There is a plan in place for who will succeed Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim, he said on ESPN Radio’s “On The Block” on Wednesday.
“We have a plan in place, a good plan, an ironclad plan,” Boeheim said. “But we have a plan, we obviously aren’t going to release it, because we don’t want everybody we’re recruiting against to know what we’re going to do.”
Boeheim, 77, said he would be returning for a 47th season as Syracuse’s head coach on the show, mirroring what he said following SU’s loss to Duke on Saturday. He added that he made a promise to the incoming 2022 class that he would be their head coach, and he intends on following through with the promise.
Boeheim also said that he had input into who his successor would be, but the final decision ultimately rested with Syracuse’s chancellor and athletic director.
Said Boeheim: “There’s no solution that guarantees success. There have been cases where they had a great plan, a coach came in, and everybody was on board and the guy couldn’t win any games.”
Jim Stechschulte
Senior Columnist
So, there’s a plan in place for when Jim Boeheim steps away from the Syracuse basketball program.
There’s no reason to not believe the announcement. Of course, there was basically nothing to the announcement.
Yes, Jim Boeheim will, at some point, no longer be the men’s basketball coach at SU. Yes, someone will replace him at that time. No, there are no additional details about either of these sentences.
We knew all of that before the announcement.
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Remember, there was also a formally-made coach-designate announcement nearly seven years ago with that coach-designate scheduled to take over the Orange program four years ago. Of course, life interfered and that coach-designate is now three years removed from his second Pac-12 Coach of the Year Award. That agreement turned out to not really mean anything.
But, please, feel free to speculate away and debate the potential terms of the agreement. When does Boeheim step down? Who will replace him? How will it affect the rest of the coaching staff? How will they pull this off without messing up recruiting? How will they pull this off without someone accidentally letting a part fo the plan slip, especially as it pertains to recruiting?
The fun thing about announcing a plan, but not announcing the specifics of the plan, is that the plan can be whatever the planners want it to be, whenever they want it to be.
I’m not saying the plan will change, the plan is or is not flexible, or anything else.
There’s just an announcement of a plan. That’s all.
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