Embattled ACC leaders on the defensive at college basketball media day

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – The Atlantic Coast Conference calls its basketball media day Operation Basketball.

This year, it became Operation Damage Control.

The ACC’s celebration of the season coincided with a 1-2 punch of bad press: North Carolina is still reeling from the devastating details in the Wainstein Report that was released last week, tainting the image of a program that previously held itself to a holier-than-thou standard; and some of the Syracuse contingent was on a pit stop here on its way to an NCAA Committee on Infractions hearing Thursday and Friday in Indianapolis – the climax of a marathon investigation into alleged wrongdoing in the basketball program.

So the ACC had a slightly awwwkwaaard situation on its hands – two of the league’s four Hall of Fame coaches had to deal with pertinent, pressing questions about something other than how wonderful they are. (One of them handled it a lot better than the other, but we’ll get to that.) And the commissioner was peppered with questions about off-court issues affecting the league. And the Syracuse and North Carolina players had to deal with questions about things far removed from their control as well.

“It doesn’t benefit any of us to have problems,” said Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski. “That doesn’t help anybody.”

Then the winningest coach in college basketball history – who considers himself something of a guardian of the game – basically bailed on the subject like a rookie coach in a mid-major conference.

“It’s not my place,” said the author of several books on leadership.

But Krzyzewski played a very small role in the sideshow. The first act of that came at 9 a.m.

That’s when Roy Williams kicked off the day by resisting ESPN questioning about the academic scandal that has engulfed the university and athletic department, while threatening the Carolina coach’s gilded legacy.

“I’m not going to rehash all that crap,” he told Kevin Negandhi. “If you want to talk basketball, we’ll do that. I’ve already had 100 million press conferences about that.”

If you trust Ol’ Roy’s accounting, it would be 100,000,001 press conferences focused on academics before the day was over. Williams sat through more than an hour of questioning here Wednesday afternoon – and he was patient and reflective in that press conference.

“You can say I’m too short, too ugly, too much gray hair, that I have a bad golf swing,” Williams said, in full folksy mode. “But there’s not one frickin’ person in the world that can say that I never emphasize the academic side of it. If they say that, they're lying or whatever.

“You can accuse me of being naïve but truthfully I don’t think you can go past that. But that’s like noses. Everybody's got one.”

Jim Boeheim’s nose got quickly out of joint Wednesday. While Williams regrouped after his opening attempt to squelch the obvious topic of the day, the Syracuse Hall of Famer remained defiant every time his touchy subject came up.

Around mid-afternoon, Boeheim told ACC associate commissioner for men’s basketball communications Brian Morrison, “I’m out of this building.” That was before his scheduled meeting with the writers, which figured to be the diciest part of his run through the multimedia interview gauntlet here.

So the ACC quickly printed up and dispersed a release saying that Boeheim would be out of this building before his appointed round with the print media. This was not well-received, for obvious reasons. Sometime thereafter, there was a change in plans and Boeheim made an appearance in the print media interview room. (It is unclear whether commissioner John Swofford or anyone else exerted any pressure – subtle or otherwise – on the coach of the Orange.)

As he sat down at a table, the NCAA's career active leader in sarcasm said, “Fire away. I’m betting I will be getting up in 15 seconds.”

Then I asked the first question: What was he expecting from the Committee on Infractions hearing Thursday?

The answer was literally a hiss. Not sure how to spell it, but it was pretty much: “Sssssssssss,” followed by “You know…”

Me: “We have to ask.”

Boeheim: “And I answered.”

Me: “Are you attending [the hearing]?”

Boeheim: “I’m waiting for a question I want to answer.”

Gary Parrish of CBS Sports: “Let me ask this …”

Boeheim: “Is this a different way to ask the same question?”

Parrish: “Probably but I’m going to be as creative as I can.”

Boeheim: “You can’t get creative, as creative as I’m sure you are.”

Parrish: “Has it grown frustrating?”

Boeheim: “You tried. You tried. Congratulations.”

Dana O’Neill of ESPN: “Not to belabor the point, just to clarify: Is it that you can’t answer or you won’t?”

Boeheim: “No, it’s against the rules. You’re the writers that write about these things all the time, I’m sure you know that. It’s against the rules to talk about an ongoing investigation, period. Period. The only thing, you always get me to say something, and I know that’s why you here.”

It was actually a fairly humorous exchange, other than using NCAA confidentiality as an overly broad defensive maneuver. His one whistling-past-the-NCAA-graveyard quote pertained to the Syracuse exhibition game Sunday with Canadian school Carleton: “I’m more worried about Carleton than anything else that’s coming up this week.”

Otherwise, Boeheim pretty much stuck to the gameplan and commented only on basketball – and was perfectly agreeable and interesting and even funny doing that. As long as everyone ignored the mushroom cloud hovering over Syracuse basketball, it was all good.

Swofford was not able to evade. His media session was dominated by questions about UNC and Syracuse, not to mention the serial controversies clinging to Florida State football and the major penalties levied against Miami football not long ago. A reporter who tried to lead Swofford into acknowledging some level of angst – he was the athletic director at UNC for part of the 18-year run of bogus classes – was met with understated but firm resistance.

“I’m not going to stand up here and start throwing adjectives out,” Swofford said. “…Anytime one of our schools has a compliance issue, it’s a concern. You want to see as few of those as possible. …In terms of NCAA violations, we’ve had fewer than any of the other [power] five conferences. And we want to keep it that way.”

That’s the goal. But with a 15-school league that is striving for an ever-larger slice of the lucrative college sports pie, the reality is this: mo’ teams, mo’ money, mo’ problems.

And when those problems pile up, Operation Basketball can turn into Operation Damage Control.