Video clips of the day

Deadspin has dubbed this rant by Illinois coach, Ron Zook, after the Illini's loss this past weekend as his "Jim Mora moment". You be the judge.



First, the Zooker:






And now, the gold standard:

The sadly obligatory coaching makes coach feel good about himself post

As readers of this blog have recognized, this is not a personal blog. Its not personal because any paltry readership that is scared up would be bored to tears and wasted-away with any recounting or relating of my procrastinating nature, my fear of committment and destructive personal habits not to mention my constant brushes with the law, struggles with substance abuse, conquering of 2 or 3 life-threatening diseases and my time in the French Foreign Legion. From time to time, though, I will throw out a personal experience.
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I coached 7/8th grade hoops up in North County this year. Technically, I assisted a former co-worker but often times I was the one with the whistle as the head coach would be on travel or at the games of his daughter’s soccer team of which he was also the coach.

Anyway, after getting our butts kicked by 15 points in the very first game of the season, we didn’t lose again as we played our best game of the season on Friday night in the championship game, winning by 22. That steady growth from seeing your guys run around without a clue in the beginning of the season to “seeing the light go on” by the end of the season to where they are running some semblance of the very offense you taught in practice ("hey, that looks strangely familiar – where have I seen that before?") and calling out and switching on picks on defense is one of the most gratifying things you can experience as a coach.

Well, almost the most gratifying.

Quick side note: About half the kids’ parents are first-generation immigrants of Asian descent and I was getting a kick out of being able to witness, first hand, their efforts to figure out just how it is you “thank” the coach at the end of the season. I’ve been showered with gift cards to Starbuck’s and Chili’s in the past but one of the parents, “Richard”, decided to solicit cash from the parents on a team schedule email thread and I was thinking that this would be converted into some form of gift card, as well.

After Friday’s game, Richard presented Coach “Jay” and I with an envelope and inside was a card which contained…. straight cash, homie! Sweet. I felt like a kid again getting hooked up with some green backs from my grandmother for my birthday.

Anyway, each of the kids or the kids’ parents wrote a quick little “thanks, coach” blurb on the card. One of the little thank yous caught me completely off guard because of the source. “Eric” was definetely on the bottom half of our roster when it came to talent and I think I heard him say a grand total of 5 words the entire season. Though not the most physically gifted player on the team, no one listened and executed better in practices and games what was being taught in those practices. Eric made gradual improvement through the season to where, though quite honestly he was still a bit of a liability on offense, he was playing very good on-ball and team defense (and that’s all Coach Dean really cares about).

Eric’s parents wrote the following: “Dear Coach, Thank you so much for a great season! You really brought out Eric’s love for basketball!”

Two things: A) You never know. You have absolutely no idea what sort of impact either for better or worse you have on those around you particularly in that sort of dynamic. And B) If I could bottle the feeling I had after reading that and which I had for the rest of the evening, I’d be a very rich man. Basketball is quite simply the greatest game ever invented. There is not even an argument to be made for any other sport, so to think I played some part in stoking a kid's fire for the game was humbling, indeed.

The season ended too soon. We were playing well but there is always improvements to be made. We still never really ran the against-a-zone offense all that well. I wonder if the kids would want to get together to work on it… you know, have practices? Gosh, so much to learn – so much to work on. Yeah, I’ll start making some phone calls and…..

We now return you to your regularly collegial and fraternal 2nd person-plural programming.

P.S. A secret weapon? I will never know for sure but I have to think that having as all our team’s primary ball-handlers, left-handers, had to give our opposition fits. Even as a lefty myself, I always hated guarding other lefties.

Our College Football Dilemma... and Hope for the Cure

The first AP college football poll came out and as expected, USC was ranked first followed by LSU, West Virginia, Texas and Michigan to round out the Top 5. So we’re almost there… a fortnight away from the 1st full weekend of the college football season.

So are we excited? You bet. But we will admit that excitement is tempered a bit knowing that along with the joy that college football brings us, it is a double-edged sword that can also cause frustration, angst, and utter disbelief because it seems that each week we are witness to a continuing litany of boneheaded coaching decisions.

A quick peak into our dark psyche: Last October we were watching UCLA kick Notre Dame’s tail all over the field in South Bend. UCLA’s two defensive ends, Justin Hickman and Bruce Davis were living in the Irish backfield and ruining any chance that Brady Quinn had at winning the Heisman. Joy, oh joy. And just when victory seemed assured late in the 4th quarter, UCLA did a 180 and got completely away from what had been successful and what had them at victory’s doorstep. Yes, friends… the Bruins pulled “a Republican”

They completely shut down the offense, effectively giving the Irish defense consecutive 3 and outs and when the defense needed to make a stand with about 90 seconds left in order to ice the game, UCLA went into that god-forsaken and completely un-redeemable “prevent defense”, whereby Notre Dame blazed down the field in 3 plays for the winning score.

