Inside The Huskies

If Boeheim Retires, Hopkins' Name Still In Successor Mix

The Syracuse coach is in his 46th season, longest in the history of the game.
Dan Raley|
If Boeheim Retires, Hopkins' Name Still In Successor Mix
If Boeheim Retires, Hopkins' Name Still In Successor Mix

Jim Boeheim has been coaching basketball at Syracuse for 46 seasons now. He's closing in on 1,000 victories. He's been to five Final Fours. He's captured a national championship.

He has an underachieving 10-11 team.

Boeheim is 77.

For the most part, some Orange fans have grown weary of him.

Replacement names already are being tossed around, figuring Boeheim must be close to walking away. 

After all, Tom Brady finally retired at 45.

Years, not seasons.

The first names that come up as possible successors are Syracuse assistant coaches Adrian Autry and Gerry McNamara.

Not far behind them in this proactive debate is Mike Hopkins, former Orange assistant coach covering a pair of decades.

It doesn't seem to matter that he followed two breakthrough seasons at the University of Washington with a pair of disastrous ones.

Hopkins, 52, is finally winning modestly again (11-8 overall, 6-3 Pac-12) as he takes the Huskies to the Bay Area to face California on Thursday and Stanford on Sunday.

Without any big men.

Using Boeheim's trademark zone.

Charming everyone along the way. 

While a large segment of the Seattle fan base might well be weary of Hopkins these days, there are plenty of those in Syracuse who still consider him to be the fallback coach once Boeheim is done.

Syracuse has a Top 25 recruiting class, but just one player, California forward Chris Bunch, is ranked among the Top 100 players.

Bunch, for that matter, recently said he was all but ready to play in Seattle for Hopkins before he made the Huskies his second choice among three finalists. Rutgers was his third option.

“I was definitely really interested in Washington," Bunch told Rivals.com. "I really liked coach [Mike Hopkins]. I was actually going to commit there. I was thinking hard about it, but things changed overnight.”

It makes sense that Boeheim might finally consider stepping down. After all, one of his last coaching peers, Duke's Mike Krzyzewski, is retiring at the end of this season.

Boeheim is the oldest tenured coach in the history of Division I college basketball.

He coaches his sons, Buddy and Jimmy, who are seniors.

With Boeheim, Autry, McNamara and Hopkins, the idea always has been to keep Syracuse basketball in the family. 

Syracuse AD John Wildhack, in his comments, seems to lean in that direction.

He hasn't pushed out Boeheim, but has to stay ready when the day comes that he's done.

Hopkins officially was designated by the school as the Orange coach in waiting in 2015, with suggestions of this sort first appearing way back in 2007.

He served as Boeheim's interim head coach for nine games in 2016, when his boss was suspended for program irregularities. 

Four of his players left him and entered the transfer portal after last season, indicating some of the luster is lost.

Boeheim has never experienced a losing season in Syracuse, outside of a couple of instances when games later were forfeited to satisfy program missteps. 

He's currently 10-11 with a team not nearly as athletic as usual. His sons soon will move on. Krzyzewski is halfway out the door.

Who knows, Hopkins might be weary of the UW and Seattle. 

No matter what happens with the Huskies over the next month and a half, the congenial and relocated coach should stay prepared for anything.

If Boeheim were step down and Syracuse came calling, Hopkins would have a hard time saying no.

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Dan Raley
DAN RALEY

Dan Raley has worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as for MSN.com and Boeing, the latter as a global aerospace writer. His sportswriting career spans four decades and he's covered University of Washington football and basketball during much of that time. In a working capacity, he's been to the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the MLB playoffs, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship and countless Final Fours and bowl games.

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