Jim Boeheim, you just won your first national championship. Where are you going next?
Boeheim: I am going home with my twenty-something year old wife, Julie, who got more face time than the Syracuse dance team last night.
Jim “Bohemian Rhapsody” Boeheim was a winner well before he captured his first national championship last night. He is one of the winningest coaches in college basketball history, has coached three Final Four teams, landed the top freshman in the nation last year and had married a women who looked 20 years his junior.
Based on the lack of television coverage dedicated to his wife last night, people may look at Roy Williams as a loser after an 81-79 shellacking at the hands of the prepubescent Orangemen. After all, his two All-American seniors came up short in their biggest game, and Michael Lee had a game-tying 3-pointer blocked by Hakim Warrick, who took off like Superman to get to the shot.
But in reality, Williams is anything but a loser.
Sure his team is cursed and gets more spooked during the postseason than Shaggy and Scooby Doo in a haunted house after a few doobies. But Williams will be rewarded for his years of premature exits and underperformances with one of the most prestigious honors in college athletics – the North Carolina head coaching position.
When asked about it after the game by CBS’s Bonnie Bernstein, Williams dropped the “S” bomb on national television like bombs over Baghdad.
“Personally, I could give a shit what people think,” said Williams when asked if he was thinking about taking the North Carolina job.
While a win might have kept him in the homely town of Lawrence, Kan., the loss will likely send Williams, who didn’t say he wouldn’t take the job, to Chapel Hill, N.C., where he will be able to bury himself in all of the “Timeout” fried chicken he can handle. That is why it is curious that CBS had a camera in the Carrier Dome filming celebrating Syracuse students when it should have been in the Dean Dome shooting elated North Carolina boosters.
The people of Kansas weren’t the only big losers last night – actually there were a whole bunch more in Vegas. But Ann Arbor had its own big loser in the form of Engineering senior Bob Kender. Kender managed to lose the MichiganDaily.com/Pizza House Challenge by scoring just 30 points and having his entire bracket out of the running by the second weekend of the tournament.
The Troy native picked Dayton (his father’s alma mater) to win the championship and Mississippi State to be the runner-up. Unfortunately, No. 4 Dayton couldn’t even fly into the second round, suffering a first-round loss to Tulsa.
“I am positive there was no drug use involved with my pool, but based on my picks, it makes you wonder,” Kender said. “I thought I knew a lot about college basketball, but obviously not.”
Fellow engineer Dave Kaplan faired better than Kender. Kaplan won the Daily’s pool by selecting seven of the Elight Eight teams and all four Final Four teams. Kaplan, however, was unable to share his secrets with his fellow dancers.
And when the techs in the CBS production van hit the button on “One Shining Moment”, the books on the 2003 NCAA Tournament were closed (until the NCAA Infrations Committee reopens them 10 years from now), informing college basketball fans on dance floors throughout the nation that it isn’t time to go home, but they can’t stay here.