1 of 1- Gwmayhem
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Coaching Emphasis
In team sports, it's easier to appreciate the greatness of athletes, in lieu of championships won, than it is coaches. Probably because we by and large know greatness in players when we see it. Dan Marino, Charles Barkley, Mike Trout, Patrick Ewing, Barry Sanders, Stockton & Malone, Ted Williams, Ernie Banks....zero professional championships among them and the list goes on.
For college basketball coaches, a season is unequally divided into thirds. A regular season lasts roughly 30 games. A conference tournament can generally last up to 3-5 games. And the NCAA tournament, excluding those 4 play-in winners, lasts up to 6 games for just two schools.
This year, we got to see a coach get promoted as he was simultaneously leading his smaller school to unprecedented heights at the dance. Shaheen Holloway formerly played for and coached as an assistant at Seton Hall. So when Under Armour U poached Kevin Willard, Holloway may have been next in line to lead the Pirates prior to this year's dance. Then again, as a head coach in the MAAC, going 61-53 at St. Peters prior to this year's Tournament, he also may not have been. Shaheen sealed the deal ousting #2 and #3 seeds Kentucky and Purdue, along with a talented midmajor in Murray State. Suddenly, a now 64-54 record had far less meaning than it had less than three weeks earlier.
In late January, UNC suffered consecutive losses at Miami and at Wake Forest by a combined 50 points. (50, not a misprint.) The Heels fell to 12-6 and the talk of Hubert Davis missing the tournament in his first season at UNC was very real. Am pretty sure you know how the rest ended up.
Whether perceived as "hot" coaches or "tremendous" ones, Holloway and Davis were each celebrated by the end of this season. Here's who wasn't: Mark Few and Tommy Lloyd who piloted the top two programs during the regular season. Neither has yet to win a national championship (Lloyd finishing up his first season as a head coach can easily be forgiven for this) but what about guys like Kelvin Sampson and Jim Larranaga who had success at this year's dance but who also have never cut down the nets in April? Do Few, Sampson and Larranaga join a club that includes coaches like Bob Huggins and Bo Ryan who have come very close but never won a D1 title?
Or, should one adhere more to the media-created "never reached a Final 4" statistic? After all, only one team gets to win the title every year but shouldn't a highly regarded coach be able to reach at least one Final 4? If this is the case, then what are we supposed to make of the late John Chaney, Lefty Driesell, Sean Miller, Bob McKillop, and the truly cursed school Purdue which between Gene Keady and Matt Painter have failed to play on the final weekend? Painter is a current and curious example. At Purdue, he has led the Boilermakers to 13 dances, 6 Sweet 16's, 1 Elite 8, and Zero Final 4's. His overall record at Purdue is 384-192. While he has retained and even built upon the success that Keady enjoyed, today's instant gratification sports fan likely views Painter as "can't win the big game" rather than "successful head coach."
There are two legendary coaches who throughout much of their careers had to endure being "great coaches who could never win it all....Dean Smith and Jim Boeheim. Fortunately for them, they eventually won national titles to silence their critics. To a lesser extent, guys like Lute Olson and Gary Williams were also in that same boat.
Back to the title of this thread....do we as fans of the sport place too much emphasis, not enough emphasis, or just the right amount of emphasis on coaches based solely on their postseason successes and failures? How do you stack regular season success, which has a much larger sample size, against postseason success where the games are fewer in number but more meaningful? And, do you think that you as a GW fan looks at this differently than a fan of a major program with loftier aspirations?
- Class of 13
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Re: Coaching Emphasis
I would say the right amount of emphasis. Of course we're going to celebrate the coaches who are left standing at the beginning of April because there's only so much to talk about. Still, if an athletic director at a high major had a job opening and had his/her pick of any coach in the country, Few would still be higher on that Ad's list than Davis right? Just like no fan would think of John Brady as a better head coach than Sean Miller just because Brady's been to a final four and Miller hasn't. Regular season and conference records will always be the primary way that coaches are judged and for a select 20 programs or so, how the coach performs in the postseason will be a more important metric based on program expectations/resources available to the program.
Postseason results provide us a small sample size, but I do believe they help distinguish the best of the best in the profession. Yes, talent is more often than not going to be what decides each individual game, but the ability to make a deep tourney run is also often dependent on a coach's ability to keep the team loose when playing a game its expecting to cruise through, to have the team prepared when given a 4 day scout and a 1 day scout and to manage the game while it's happening. In the case of a Painter, his teams have been ousted from the dance by double digit seeds four times in 11 seasons. so while he's done an amazing job overall at Purdue, that deserves to be a legitimate mark on his record and I would hold it just as much against him had Diakite missed the miracle shot in 2019 and Purdue made it to a final four (and perhaps won it all). On the other end of the equation, a Jim Calhoun's postseason success (only lost in the first round twice, went 6-1 in final four games) elevates him in my mind to a tier that I don't believe most place him on.
