After 47 years leading his alma mater, Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim has coached his final season, the school announced Wednesday afternoon.
The announcement comes on the heels of a disappointing 17–15 campaign for the Orange, which left the team on the outside looking in of the NCAA tournament and the NIT. Syracuse will sit out March Madness for the second straight year after the team posted the first sub-.500 record of Boeheim’s tenure in 2021–22.
Along with the news of Boeheim’s departure comes the announcement of his successor. Adrian Autry, a former Syracuse point guard and the team’s current associate head coach, becomes Syracuse’s first new head coach since 1976.
Boeheim departs as the longest-tenured men’s basketball coach in the country, with one national championship (2003) and five Final Fours under his belt. He has an official career record of 1,015–440, though he had 101 additional wins removed from his record due to NCAA sanctions in ’15. Boeheim was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in ’05 and the College Basketball Hall of Fame a year later.
Syracuse rose to national prominence during Boeheim’s tenure. The Orange became a staple of the Big East in the 1980s and ’90s, winning 10 conference titles between ’80 and 2012, along with five league tournaments, most recently in ’06, a legendary underdog run led by guard Gerry McNamara, now an assistant on Boeheim’s staff.
The team’s first run to the Final Four came in 1987 when Syracuse lost the national championship game to Indiana on a last-second shot by the Hoosiers’ Keith Smart. In ’96, an underdog Syracuse team led by John Wallace—and the now-vaunted 2-3 Zone—fell in the national championship to a loaded Rick Pitino-led Kentucky team, 76–67.
Boeheim’s team finally broke through in 2003, led by superstar freshmen Carmelo Anthony and McNamara, sophomore Hakim Warrick and a slew of veteran role players. Warrick’s dramatic block of Kansas’s Michael Lee to seal Syracuse’s 81–78 win remains an iconic NCAA tournament moment and put Boeheim’s career in rarified air.
The team was a No. 1 seed in both 2010—when Boeheim won a number of national coach of the year awards, including the Naismith and AP—and ’12, and made runs to the Final Four in ’13 and ’16, falling to Michigan and North Carolina, respectively, in the national semifinals.
In addition to his work at Syracuse, Boeheim won Olympic gold in 2008, ’12 and ’16 and FIBA world championships in ’10 and ’14 as an assistant coach on Mike Krzyzewski’s Team USA staff.
Autry will be tasked with holding together an intriguing young core of players and adding to a recruiting class that currently features just one player, three-star center William Patterson. Judah Mintz, the team’s second-leading scorer, along with role players Chris Bell, Maliq Brown, Justin Taylor and Quadir Copeland are all freshmen.
