Boeheim’s career at Syracuse has plenty of New Orleans roots

The domino that led to Jim Boeheim becoming the head men’s basketball coach at Syracuse University may have fallen in upstate New York, but it was pushed in uptown New Orleans.

In the spring of 1976, Boeheim was an assistant to then-Syracuse head coach Roy Danforth when Tulane, seeking a replacement for Charlie Moir, called and lured Danforth to head back south, where he had starred as a player at Southern Miss and had a successful start to his coaching career in junior college.

Tulane had just joined the fledgling Metro Conference and the Louisiana Superdome opened seven months earlier.

At Danforth’s introductory press conference, he said he wanted the administration to play all of its home games in the Dome, alongside the two-year-old New Orleans Jazz.

With Danforth departed, Syracuse administrators turned to Boeheim to lead the program that was already experiencing success. Just 12 months earlier, the Orangemen had reached the Final Four.

Danforth would spend five mostly unsuccessful seasons at Tulane before he left the bench and moved to the fund-raising end of the athletic department.

By comparison, before Boeheim coached his final game with the Orange on Wednesday in the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament, Tulane hired seven more head coaches and had a four-year shutdown of its program from 1985-89 because of point shaving allegations and other improprieties.

Twice, Boeheim’s season ended in the same building where Danforth wanted to play all of his home games – on Poydras Street, in the Final Four.

In 1987, he made it to the sport’s biggest stage for the first time as a head coach, only to be turned away by Indiana and Baton Rouge native Keith Smart’s late jumper.

Sixteen years later, Boeheim was back with a freshman named Carmelo Anthony and came away with the program’s only national championship, defeating Kansas in another of the many thrilling championship games to be played in New Orleans.

Add in the two semifinal victories, and three of the biggest wins of Boeheim’s career came inside the Dome.

How long was Boeheim the Syracuse head coach? The Big East Conference had not yet been formed.

Perhaps if that league – with a vision in major northeast TV markets similar to what the Metro had in the southeast – had been in place in 1976, Danforth may not have left Syracuse for Tulane.

And the domino that started the head coaching career of Jim Boeheim may not have toppled.