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The best day on the college basketball calendar began with the equivalent of a trip to the dentist's office.
Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim hijacked the first day of the NCAA tournament with a 45-minute filibuster of a news conference Thursday morning in which he addressed the sanctions levied against him and his program for the first time.
Boeheim called the penalties from handed down by the NCAA two weeks ago "unduly harsh" and reiterated that he intends to appeal them. He also bemoaned that his side of the story was "disregarded by enforcement staff, insisting that he had no personal involvement in any of the violations and attacking the NCAA's assertion that he did not promote an atmosphere of compliance within his program.
"This could not be further from the truth," Boeheim said.
The NCAA suspended Boeheim for the first nine games of the ACC season next year, vacated more than 100 of his victories and took away 12 scholarships from the Syracuse men's basketball program over the next four years. The penalties followed a multiyear investigation that uncovered everything from academic misconduct, to impermissible benefits from boosters, to drug testing policy violations.
Syracuse announced Wednesday that its athletic director Daryl Gross had stepped down and that Boeheim intends to retire in three years. In doing so, the school essentially allowed the man overseeing the basketball program to leave on his own terms but made his boss the fall guy.
Boeheim addressed his impending retirement Thursday, calling three years "a long time" and saying that he could only guarantee he'd coach next season. The 70-year-old coach said he might have retired after Syracuse reached the 2013 Final Four were it not for the ongoing investigation into his program.
"There's no way that I would ever run away from an investigation in progress," he said. "Other than my family, this is the focus of my life."
Syracuse assistant coach Mike Hopkins has previously been acknowledged as Boeheim's successor at Syracuse, but that plan appears to be in doubt at this point. Hopkins has interviewed for a handful of other jobs the past few years and Syracuse chancellor Kent Syverud told the Post-Standard that he was not ready to address whether Hopkins would be the next coach.
While Boeheim said, "I fervently hope that he will be the coach here," he also acknowledged that it will not be his decision.
If Syracuse chooses to hire from the outside when Boeheim leaves, the timing is not ideal. Prominent coaches who already would be wary of following a legend at Syracuse might be more reluctant to do so while scholarship restrictions were still in place.
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Jeff Eisenberg is the editor of The Dagger on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at daggerblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
from Yahoo Sports http://ift.tt/1x4tZKT
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