Those who are regulars in the Stomp the Lunatic contest know that I am not a fan of Jim Boeheim.\u00a0 \u00a0While I respect how amazing of a coach he is, he tends to say things in press conferences that really rub me the wrong way.<\/p>\n
Well, not today.\u00a0 Today he was asked by a reporter about what his thoughts were on how some people were saying that they would rather have a mediocre .500 team that have what happened to Virginia.<\/p>\n
And as only Boeheim can do, he gave a pretty long answer to the question.\u00a0 Here are some of his best quotes.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’ve seen coaches win games in this tournament, two, three, four games and they’re terrible coaches. Things just went right. And it’s what you do over the course of 35 games that determines what kind of coach you are. You win 17 games in the ACC, win the ACC Tournament? He’s got — I think he’s got one guy who was hurt that will be an NBA player. The other guys are — they’re pretty good. There’s a couple. They may sneak in. I don’t know. They may sneak in there.\u00a0\u00a0But he’s won the ACC against Duke and North Carolina what four or five years? I don’t know what it is. It’s beyond even trying to understand it. With maybe two recruits in the top 40. And he’s playing against 15 guys on each team over those period of time that were in the top 20 or top 10 or top 5 in wins? Come on. It’s one game. It’s one game.<\/p>\n
“Pittsburgh, they didn’t like their coach because he didn’t win the tournament. They’re doing really good now, aren’t they, in Pittsburgh? I know all those people were yelling, too. They wanted him out.”<\/p>\n
“Come on, the tournament is — I’ve lost in this tournament, everybody has. I’ve looked at the list of bad losses, and I couldn’t believe we weren’t even on it.\u00a0 But Mike Krzyzewski has lost, I’ve lost, Roy Williams has lost, Bill Self has lost, Dean Smith lost.\u00a0 There’s nobody that hasn’t lost.”<\/p>\n
“This is college basketball. I saw the Spurs get beat in their first game of the playoffs one year. They won the championship. Golden State, I think, got beat in the first game. They won the championship. It’s one-and-done. You’re off your game a little bit, you know, and it’s not that, like, people will say, they’re just good in the regular season they’re not good — that’s just stupid.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I know that this loss is going to sting for a while.\u00a0 But Virginia fans need to know that their program is in amazing hands with Tony Bennett.\u00a0 If Virginia was a 2 seed (like Michigan State lost to Middle Tennessee State, Duke lost to Lehigh, or Syracuse lost to Richmond), this would just be considered an awesome upset by UMBC.\u00a0 But in those cases, Middle Tennessee State, Lehigh and Richmond were just ranked a couple teams higher than UMBC.\u00a0 In fact, the Syracuse \/ Richmond game happened in 1991 when there was no play-in game.\u00a0 Based on where UMBC was ranked compared to the other conference tourney winners, they would have been a 15 seed that year….<\/p>\n
To be fair, some of the things that I have read are totally unfair – both to Bennett and UMBC.\u00a0 \u00a0No one wants to mention this, but UMBC stayed in the game until the very end against Kansas State.\u00a0 They didn’t just surprise Virginia – they almost surprised Kansas State as well.\u00a0 UMBC might not have had a major win before their conference tournament, but they earned the right to be here – and beat a pretty good team in Vermont on their home court to do it.<\/p>\n
It is a historic upset.\u00a0 But it is only historic because Virginia had an amazing season where they went 31-2, won the ACC by 4 games, and won the ACC tournament.\u00a0 Otherwise, this game just appears like Arizona (another major conference champion) getting upset by Buffalo.\u00a0 It will take some time, but Virginia basketball will be just fine under Bennett’s leadership.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Those who are regulars in the Stomp the Lunatic contest know that I am not a fan of Jim Boeheim.\u00a0 \u00a0While I respect how amazing of a coach he is, he tends to say things in press conferences that really rub me the wrong way. Well, not today.\u00a0 Today he was asked by a reporter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2018-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1307"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1308,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1307\/revisions\/1308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}