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"&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;For years, Syracuse has exhibited the soullessness that is inherent with pursuing the spoils of big-time college sports\u2014television exposure, millions of dollars and an indelible university identity. In doing so, it shrugged off NCAA investigations and persistent negative headlines as collateral damage. Who cares about probation, low graduation rates and the head coach cursing his way into YouTube lore? Certainly not Syracuse, as the school has shown consistently that it would gladly trade small bits of its soul for the glory and enrollment bump that comes with a Final Four run.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;So Wednesday\u2019s news that Hall of Fame coach Jim Boeheim, 70, intends to retire in three years is surprising only because his tenure seemed destined to end like those of college coaching legends, such as Bobby Bowden, who are forced into awkward exits after the glory fades. The question of whether the three-year window was Boeheim\u2019s choice or the university\u2019s will be the biggest one answered at a Thursday morning press conference where Boeheim is expected to speak. But no matter the spin, this feels like the type of resolution where a bunch of academics sat around after an avalanche of bad publicity and said, \u201CWe have to do&lt;em&gt; something&lt;/em&gt;.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first thing the school did was seemingly force athletic director Daryl Gross to resign. Then it put a clock on the end of Boeheim\u2019s four-decade tenure. It allows the university suits to look themselves in the mirror without wincing and say that they stood up to big-time sports. That they really do take academic integrity seriously. That maybe the academic issues were caused by systemic indifference more than a rogue operations guy. What\u2019s most notable here is that things have gotten so foul at Syracuse that even an institution with such high tolerance for athletic department shenanigans felt it needed to do something\u2014anything\u2014to show that the person in charge of the university resided in the chancellor's office and not the athletic department.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;On March 6, the NCAA hit Syracuse with a bevy of penalties stemming from a nearly eight-year investigation into numerous violations in the basketball program. Those penalties included a nine-game ACC suspension for Boeheim, five years probation and 108 wins vacated from Boeheim\u2019s record. The report took on a scathing tone that cut to the heart of the university\u2019s ideals. That included a \u201Cviolation of the most fundamental core values of the NCAA and higher education.\u201D And also: \u201CThe desire to achieve success on the basketball court over academic integrity, demonstrated clearly misplaced institutional priority.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Said Tom Yeager, the Colonial Athletic Association commissioner and a former chair of the NCAA Committee on Infractions: \u201CThe words in a report are chosen very, very specifically. It\u2019s written by a bunch of lawyers. If strong language was selected, there was an unequivocal basis for it.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The university had already chosen to self-impose a one-year postseason ban, giving Boeheim two postseason bans on his record for his career. (The other came in 1993, for a series of NCAA violations.) This set of NCAA findings\u2014which the university will appeal\u2014put another permanent stain on Boeheim\u2019s record, and assures him a place on the Mt. Rushmore of NCAA basketball cheaters.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;But as the announcement unfolded, no entity looked worse than the university itself. The NCAA cited four instances of academic fraud and essentially called out the school for sacrificing its academic reputation for athletic glory. So what did the university do to respond? It released a letter from chancellor Kent Syverud that read like a point-by-point message board manifesto against the NCAA\u2019s findings. It ignored the tone and severity of what the NCAA reported and instead fought back. (It even included a priceless passage referencing the Black Sox scandal, the epitome of the entire botched public relations move.)\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;\u2022 &lt;strong&gt;MORE CBB:&amp;nbsp;&lt;em&gt;SI&amp;nbsp;&lt;/em&gt;experts share their NCAA tournament brackets&lt;/strong&gt;\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Expect Boeheim to fire back at the NCAA on Thursday. But the overlooked reality of Syracuse\u2019s NCAA case is that it was caught red-handed. This is an era where the NCAA investigative staff has been neutered, turned over and is somehow even more impotent since the botched Miami investigation two years ago. Not only did the NCAA Inspector Gadgets catch Syracuse, but they did so fully and thoroughly\u2014computer tracings of academic fraud, bank records for funneling money and ignored drug test results\u2014that there shouldn\u2019t really be much to argue about. Syracuse not only got caught breaking the fundamental rules of the NCAA, but it also did so glaringly and obviously that the punishment required serious repercussions.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I attended Syracuse and covered the program for the local paper, The Post-Standard, for three years after graduating in 1999. From dealing with Boeheim on multiple arrests and suspensions of his players over the years, his only way of handling them is fighting and arguing over every detail like it\u2019s a block/charge call. Boeheim\u2019s competitiveness\u2014the same trait that\u2019s driven him to the Hall of Fame and made him a seminal figure in the university\u2019s history\u2014can also be his weakness. This showed up most famously when he called the molestation allegations of former ball boys against assistant coach Bernie Fine as \u201Ca bunch of a thousand lies\u201D and said they were out for money.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;And on Thursday, it will be stunning if Boeheim does anything but argue his case right down to the last detail. It\u2019s all he\u2019s ever done. It\u2019s the only way he knows. But at this point, the appetite to listen and believe, beyond the hardcore fan, is limited.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The departure of Gross is the least surprising reverberation of the fallout. (He claimed in an interview with Syracuse.com on Wednesday that it was his choice to step down, which seems hard to believe). Even after 10 years, Gross was never fully embraced in central New York. He began his tenure by firing football coach Paul Pasqualoni and hiring Greg Robinson, which started a spiral into football irrelevancy that\u2019s only been interrupted by brief snippets of mediocrity. He ends his tenure with the basketball program missing a year of postseason play because of self-imposed sanctions, on five years probation and amid as serious an athletic scandal as the university has ever seen.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In between, the school moved to the ACC and made long-overdue facilities upgrades. But in the end, Gross\u2019 inglorious departure should offer a reminder that he oversaw USC football as a senior associate athletic director during its heyday in the early 2000s, and that run ended with a vacated BCS title and significant NCAA sanctions. (Gross has more direct involvement in the Syracuse report, as he led the infamous meeting with school officials to attempt to get former basketball player Fab Melo eligible.) &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;What we\u2019ve learned from all this is that Syracuse will pause, reshuffle the deck and continue its relentless pursuit of athletic success. There will be some new administrators brought in and they will recite the same clich\u00E9s. But the school\u2019s actions throughout this investigation show that the university\u2019s top priority is getting back to the top in the big business of college athletics. At Syracuse, that\u2019s all they really know.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GALLERY: WHICH NCAA TOURNAMENT TEAM HAS THE ZANIEST FANS?&lt;/strong&gt;\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;\r\n&lt;/p&gt;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.si.com/college-basketball/2015/03/18/syracuse-coach-jim-boeheim-retire-daryl-gross>