Appreciating Syracuse's Jim Boehiem, The Grumpiest Coach in College Basketball

This feature is part of VICE Sports' March Madness coverage.

I imagine, as Frank Deford once wrote of Bobby Knight, that a considerable part of Jim Boeheim's difficulty in the world is a simple matter of appearance. Some people take on the patina of their surroundings, and Boeheim, who was raised in a funeral home in upstate New York, looks just like the kind of guy who was raised in a funeral home in upstate New York. He is perpetually balding and perpetually dour, with a jutting nose and consistently unfashionable glasses and a blistering frown. He is generally at his best when he is condemning something, be it the media or one of his own players or the very Renaultian notion that anyone inside his program could possibly be guilty of breaking NCAA rules.

Of all the prolific college basketball coaches, Boeheim is the most overtly, well, annoying. His nasal voice, his sarcasm, even his walk—"a long-striding gait … usually done to the arrhythmic accompaniment of nervous wiggling fingers," wrote Sports Illustrated's Jack McCallum—tend to grate upon the senses. Even Knight could unveil a charming side—his famous irascibility seemed to be deployed as a strategic ICBM—but Boeheim doesn't really seem to have that gear. And in a way, it's kind of respectable: The fact that, like Bob Huggins, Boeheim merely considers himself a basketball coach rather than some overarching paragon of leadership strategy is one way of staying true to himself. It also means that he's never going to be very likable, not even in the twilight of his career. But at this point, he doesn't seem to care about that, either, which I guess is one of the rights you earn when you've won 900 games over the course of 40 years.

And so Syracuse enters this year's Final Four as the strangest kind of underdog: The pseudo-underdog no one really wants to root for. Even as a No. 10 seed, Syracuse is still Syracuse, and so there is no sentimental value in having them here in an underdog's pretense; if anything, it is just the opposite. The case could be made, even now, that Syracuse didn't belong in the tournament in the first place, both for statistical and ethical reasons. The case could also be made that Boeheim should no longer be coaching at Syracuse, that he should be forced out sooner than his planned retirement date of 2018.

And the case could be made, at the same time, that this is the greatest coaching job of Boeheim's career—that his decision to employ the press against Virginia was the kind of strategic flourish that has allowed Syracuse to thrive in the NCAA tournament over the years. Which is precisely the sort of media-driven hyperbole that Boeheim refuses to buy into, one way or the other. "I learned a lesson one year in my early coaching career," Boeheim said on Thursday at the Final Four in Houston, where the Orangemen will face North Carolina on Saturday. "We ran a play at the end of the game and it worked. We won by one. Two weeks later we had the same, similar game, same situation, ran the same play, didn't go in, and I was a shitty coach. That's just the way it works. It's what coaching is."

This is the admirably grumpy side of Boeheim; this is the Boeheim who refuses to pump out the kind of glossy bullshit that so many of his colleagues (in particular his superior on the USA Basketball coaching staff) might when faced with the same question. This is the Boeheim, who berates his players publicly, but then also defends them publicly, albeit in the coarsest manner imaginable. A few minutes later at the same press conference, the subject of Syracuse's NCAA punishment and the nine-game suspension Boeheim served early this year came up. And Boeheim once again managed to reduce this argument to semantics, which is exactly the kind of thing he's been doing for years when this subject arises.

"…When they say 'cheating,' that's not true," he said. "Rules being broken is a lot different. Cheating to me is intentionally doing something, like you wanted to get this recruit, you arranged a job for him, or you went to see him when you shouldn't. You called him when you shouldn't to gain an edge in recruiting, to get a really good player. That's cheating.

"I think if something happens that you're not aware of, it doesn't really affect the recruit, I don't look at it the same way. It's a violation. I think when rules are violated, there should be a punishment … things can happen in your program. You have to take responsibility for them. You have to go on."

Is that lawyerly parsing the equivalent Boeheim "taking responsibility"? I have no idea. Maybe you think it is, particularly if you consider the shoddy ethical framework of the NCAA itself. Maybe you don't, if you find Boeheim the kind of dour perfectionist who wrings the joy out of college basketball while seeking whatever advantage he can get. There is no question that he will be remembered as a great tactician, if only for his employment of the sticky 2-3 zone defense that has come to define his program. But even if Syracuse wins two more games and wins Boeheim his second national championship as a head coach, I'm not sure he'll ever be remembered fondly outside of upstate New York. He is not that kind of man, and he's never been that kind of man, and so when someone asked him on Thursday if he still thought about "proving people wrong," he said he'd given up on that long ago.

"Honestly, I don't think about that anymore," Boeheim said. "I probably did 20 years ago or 10 or whatever."

It's too late for that now, frankly. There's no changing who Jim Boeheim is anymore. He is exactly what he appears to be.