Boeheim doesn’t do bracketology, nor does he read the blogs.
With Selection Sunday being less than one month away, NCAA Tournament talk is anything but few and far between among college basketball circles. Ubiquitous now are every major media outlet’s latest — almost daily — bracketology, putting bubble teams and seed lines of full display.
This is the time of year when Joe Lunardi becomes malnourished with the pallor of mortician as ESPN’s resident bracketologist, holding it down in the bracket bunker, which we’re pretty sure is just a Motel 8 somewhere off route 81 in Central New York.
Unfortunately for the next few weeks leading up to Selection Sunday, we’re all forced to suffer through random ESPN segments sandwiched between media timeouts of live games in which Lunardi takes up one quarter of our home television screens to blather about which teams are on the bubble while all we really care about is the game at hand.
It truly is the best time of the year.
And while the nation is tuned in to the bubble watch, our very own Jim Boeheim stays tuned out, keeping his focus on the next game evergreen. Asked on Monday’s ACC Coaches Teleconference if he pays any attention to bracketology during the year, Boeheim gets right to the point.
“No I don’t. We’re just trying to get to the next game,” Boeheim said before segueing to his team, almost making his case for an at-large bid. “I think we’ve got a good team. I think we’re playing well this year. We have a much better strength of schedule than we had last year. We don’t really have any bad losses and we’ve got more road games (wins) than we had last year.”
This shouldn’t come as much of a shock as Boeheim truly does just stay focused on coaching his team while eliminating outside distraction. We’ve seen this from the hall-of-famer numerous times over the years, so to hear him say he doesn’t pay any mind to the exercise of bracketology should surprise few.
As for the remainder of the schedule, Syracuse will have a crack at the creme de la creme of the conference, playing three of the top four teams while mixing in a tricky road game against Boston College before heading to Brooklyn.
“We just have to keep playing. We’ve got some really really tough games left and we’ll see what happens,” Boeheim finished.
Indeed we will.
