actually a little bit. I had him do some meetings and do a little bit more in practice and things. But when it hit like that and we had two days, the team could not adjust to that. They really couldn't. And we didn't play well in Georgetown and St. John's, we just didn't. They didn't play anywhere near like they had played. It wasn't so much that Mike did something wrong. There was nothing he couldn't have done. John Wooden couldn't have done anything. But then he got it going. They started to play. They played very well. They won some difficult home games. They went to Miami and Pittsburgh and played well. They played really well and they played really well against Clemson. They had the game won, but Clemson is good. So the two days they didn't play well, two games. But after that they played just as well as if I had have been there. Even that said, he's got a different style. He's going to coach a different way. He'll use some of the same things, but differently. So you can't judge what he did in that situation as to what kind of coach he is. I think he's going to be a better coach than me some day but not in that situation. And if it had been the opposite and I was an assistant taking over, it just wasn't going to work. It's different. I do things differently and have a different voice than he has. He will be very successful, but it took a couple of games and it wasn't a good situation. We were too fragile. We were right on the borderline and we were on the borderline when I came back. We won a couple but we were at home. We did have a great win at Duke, but that was just one of those things. But we played a little better but we didn't really play great. The only two bad games we had were the first two. They didn't adjust quickly to that. That was the difference, really. But he's a tremendous coach and it will help him, because it's different. It's different being the head coach. I went through it my first year, you do some things and you look back on them and say that wasn't very good. But we all make mistakes. I just don't come in after the game and say, well, I lost this game, because in reality no one guy, no one player, one coach, loses the game. I think people want you to come in and say that, well, I should have done this. Well, there's a lot of things you do. You do a hundred things during the game, you can do 90 right, and you might put this one guy in, he misses four shots. It's not a mistake, it's just something you tried and it didn't work. Q. Going back to last year's postseason ban, how did that impact you, and what did you do last year while the tournament was going on? Did you have a chance to like do some TV work and turn it down? JIM BOEHEIM: No, I don't even remember -- really, I mean, we've always had the league tournament. We've always had the NIT. We've been in the tournament every year except the one. And won one of those years. So I think it was because it turned out that we didn't play great at the end of the year, it wasn't a killer that you couldn't go to the tournament because you probably weren't going to get in, it would have been nice to go to the league tournament, it would have been nice to play in the NIT but it just didn't happen. You just kind of moved on, that's all. THE MODERATOR: Thank you. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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