Mass Failure of College Basketball Coaches Previously and Erroneously Thought to be Good

Many college hoops fans & members of the media, especially those living in the Twin Cities, had high expectations for the Minnesota Golden Gopher Men’s Basketball Team. After all, they made the NCAA tournament last year with essentially the same line-up, and they’re led by National Championship winning Coach Tubby Smith. The fact that they are 5-7 in conference (14-10 overall) means those Tourney hopes are essentially out the window, barring 5 or 6 wins in the final 6 games (vs. Wisconsin, vs. Indiana, vs. Purdue, at Illinois, at Michigan, vs. Iowa) or a victory in the Big Ten Tournament which comes with an automatic bid. Stranger things have happened, but clearly this season has been a disappointment, and there’s no one to blame other than the coach, right? After all, good coaches are able to rally the troops even when the top two recruits never play a game and the best defensive player on the team/starting point guard is out for the 2nd half of the conference season due to grades, right? A coach with 1 National Championship, 3 Elite Eights and 5 Sweet Sixteens, who had a string of 14 straight NCAA tournament appearances with three different teams (Tulsa, Georgia & Kentucky) broken in his first year at Minnesota, clearly isn’t as good as his career record if he can’t get this team back to March Madness. If this is the case, as so many local writers & fans have said, there are a lot of bad coaches out there this season that used to masquerade as legends & leaders of the game!

UCLA is 11-13 this year, with a 6-6 record in the very “down” Pac-10 conference. They lost to Cal State Fullerton, to Dan Monson’s Long Beach St and were absolutely annihilated by Portland, who later lost by 30+ points to Idaho. Ben Howland used to be a good coach, back when UCLA went to 3 straight Final Fours in 2006-2008; or those two Sweet Sixteen trips for Pittsburgh, which landed him the Bruins job. Heck, he can’t win this year even though they only made Nikola Dragovic sit out a couple games when he was charged with felony assault. His trial has been pushed to March 15, and unlike the Gophers’ Trevor Mbakwe, Dragovic doesn’t have any witnesses saying he wasn’t even in the state where the assault occurred. UCLA clearly knew they were down on talent this year, due to multiple early entries into the NBA the past few seasons (Kevin Love, Jrue Holiday & Russell Westbrook, just to name a few) so little things like a felony assault didn’t bother them, but still they can’t seem to win. I guess Ben Howland just isn’t a good coach anymore.

Remember a few years ago, when the Florida Gators celebrated the first back-to-back men’s college basketball championships in nearly 15 years? Billy Donovan was a hot coach then, being offered the Orlando Magic NBA head coaching spot, accepting it, and then changing his mind & returning to Florida. His team is 17-8 this year, which sounds good, but is a bit deceiving. Their win over Michigan St is nice, but the loss to South Alabama and no other significant non-conference wins has them on the outside looking in for March Madness. Nick Calathes clearly left college a year or two early, and prior to that, it apparently hurts to lose all 5 starters from your National Championship team. If they fail to make a late run, this will be two years in a row in the NIT. I guess in Billy the Kid’s old age (he is at close to the nursing home entry level at the age of 44) he has forgotten how to coach, because we’ve heard around here that these things must be overcome by enthusiasm and leadership of the head coach. 3 Final Fours (2 championships & 1 runner-up) and a Sweet Sixteen just aren’t worth what they used to be…)

Jim Calhoun’s normally strong UConn team has really struggled this season. Their overall record is 15-11, but they are only 5-8 in the Big East conference, which won’t get them into the big dance. Connecticut has losses against strong teams like Duke, Kentucky, Georgetown & Syracuse, but has also struggled against weaker teams such as Michigan, Providence, and a suddenly down Louisville (come to think of it, Rick Pitino is another coach I could feature for this blog). Their only wins this season against likely tournament teams are vs. Texas, who has been free-falling for weeks, Villanova and…William & Mary. Pretty bad if William & Mary is one of your teams’ 3 marquee wins! But this one is really hard to figure; the Huskies troubles started with Jim Calhoun on the bench, but even when he took an extended medical leave, they weren’t able to bounce back from the clearly weak coaching they had been getting from the man with 2 National Championships, 1 other Final Four, 5 Elite Eights & 4 Sweet Sixteens (with a grand total of 21 NCAA tournament appearances as a head coach). It must be really bad leadership to continue to affect a team even when he wasn’t there anymore!

