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Boeheim turns in another epic press conference

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New rule. Every Jim Boeheim press conference should be streamed live on the Internet.

Less than a week after letting loose regarding the Syracuse media coverage – video is here, text exchanges are here – the Orange coach was refreshingly candid following Monday’s 69-64 win at Villanova.

To be blunt, he could give a fig about playing “tough” games, whether they’re during the non-conference schedule or during Big East play.

Jonathan Tannewald from Soft Pretzel Logic got the good stuff down:

Reporter: You came up with an overtime win at home [against Rutgers on Saturday], and then a tough, tough game on the road here. Do games like this help you at this stage of the conference season?

Boeheim: I think that’s all [cow-based fertilizer], you know. All that stuff, it’s all [cow-based fertilizer]. We could play next week and get in the same game next week and lose. We could have ten of these in a row and win them, then get in a tournament and have one and you lose it. It’s all [cow-based fertilizer].


But that’s just for starters. The next exchange really made me laugh.

Reporter: Does this league toughen a team up or beat a team up?

Boeheim: I don’t know. That’s like that other question. You can’t - it’s not that it’s bad. It’s just that the whole thing about toughening a team up, I don’t think it hurts you. They see they can make a play. But it’s like schedules.

They say, play a tough non-league schedule and it will help you for the league. Georgetown had the toughest non-league schedule in our conference and what did they start out in our league? 1-4. We had a fairly easy one and we were 5-0.

Does that mean our schedule wasn’t tough enough? Or it took a little bit longer to kick in that it wasn’t tough enough? That’s all nonsense. It’s what kind of team you have. You play a fairly decent schedule, whatever it is. You could play 14 easy games and a couple tough ones just to see, and then you can start playing.

I mean, what happens the year you start out with a tough game? You didn’t have anything to get ready for. All that stuff is just, you know - it used to be that it wasn’t so bad because we just had you guys. Now you’ve got all these people doing this all the time. Now you’ve got eight million answers to one question that only needs one answer.

We’ve got a talk show guy in Syracuse who never comes to press conferences, and he says, “They don’t ever ever ask Boeheim the tough questions.” So I called him. On the air. I said, “Okay, ask me a tough one.”

[He said] “Well, what do you mean?” I said, “No, ask me a tough question. You know”

He said one week I took [Brandon] Triche out when he hit two shots. I said, “Well his back was bothering him, and he said he had to come out for a minute.”

[And the talk show host said] “Oh. I didn’t know that.”

[To which Boeheim replied] “No [fertilizer].”

[The talk show host then said] “But you know, I’m not a journalist.”

I said, “You didn’t have to tell me that. I already knew that.”

Questioner: I just thought I’d ask.


Was Boeheim over the top? Maybe. But give the guy credit for speaking his mind. The last thing the world needs is more boring coachspeak.

You also can follow me on Twitter @MikeMillerNBC.