AIDAN POLLARD
Assistant Sports Editor
A good coach needs to be just that — a coach.
Good coaches don’t need ridiculous athletic résumés; they just need to understand the game they’re coaching and understand how to lead a team or individual to victory.
If I were looking to find someone to coach me in any sport, I wouldn’t look at whether or not they were a champion, I would look at whether they could see a potential better than the one that I see in myself.
Coaching comes from the love of a sport and not necessarily the ability to execute everything a coach needs a player to do. By that I mean that it’s not necessary for a snowboarding coach to know how to do a double backflip to be able to coach an athlete on how to perform the trick. A hockey coach doesn’t need to be comparable to Wayne Gretzky to understand how to coach a team to a Stanley Cup win.
Especially in sports like track and field or swimming, a head coach may have never attempted an event in which they are expected to produce a champion.
Jim Boeheim has more underdog wins than any other NCAA coach. This season alone, in all three of Syracuse’s wins to advance to the Sweet 16, they were slated as the underdogs.
Boeheim is a hall of fame coach who will rank fourth all time in wins, while including redacted victories, and second all time as a Division I coach. Fab Melo was an NCAA athlete who played without eligibility, forced Boeheim to forfeit a large amount of wins, but that doesn’t necessarily discredit of all the wins during that period.
Boeheim has a win percentage of .738. He’s one for three in championship games with five Final Fours, seven Elite Eights, 19 Sweet Sixteens and 33 March Madness appearances.
Next to Mike Krzyzewski of Duke, Boeheim is the second all time Division I coach in wins with one school, still including the redacted wins. He’s only let the Syracuse Orange miss the tournament twice in consecutive years and has three gold medals for the U.S. Olympic team.
The only other coach with a résumé that can surpass this is Krzyzewski, with a .765 win rate and five national championships.
For that reason, Krzyzewski surpasses Boeheim as the greatest NCAA men’s basketball coach of all time.
It’s hard to argue against facts like win percentages, but it does say something when Boeheim and Krzyzewski are the two routinely picked to coach the USA Olympic team.
Coaches don’t need to be all-star athletes, but they do need to be all-star leaders. That is exactly what Jim Boeheim is to Syracuse basketball.