It seems like only yesterday that everyone thought Roy Williams knew how to coach basketball, like, perhaps, last April, when he was celebrating a National Championship victory for North Carolina. Now, he is talking about his therapist visits to discuss his feelings about this season being a catastrophe, as the Tar Heels hold a 3-8 record in ACC games, and have conference losses this season to Clemson, Georgia Tech, Wake Forest, Virginia, Virginia Tech, Maryland & Duke including a stretch of 7 losses in 8 games. They also were witness to the College of Charleston fans rushing the court after an “upset” over UNC. At least Charleston is leading the Southern Conference now that Stephen Curry left Davidson to take his game to a higher level, so perhaps that isn’t a bad loss…but a team that started the season ranked #4 in the ESPN/USA Today Coaches Poll, isn’t supposed to be miles away from even being on the bubble. Never mind the players they lost after last year’s championship; Roy Williams simply is not able to motivate this team to victory, as he has stated that the methods that worked with previous teams, just aren’t getting through to this team. Those methods clearly must be inadequate, as they only got him 2 National Championships & 5 other Final Four appearances between North Carolina & Kansas, plus 2 Elite Eights and 4 Sweet Sixteens.


If you haven’t yet caught the sarcasm dripping from these words, then I clearly am not doing any better with my writing than those 5 are with coaching, and I don’t even have any championships on my non-existent writing record. Perhaps, rather than jumping on the “Tubby is a bad coach this year” bandwagon, some other reasons for the disappointing (yet perhaps not underachieving) season should be considered, such as the missing recruits/players, struggles making shots in close games, an inability to get steals or make crisp & accurate passes without Al Nolen on the floor, a less impressive performance by the Top 10 team they beat a few games after Minnesota played them and numerous others that I may explore in future days if my brain cooperates.

Of course a coach has an impact on how a team is performing, and they have to take some responsibility even if they are doing everything “right” and it isn’t working, but to act as if Tubby has lost his touch, and start discussing if he can win & recruit here in the future, is almost as absurd as the Vikings naming Les Steckel as a head coach in the 80’s or Mike Lynn trading 321 draft picks for an aging Hershel Walker. Perhaps we have forgotten this team was 9-22 in 2006-07, that the ’07-08 NIT appearance was considered a “victory” for the program and that the ’08-09 team was never actually expected to be an NCAA tournament team until that big upset of Louisville.

I suspect this would be a much different season if Trevor Mbakwe & the 5 star top ranked recruit in the Big Ten, Royce White had ever stepped foot on the floor, even if Al Nolen still didn’t do his homework. But I guess that’s a scenario that is only happening in a parallel universe along with Brett Favre running for 4 yards and Ryan Longwell kicking a FG to go to the Super Bowl.

Random thoughts on Captain Sully Sullenberger, Boise St-TCU & the BCS, and the former GB QB

As usual, I have a lot of sports-related things on my mind, but I’ll start with a hero; a real hero, not the kind of hero who hits a game-winning shot in the playoffs.

 

Sully

Captain “Sully” Sullenberger was the big hero last year, and has been able to start 2010 in the news, without any miraculous landings needed. As I watched a few of the 2009 retrospective type shows (yes, I’m a sucker for anything like that; could be why I was a History major), I continue to be amazed each time the story is told about him piloting U.S. Airways 1549 to safety in the river. I got to hear the discussion with the tower for the first time, I believe during the VH1 look at 2009. The tower tells everyone else that takeoffs & landings need to be stopped, since a plane has an emergency and needs to return. Sully comes on & says that he needs to land in the Hudson. Verbatim response from the tower “I’m sorry, say again?” I can only imagine what they must’ve been thinking when they heard that.

 

The camera phone type videos that have been shown of the landing (which I somehow hadn’t seen before) just solidify how amazing it was that everyone survived. That plane was still going fast! The line “brace for impact” isn’t usually followed by such a successful finish. As my mom & I were discussing this, she said looking at the video again in the last week, of the people standing on the wing of the plane in the water, she was suddenly more amazed. As a flight attendant, she had to do safety training that included going out on the wing, and the wing is slippery. It’s not exactly a stable place to stand. Yet in the water (which I’ve heard can make things more slippery), everybody was able to stay in place until the rafts & boats rescued them. I cannot even fathom that no one was lost, and to continue to have the presence of mind, and selflessness, of waiting until everyone else was off, and then going back to check the whole plane again, even as the back end inside the plane was dangerously full of water, just adds to the heroism of Sully Sullenberger.

 

The man has shown in the nearly 12 months since this happened, that he’s not big on getting a lot of attention, or taking a lot of credit; he was just doing his job, is what he keeps repeating. Yet, he also was wise enough to realize that if he didn’t acknowledge the praise people from the flight were giving him, that he was minimizing the fact that their lives were saved. I’m guessing he would like to have just started flying again quietly and continued his life, but of course news cameras & media followed his first day back on the job, so he is learning to somewhat embrace the position he’s including writing the book “Highest Duty” which I have on audio book, so I can hear him tell his story.