To say we were apoplectic would’ve been a slight understatement. Things were thrown, invectives cast, and house guests politely excused themselves from the premises in the face of this glorious meltdown.

This coaching performance was followed the very next day by the Chargers doing pretty much the same damn thing in their game against the Ravens. Unbelievable. We had a headache for about 4 days afterwards.

For the first time, we didn’t want to watch any football for a while. We’d had it. We were spent. We were beat down - ground into the turf by coaching stupidity. Why was it that we saw it coming a mile away but men who are paid great sums of money to lead young men to victory by being able to see the same could not?

It was then that we came up with this theory: Coaches watch game film but they don’t watch football.

Its not as counter-intuitive as it sounds. You see here at BwD HQ, at the height of any given Saturday afternoon in the fall, we are tracking no less than 6 or 7 football games simultaneously. And in watching and processing all this info, we don’t care that the left tackle is taking a bad technique in chipping on the defensive end before getting up field to block for a screen pass. We’re tracking scores and we are tracking game trends. We’re monitoring the ebb and flow of numerous games and as such, we start to see and recognize general situations and on-field circumstances from week to week that will lead to victory and conversely, defeat.

This is something that head coaches don't do. They watch plenty of game film and they get down into the weeds to look for an advantage in way of seeing if the wide receiver, for example, is tipping off plays by the way he lines up or hold his hands prior to the snap. But they don’t step back and look at the big picture - in fact, it would be nigh impossible for them to do so because as we are gathering game trends real-time, processing it and coming to our own conclusions as to what basic strategy will and will not work, the coaches are out there coaching and continuing to make boneheaded decisions.

Sorry for the long post but the poll and accompanying article from the AP via Sports Illustrated is attached. Click here.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/football/ncaa/specials/preview/2007/08/18/ap.poll.ap/index.html

In With A Bang.....

Not sure this was post-worthy because we don't know whether it’s a trend or just a curious coincidence… but we'll talk about it anyway.

Over the past 19 years there have been 8 coaches to win a national championship within the first 3 years of taking over at head coach of their respective college teams, and in 6 of those cases, that coach never won another one (the exceptions are Urban Meyer who won it just last year so we will have to wait and see and Pete Carroll at USC who won it in his 3rd and 4th seasons. The rest of the lineup is as follows:

Lou Holtz – Notre Dame ’88 (3rd Year)
Gene Stallings – Alabama ’92 (2nd Year)

Lloyd Carr - Michigan '97 (3rd Year)
Bob Stoops – Oklahoma ’00 (2nd Year)
Larry Coker – Miami ’01 (1st Year)
Jim Tressel - Ohio St. ‘02 (3rd Year)

Obviously, each data point has a different backdrop and context from the others…. Holtz continued to field national championship caliber teams after ’88, though the last 3 years were mediocre (23-11-1) by Tying Irish standards. Stallings also, had very good on-field success after his lone championship, though he stepped down in ’96 after an exhaustive 2 yr. investigation of the ‘Bama program which did result in sanctions. Michigan coach Lloyd Carr, though, has not only not won another national title but is perceived now as heading a program in gradual decline.

Also in the 90s one has examples conversely of this alleged phenomena where ironically it was two ball coaches that had been at their respective schools for years before winning their first championships in the persons of Bobby Bowden at Florida St. and Dr. Tom Osborne at Nebraska. In fact, those two pretty much owned the decade by combining for 5 National Championships.

Things get a little juicier with this next set. Tressel won in his 3rd year and had a chance to win the title again last year before being upset by Florida and Urban Meyer, a 2nd Year guy himself. No shame, that. Larry Coker is the poster-old man for this post. After winning the championship in his very first season with the ‘Canes, his win totals declined thereafter until he was dismissed after last season. And though by no means is he in the hot seat, Sooner Nation, is getting a little anxious for Bob Stoops to get back to the BCS title game. (Ed. update: Last week's loss to Colorado is not going to help matters any).

Again… not sure if there are enough data points to lead to anything more conclusive than perhaps that each of the above won primarily with the last guy’s recruits.

We would be remiss if we did not hand out an Honorable Mention-type award as well: Kirk Farentz of Iowa has seen his win totals in steady decline after winning the Big 10 title in both '02 (4th season) and '04 (6th season). And both Ralph Friedgen of Maryland and Chuck Amato who was fired as HC at NC State shared similar career arcs starting at the beginning of the decade in the ACC.

It will be interesting to see how Tressel, Stoops and Meyer, coaches who man one of the 6 or 7 mega-programs in the nation, fare in the coming years.