As far as GW goes, I can't speak for how anyone else looks at these things. All I can say is my goal for the program each year is to win 20 games, finish in the top six of the league and hope to play on semifinal Saturday. That to e is a very successful year regardless of what comes after.
- jf
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Re: Coaching Emphasis
Well, for us, getting to postseason play in the NCAAs or NIT's and winning a game or two in the NCAAs is
the very best we can usually expect. So, it has more impact.
In other words, would rather either capture lightning in a bottle and win the A-10 tournament or finish 4th or 5th in the A-10s and make/ win in the Dance. Or do real well in the NITs. Rather than finish third in the league.
Another factor is that we had a gaudy record 26-1 record going into the A-10s in the Hobbs era--and wound up an 8th seed. A significant factor was A-10 bias, but another one was who we played that year.
This recent season, our OOC was so pathetic it would have been extremely hard to get an at-large bid, even if we hadn't performed abysmally against low-level competition.
Having said that, it would be good to have a steady, respected program. During the good years for Lonergan, Hobbs and Jarvis, we were top 50-75ish teams (at least top 100), by the eye, if not the actual rankings.
For example, think in a Penders year, we beat Illinois on the road, off the top of my head, on a Roey Eyal late steal. I thought Ok, we won. Didn't set off dancing in the street that we beat a Big 10 team on the road.
This year, we trembled before teams in lesser leagues.
So, postseason play every couple of years and some regular respect for our program.
- DC Native
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Re: Coaching Emphasis
I think championships are important. I recognize, however, that GW will never win an NCAA championship. For that reason, I have always thought fans of teams like GW focus too much on making the NCAA tournament. For me, the measure is A10 championships, as teams are at least supposed to be on a level footing with the other teams in their conference. Both regular season and tournament championships are good for me. Jarvis never won the A10 tournament, but he had two regular season championships (1996 & 1998). Hobbs had two regular season (2005 & 2006) and two tournament (2005 & 2007) championships. Even Penders won a regular season championship (1999), albeit with mostly Jarvis players. This is my measure for success. Hopefully Caputo can get us there.
- Free Quebec
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Re: Coaching Emphasis
DC Native wrote:
I think championships are important. I recognize, however, that GW will never win an NCAA championship. For that reason, I have always thought fans of teams like GW focus too much on making the NCAA tournament. For me, the measure is A10 championships, as teams are at least supposed to be on a level footing with the other teams in their conference. Both regular season and tournament championships are good for me. Jarvis never won the A10 tournament, but he had two regular season championships (1996 & 1998). Hobbs had two regular season (2005 & 2006) and two tournament (2005 & 2007) championships. Even Penders won a regular season championship (1999), albeit with mostly Jarvis players. This is my measure for success. Hopefully Caputo can get us there.
So the reason I don’t agree with this is because it can be so variable based on opposition. Those three Hobbs years, the A10 was a 1-2 bid league every year - the worst three year stretch in the last 35 years, I believe. It was easier to win a championship those years than, say, the lonergan year when we got a 9 seed because there were 6 A10 teams in the dance that year. That 9 seed was clearly better than the team that won the A10 , but got destroyed by Vandy.
To the original question, I think too much in general is on postseason records. In a one loss tourney like thr NCAAs, small sample size results can be fluky. Matt Painter gets ripped for never making a final 4, but he’s also lost in I think the elite 8 on a crazy buzzer beater three. Would he be a better coach if that shot rimmed out? No. Another example is Hobbs - he had the team ready to play vs Georgia Tech in the dance and a good game plan, but we shot uncharacteristically poor from the line and it undid us in that game. That doesn’t make him a worse coach because he “only” won one NCAA game instead of getting they upset.
Now if a coach shows he’s consistently unable to get his team up for the postseason (like if this year’s A10 debacle vs UMASS were repeated year after year) it is fair to start wondering if the coach is doing something wrong.
By and large, I think coaches should be judged on how well their teams play and, over time, on how well they do.
And coaches of rebuilding teams, like Caputo, should be judged by whether it looks like the team is heading in the right direction vs if it looks like there’s no chance the team can compete for a postseason berth in the next couple of years. That evaluation is what undid our last two coaches (and Hobbs at the end), but it’s also what gave ML the benefit of the doubt after the first two bad years (you could see what he was doing and that with the right players it would work).
- Mentzinger
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Re: Coaching Emphasis
Is this the thread to mention Rick Pitino wants Iona into the A-10?
- BC
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Re: Coaching Emphasis
Metz, if true, about Iona, I expect it deserves a thread onto itself.
- jf
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Re: Coaching Emphasis
At some point, we may be able to just change the league name to the A-20.