 

On January 1 of this new decade, Sully was the Grand Marshal of the Tournament of Roses parade, along with his wife Lorrie, and had the honor of doing the coin toss for the Rose Bowl game between Ohio State & Oregon. On Monday (Jan. 4) he spoke to employees at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, and was even able to speak to Astronauts (& Cosmonauts) on the International Space Station from mission control (video can be found here on NASA’s Featured Videos page: http://bit.ly/6nChxi ).  I’m a little jealous that NASA employees in Houston get to see Astronaut Mike Massimino and now Sully Sullenberger, but I’ll make a New Year’s resolution to get over my envy! 

 

Of course, you know you’ve made it when Harrison Ford is going to narrate your documentary, which will be shown on TLC (January 10, 9 EST/8CST) called, appropriately, “Brace for Impact.” My Tivo is already set!

 

I’m just pleased, that with all the end of year talk about Jon & Kate, Britney, K-Fed, Kanye, Rihanna’s horrifying abuse from Chris Brown (& his return to the music charts in less than a year), Spencer & Heidi, and White House party crashers, that discussion of a true inspirational hero could stand out as one of the great stories of the year. Thank you Captain Sullenberger!

 

 

BCS: Boise St. & TCU

Since I already expounded on this subject with both Facebook & Twitter, I’ll keep it brief here: I am about as irritated as I can get about something in sports (I can get more irritated about real life, but we’re just talking sports now) at the fact that the BCS matched up Boise St. & TCU in the Fiesta Bowl Game, played last night, 01/04/10. I’m glad they “admitted” two very worthy schools from non-BCS conferences, but they are robbing all of us the opportunity to see how they matched up against schools from the big, bad, “powerful” BCS conferences. All this does is guarantee that the little conference schools will be .500 in BCS bowls this year, and since there are no playoff games, so there is no advancing to the next round, we can’t see if they are Cinderella teams whose clock strikes midnight or if they are worthy applicants for the National Championship game. Let’s face it; they couldn’t look any worse than Cincinnati did in the first half vs. the Florida Gators in the Sugar Bowl, and if Nebraska had held on to beat Texas a month ago, Cincinnati would have been the #2 team in the BCS and would’ve been in that Championship game vs. Alabama. Computers should not be deciding championships.

 

Another thought stream that I put on Facebook the other day:

College football needs a playoff, because undefeated teams like Cincinnati, TCU & Boise St. deserve the chance to try to prove that they are the top team in the nation.

 

College football needs a playoff, because Cincinnati was only a few Nebraska plays away from competing for the National Championship, and clearly, they were not qualified.

 

 

Pro Bowl is not in Hawaii? And it’s before the Super Bowl?

Can someone please explain to me the logic behind putting the Pro Bowl the week before the Super Bowl? Aside from the fact that players don’t want to go to play; they want to go to Hawaii with their families, it makes no sense! Generally the two teams in the Super Bowl will have some talented players on their roster, and likely a number of them will have already been named to the Pro Bowl. But this guarantees that fans won’t get to see those players participate, as they obviously won’t be playing an exhibition the week before the big game.

 

 

The Legacy of Brett Favre

Speaking of Pro Bowlers…Brett Favre. I recall stories all summer on any network that carried sports, discussing that Brett Favre was likely ruining his legacy with his waffling about retirement, and would certainly ruin his legacy by trying to play this year, after ending last year on the down month (never mind that pesky injury he had). While the Vikings lost some games they should’ve won and we don’t yet know what will happen in the playoffs, it would be hard to argue that these numbers will bring him down: 12 wins, 33 touchdowns while the gunslinger only tossed 7 interceptions, 4200 yards (his 3^rd highest total) and a career best 107.2 QB rating (which is not my favorite stat to compare quarterbacks, but can be valuable to compare seasons of any one quarterback). He completed 68.4% of his passes, which is his personal high. Only Drew Brees (70.6) & Peyton Manning (68.8) had better completion percentages, and they had better completion percentages to the opposing teams as well, throwing 11 & 16 interceptions, respectively.

