Rush The Court

Roy Williams and Jim Boeheim couldn’t seem more different on most days. Both reflect their environments: one is a cranky New Yorker; the other sounds every bit like he grew up in Swannanoa, North Carolina (a town of fewer than 5,000 people in the eastern North Carolina mountains). But the two have fascinating reputations to unpack.

Williams was a longtime assistant for Dean Smith, and he rarely lets an opportunity get by without letting you know about it. Everything from his disinterest in calling timeouts to stop opponent runs to his frequent first half subbing harken back to his assistant coaching tenure under Smith. After a decade on the Tar Heels’ bench, Williams left in 1988 to take over a Kansas program in disarray as a result of Larry Brown. Hardly a rebuilding job, though, Williams made the NCAA Tournament in every year he was in Lawrence except his first (the Jayhawks were still on probation). He wound up taking Kansas to the Final Four a total of four times, including the 2002-03 season, right before he left for Chapel Hill. At the time, Williams famously said, “I could give a sh– about North Carolina,” immediately following his championship game loss to (ironically) Jim Boeheim and Syracuse.

Back at his alma mater starting in 2003, Williams took over a floundering program that had lost 36 games in its previous two seasons (it would take Williams six years to log 36 losses). Matt Doherty bequeathed him a young team with many of the players Williams would ride to his first national championship — Raymond Felton, Jawad Williams, Sean May and Jackie Manuel. But Williams’ Tar Heels bore no resemblance to the ones coached by Doherty. They ran like the wind and turned the undersized May into an unstoppable juggernaut. It’s impossible to consider now, but North Carolina was arguably one more bad hire away from long-term irrelevance (with Coach K just down the road having just won his third championship in 2001).

Syracuse was obviously much different when Boeheim took over as a 32-year old in 1976. Tulane had just hired previous head coach Roy Danforth, who had led the then-Orangemen to their first-ever appearance in the Final Four. Boeheim picked up right where his predecessor left off, going to the Sweet Sixteen three times in his first four years and to at least 20 wins in all but two seasons. However, despite making the NCAA Tournament nearly every year on the sideline, his teams didn’t typically excel there. In 30 NCAA Tournament appearances, this is Boeheim’s fifth Final Four appearance. That’s certainly nothing at which to scoff, but Boeheim has had the distinction of playing second fiddle to numerous more accomplished coaches — first to Jim Calhoun at Connecticut; now to Mike Krzyzewski at Duke and Roy Williams at North Carolina — for much of his career.

So just how important is this year’s championship to both coaches? Very. Boeheim is coming off one of the worst years of his coaching tenure as well as a scandal that forced him to announce his retirement timetable. Roy Williams is facing pressure from a seemingly never-ending academic fraud investigation along with the sudden resurgence in Durham over the last half-decade. Like Boeheim, Williams’ last few years have been dogged with bad luck in both early entries and injuries. For Boeheim, he would likely have had another championship — and at least a Final Four appearance — if Arinze Onuaku didn’t get injured in the 2010 Big East Tournament (it’s harder to consider Fab Melo’s situation one of luck). For Williams, his Final Four drought looked certain to end in 2012 had Kendall Marshall not gotten injured against Creighton.

A third championship in Chapel Hill would silence any remaining doubters, with Williams in just 13 seasons surpassing Dean Smith’s total of two rings. He would go from much-maligned bumbler to a status as undeniably one of the great coaches in college basketball history. And truthfully he deserves more credit than he gets — since coming to North Carolina, his success has been better than Coach K’s (admitting that Krzyzewski had juggernaut teams in 2001 and 2002). In Syracuse, Boeheim would escape the relative obscurity of only winning a single NCAA Tournament. Commenters (at least the reasonable sort) could no longer scoff that he only won that title because he managed to keep Carmelo Anthony on campus for a year while most other elite talents were heading straight to the NBA. Some people may also look at his gaudy win total as a little more than so empty.

Just making this year’s Final Four has lifted a certain degree of burden for both coaches. But a title for either gives them a chance at rewriting their recently flawed narratives.