After losing in a blowout to Seton Hall in the 1993 Big East tournament final, Steve Keating remembers the Syracuse team bus pulling into the parking lot outside of Manley Field House with about three feet of snow on the ground.

Then-assistant coach Bernie Fine was planning wind sprints and workouts for the next day. But a 20-9 SU team that went 10-8 in the Big East and 2-4 against Top 25 teams knew it wasn’t going to play for another 259 days.

The Orangemen had been banned from postseason play by the NCAA for “repeated and conscious efforts by representatives of the university’s athletic interests to gain recruiting and competitive advantages for the men’s basketball program,” according to the governing body’s infractions committee. Its ban was released by the NCAA before the season on Oct. 2, 1992 and the Big East voted to allow SU to play in the conference tournament.

It left the then-defending Big East champions with no shot at a national title. Those Orangemen — including now former NBA players Lawrence Moten and John Wallace — were the last to miss out on the national postseason and the last Syracuse men’s basketball team to receive a postseason ban.

“Your hopes are to have a successful season and make the NCAA, and especially when you’re at Syracuse, you want to win it,” then-SU forward Glenn Sekunda said. “And it’s not far-fetched to think that either.”

Current SU assistant coaches Mike Hopkins and Adrian Autry were also on the 1992–93 team — Hopkins was a senior — but were not made available for comment for this story.

In the wake of SU’s decision to self-impose a postseason ban for this year’s team, after an NCAA investigation that hasn’t produced sanctions yet, Keating and his former teammate on that team, Sekunda, reflected on the experience of accepting the ban and playing through a season knowing no NCAA Tournament or NIT awaited.

“The biggest thing is disappointment and you feel like you’ve done nothing wrong to warrant that,” Sekunda said.

Keating was a walk-on and an engineering major who only played one minute in his two-year career. The NCAA-sanctioned loss of a scholarship for each of the next two seasons contributed to Keating’s decision to leave the team after the 1992–93 season as he figured he wouldn’t be able to earn one as a walk-on, he said.

Current walk-ons may do the same if the NCAA issues any sanctions that affect scholarships too, he said.

“As a walk-on, these are some of the thing you look forward to,” he said of NCAA Tournament appearances.

Keating emphasized that bans are much worse for scholarship players who have a reasonable chance of getting scouted for and playing professional basketball.

Sekunda transferred to Penn State after the season due to limited playing time and went on to play 12 years of professional basketball in Europe. He said that while the fact that there was no postseason did enter his mind and his teammates’, it didn’t change game days.

“You try to prove to your opponent ‘Hey, I’m better than you,’” Sekunda said.

Published on February 8, 2015 at 11:52 pm

Contact Jacob: jmklinge@syr.edu | @Jacob_Klinger_