What is there to be said about the 2015 NCAA Tournament through the prism of coaches that hasn’t been said already?
We already know that Coach K is the coach of our generation… and frankly, in 1992, he had just about established himself as the coach of a previous generation as well. He’s the best in college basketball since John Wooden, and as many people would point out, UCLA did not have to play Sweet 16 or Elite Eight games (or teams) outside its region during the Wooden era, making Coach K’s feats that much more impressive.
We already know Tom Izzo is a March master. We know that Mike Brey and Mark Few made their first Elite Eights, showing that improvement and growth were possible after a combined 31 seasons on the job in South Bend and Spokane. We know that Dana Altman can outcoach Travis Ford any day of the week. (Oregon drummed Oklahoma State in the 2013 NCAA Tournament, not just this year.) We know that Jay Wright needs to recruit low-post studs with a little more urgency. When his guards don’t make threes and can be contained on dribble penetration by quick defenders, Villanova’s offense stalls in March.
We know that Rick Barnes’ tenure at Texas became stale, and that Bob Huggins coached as well this season as he ever has in his career, taking an undersized team that couldn’t shoot consistently to the Sweet 16.
What’s worth mentioning about the NCAA tournament portion of the coaching community, as this tournament fades away from view?
Let’s start with the man who fell two games short of being the coach of a 40-0 team.
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John Calipari was born to coach the Kentucky Wildcats. He is a salesman, he has a sense of theater, he is thoroughly shrewd in frontstage and backstage settings. His appearance is consistently polished. He knows how to work a room and an ESPN anchor or studio crew. He and Rick Pitino — whose paths intersected in national semifinals before two of Kentucky’s three most recent championships (1996 when Pitino was at Kentucky; 2012 when Calipari commanded the Cats) — were perfect fits for Lexington in the modern media age.
Calipari has clearly learned from his 2013 and 2014 experiences, in which he plainly failed to get his team to mesh during the course of the regular season. It is startling — and a very inconvenient truth — that without a brilliant performance against Wichita State 13 months ago, Calipari’s reputation might be a lot worse than it is today. Had that 2014 team not made the March run it was able to pull off, Cal would be seen in a different light… and he might not have found the magic touch with this year’s team.
No, this is not meant to undercut Calipari in any way, just an attempt to show how the reputations and appraisals of coaches are stuffed with inconvenient truths. Calipari’s detractors just have to live with the fact that, in a very Izzo-like way, he got his 2014 team to pull together in the nick of time. Because Calipari and not Izzo turned the trick, is it any less impressive or any less an indicator of great coaching? No.
Here’s another inconvenient truth: If Christian Laettner doesn’t stamp himself as one of the five to ten best college basketball players of all time — and more specifically, one of the great crunch-time shotmaking artists the sport has ever seen — where would Mike Krzyzewski’s reputation stand? He’d still own a gob of Final Fours, but would he be so clearly placed on Mount Olympus as he is now?
Here’s the money line: Every coach has to get great plays from his players at some point. The coach doesn’t put the ball in the basket or the pigskin across the goal line. He needs his players to pull white-knuckle games out of the fire. The line between all-time-best coach and “merely” great coach is a fine one. So is the line between great coach (which Calipari is) and “very good coach.”
To take the Calipari comparison a few steps further, let’s flip the script a bit: What if Kentucky had beaten Wisconsin and then taken down Duke? We’d be viewing Calipari as the architect of a seminal achievement in college basketball. Coach K would still be at the top of the mountain in terms of his overall career, but Calipari would have attained a unique and substantial piece of immortality. Nearly 25 years earlier, Coach K prevented Jerry Tarkanian and UNLV from doing what Kentucky and Cal had hoped to achieve this past weekend.
It is absurd, really, when you think about it: 2014 Kentucky — a flawed, sometimes feeble, often confused No. 8 seed — went deeper in the NCAA tournament than 2015 Kentucky, the 38-1 team in tune with itself and its coach. That’s as absurd as 2014 Kentucky going deeper in the 2014 tournament than the Florida team which — like 2015 Kentucky — went 21-0 in the SEC and amassed a winning streak of at least 30 games during the season.
These kinds of realities force the discriminating college basketball fan/pundit/writer to realize that while March coaching performances matter a lot, they have to be kept in balance with the whole of a season.
Consider Larry Brown as another (final) example of this dynamic.
This season, Brown took an incomplete SMU team — incomplete because Markus Kennedy couldn’t play the first month-plus of the season, and because Keith Frazier couldn’t play the latter half of the season — and guided it to a “double championship” (regular season and conference tournament) in The American. His body of work was tremendous. Yet, here came UCLA, Bryce Alford, and the correct interpretation of a horrible goaltending rule which pointed out the need for that rule to be reformed.
Brown coached a million times better than UCLA’s Steve Alford during the whole of the season. Alford got a big break in the round of 64; a 14 seed in the round of 32; and, as a result of those two occurrences, the most improbable Sweet 16 ticket of anyone in the field. Brown was sent home early. Do we dare say that Alford did a much better coaching job? The casual fan’s focus on March results would lend itself to such a verdict. Yet, the savvy basketball observer can confidently say that Brown was so much better.
Inconvenient truth, thy name is March Madness.
The rich irony here is that Brown, of course, once profited from an absurd and lucky run with a Calipari 2014 flavor, something far more brain-busting than what Steve Alford achieved this March. In 1980, when the NCAAs had 48 teams in the field, UCLA was an 8 seed, near the back of the field (much as UCLA was an 11 this year in a 68-team field). Somehow, as an 8 — the seed Calipari and UK owned in 2014 — Brown was able to coax the best basketball out of the Bruins, who rolled all the way to the national championship game before losing to Darrell Griffith and Louisville in this year’s Final Four city, Indianapolis.
Brown’s reputation as one of America’s greatest basketball coaches has been reaffirmed time and again, mostly by what he’s done in the NBA, but also for reviving SMU and, most centrally at the collegiate level, being one of only three men to give Kansas basketball a national title. Yet, Brown’s 1980 run with UCLA and his 1988 magic carpet ride with the Jayhawks still invite the question from the past: What if those joyrides — those illogical, anything-but-expected three-week surges — had not occurred? What would we say about Brown today?
Larry Brown of UCLA in 1980, celebrating what stands today as the Bruins’ most improbable Final Four trip. This journey through the brackets made 2015 UCLA’s parade to the Sweet 16 look pedestrian by comparison. Yet, Brown wishes UCLA hadn’t made the Sweet 16 this year. SMU was the unlucky victim of circumstance… and a poorly-written goaltending rule which was correctly applied by the officials in Louisville on March 19.
When you get beyond the realm of the obvious in assessing several of the biggest coaching stories from the 2015 NCAA Tournament, you are confronted with one inconvenient truth after another.
This is why college basketball is so maddening and frustrating to take in… and why it’s so deliciously, endlessly chaotic, year after year, testing the ability of its chroniclers to make sense of it.