 

Just to clarify about Brett Favre, I did not jump on this bandwagon, or do a 180 on cheering for a player I hated. I never hated Brett Favre. I have recently learned this was rare among Minnesota Vikings fans. Of course I hated the Packers, and wanted to see Favre throw to the team in purple, and wanted John Randle to slam him into the icy turf at Lambeau & concrete floor in the Dome, but I always enjoyed watching Favre play. While I never quite understood why his interceptions were because he was “just trying to make a play” while Dante Culpepper (back when he was actually good) would be making “a dumb decision,” I still thought he was fun to watch, and thought he showed how football showed be played. I just wanted him to lose every time he was on the field against the Vikings, or in any game that would affect the Vikings.

 

Once there was a shot at the Hall of Famer coming to Minnesota, I was on board for that, though I certainly could’ve done without nightly reports about him, when nothing new had happened; just tell me when there’s something I need to know! Now I can only hope that Favre can help lead the Vikings to somewhere they have never been: the winner’s circle of the Super Bowl! If that should happen, all those meaningless reports of him on high school football fields, or false sightings of his wife shopping in Minnesota, will be nothing but a distant memory!

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Urban Meyer...

I was sitting with my parents & aunt on Saturday night, discussing all the knee-jerk reactions the airline industry was already having to the attempted terrorist attack on the NWA flight in Detroit (which deserves a complete post of its own), when I looked to my phone & saw a new AP news alert text message out of Gainesville, FL "Urban Meyer is stepping down as coach of the University of Florida football team." I did a double, or possibly quadruple take on this text, and quickly switched to my ESPN text feed, to see that they had already posted two messages about Coach Meyer's decision. I'm only slightly exaggerating when I say that I would’ve been less surprised to see a leprechaun next to a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

 

I have always been a fan of both Florida St. & Florida football. I realize if I lived in Florida, that this could get me killed, but as a Minnesota resident, I felt I had the right to cheer for both (behind my favorite hometown Gophers, of course). Florida St. was usually my favorite of the two, especially when former Cretin Derham Hall QB Chris Weinke was there, even though the Gators were my favorite basketball team of the two (still bummed that Teddy Dupay & company did not pull out the 2000 Championship over Michigan St., but just reaching the finals helped me win multiple March Madness pools). That shifted when Urban Meyer arrived in Gainesville. Being a fan of the underdog, I was quite excited about Utah’s big BCS win (see the next paragraph), which somehow led to me becoming a big fan of a dynasty. Go figure. Tim Tebow’s arrival merely cemented the Gators position as 2^nd on my list of teams, ahead of the Seminoles, but Urban Meyer is why they would stay in the spot for me next year & beyond.

 

This is the same Urban Meyer, who brought an undefeated Utah Utes team to a BCS bowl game, in his 4^th year of being a head coach of college football (2^nd year at Utah following 2 years at Bowling Green). Utah is in the Mountain West conference, which makes them an outsider in the BCS conference party. Lead by QB Alex Smith & Meyer’s spread offense, the Utes pounded the Pitt Panthers (out of the BCS member Big East conference) to win the Fiesta Bowl & finish their season with no losses on their record, becoming the first non-BCS team to win one of these bowls. They joined Auburn & Boise St. as three teams undefeated before the bowl games that had no chance to compete for a National Championship, but that would take a few books to write about, not just a blog entry. (USC ended the 2004 season as the “National Champion” with their crushing of Oklahoma, and Boise St. lose their bowl game, leaving Utah, Auburn & USC as the only teams with no blemishes/e)

 

The once feared Florida Gators had been stumbling (especially by their standards) since legendary Coach Steve Spurrier had stepped down (and been humbled in the NFL), being replaced by Ron Zook, whose qualifications included something like being a high school gym teacher, if I remember correctly. The Gators parted ways with Zook after the end of the 2004 bowl season (which is actually in early 2005, which sometimes gets confusing), and courted the hot young Urban Meyer to move east to Gainesville. Meyer was barely 41 yrs old by the time he coached his first Gator football game, but he showed that age was not what mattered for coaching success, nor was a lot of time as a Division I head coach. The Gators finished 9-3 in his first season there, ranked #12 in the AP poll. This still isn’t a successful season in the eyes of Florida fans, but after not even being in the AP poll at the end of the 2004 season (and falling behind rivals Georgia & Florida St., as well as in-state school Miami), this was a leap in the right direction.

 

The 2006 season showed everyone why Florida President Dr. Bernie Machen had wanted Urban Meyer at Florida (Dr. Machen was the Utah president from 1998-2003, so he was very familiar with Meyer already). Behind the solid, but not superstar, senior quarterback Chris Leak, the 12-1 Florida Gators became a surprise contestant in the BCS National Championship game vs. Ohio St. Many thought that the 12-1 Buckeyes should’ve been playing Louisville (12-1), LSU (11-2), USC (11-2), Michigan (12-1, but their only loss had been weeks earlier to Ohio St.) or even the underdog Boise St. Broncos, who once again stood at 13-0 before the bowls, but the BCS computers chose Florida. Oh, I forgot to mention that besides that senior QB Leak, there was a highly recruited freshman out of Nease High School’s football team (he was home schooled for classes), Tim Tebow, who came in to play QB for some plays, including goal-line situations where he could plow through the line, or try one of his never-seen-before jump passes. Tebow would go on to be a decent QB after Leak’s eligibility was exhausted.

 

9 ½ out of every 10 “experts” predicted that Ohio St. would crush the “overrated” Gators. Perhaps Boise St. set the stage for Florida the week before. In the Fiesta Bowl, taking place in the same Glendale, AZ stadium where the National Championship would soon be played, the Broncos somehow found a way to beat the mighty Oklahoma Sooners, who even had the return of their injured running back, Adrian Peterson. Boise outplayed the Sooners, then fell behind late, before some of the most incredible plays in college football led them to an improbable win. Many sports fans would agree that was one of the most fun games (in any sport) that they had ever witnessed. Perhaps it was not merely a coincidence that the underdog wearing blue & orange uniforms pulled out the win.

 

I was lucky enough to be in Florida for a work trip for that National Championship, wearing my blue Gators sweatshirt as I watched the game with my co-workers from our hotel bar. If I believed in gambling of any sort, I might have placed a $5 online bet for the Gators to win, which might have paid out a whopping $20…if I’d ever done that sort of thing. After all the talk about if Florida even belonged in this game, they left everybody with the impression that perhaps Ohio St. didn’t belong in that game. As I recall, Buckeyes kick returner/wr Ted Ginn ran the opening kickoff back for a TD (and injured his foot in the celebration), but Florida didn’t blink, and just set out from there to win the game & finish #1. As a side note, this championship was sandwiched nicely between Billy Donovan’s men’s basketball team winning back-to-back National Championships. It certainly was good to be a Gator!

 

To avoid turning this into a full book, I’ll skip the play-by-play of the following seasons, but Urban Meyer definitely made his mark in college football. Sophomore QB Tim Tebow won the 2007 Heisman Trophy, becoming the first sophomore to win the award, and later became the first player to finish in the top 5 in Heisman voting in 3 different seasons. Urban Meyer has just had a standing flight to New York every year lately for the Heisman Trophy ceremony. They only finished the 2007 season as the #13 team, but they bounced back rather nicely in 2008, winning the National Championship over Oklahoma. This championship was part of an amazing 22-game win streak, started after Tim Tebow’s “Promise” following the loss to Ole Miss (“I’m sorry…I promise you one thing…you will never see a team play harder than we will play the rest of this season. God bless.”) Along with being a fantastic Head Coach & Quarterback combination, Urban Meyer & Tim Tebow had possibly the best bromance in the country! Perhaps this could be explored in a later blog as well.

 

Unfortunately for Gator fans, that 22-game win streak came to an end a few weeks ago in the SEC championship game vs. Alabama, relegating the Gators to the Sugar Bowl, rather than the storybook ending of Tim Tebow riding off into the sunset after a 3^rd National Championship. But while everyone knew that the Sugar Bowl would be the send-off of Tebow, no one thought it would be the last college football game for Urban Meyer. Sure, there were people who thought Urban (named for Pope Urban) would take the Notre Dame job, but he’d turned it down once before, and I had no concerns about that. I had no doubt that the Gators would re-load again next year, even if Coach Meyer was going through Tebow withdrawal (something I am trying to prepare for as well).

 

We have heard that Meyer has health issues, and wants to spend more time with his family, and while it is not life-threatening, the 27 hr a day/8 day a week head coach of football job, is one that provides enough stress to continually put his health at risk. So the man with 2 National Champions (& 3 BCS bowl game wins, hopefully 4 soon), winner of 6 different National Coach of the year awards in 2003 & 2004, and just named Sporting News Magazine’s Coach of the Decade, will be retiring now, at age 45. After the shock has gone away, I will just miss Urban Meyer being a part of college football. I am glad to see him putting his health, faith & family first though, as all too often, we sacrifice all of the above for the job, and somehow the job never shows the same dedication to us when the situation changes. His college-student daughter has already commented that she will be happy to get her daddy back. I wish him & his family nothing but the best, as he goes through this healing process, which will be both physically & mentally difficult. I have a feeling his players might be a little extra inspired for his final game on January 1, against the Cincinnati Bearcats, who already lost their head coach to Notre Dame. Go Gators!

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