Charges Dropped on Duke Lacross Case and My Take on the "Great College Hoops Coaches Who Can't Coach" argument

Charges against Duke LAX players dropped:
Last spring, during the weekend the Duke lacrosse story had just broke, I received an email from a PhD student in the history department imploring all grad students to come bang pots and pans outside the lacrosse players' house the next morning. This was surprising: Wasn't anyone going to wait for some actual evidence before they jumped to conclusions? After all, these are graduate students in history, usually the first to cast dispersions on anything they see reported by the media; usually the first to advocate for the rights of the accused. So I send an email back to every grad student. My email can be summarized in one sentence: "If they raped the girl, drag them out into the street and shoot 'em for all I care; but even rich, white athletes are entitled to the presumption of innocence until proof of guilt, right?!"
Apparently not. The girl who sent the initial email responded to myself and every other grad student. She responded (and I paraphrase): "I believe in the presumption of innocence until proof of guilt, but a girl was raped." This dizzying circularity was coming from someone that may be our child(ren)'s history professor some time in the future. Welcome to the American ivory tower, where such idiocy and blatant hypocrisy is not only tolerated, it's encouraged.

RE: "Great College Hoops Coaches Who Can't Coach":
I wish to shed the light of logic on Justin's post from last week.

Arguing that a man who has just won two straight national championships is a bad coach is kind of like saying to your friends, “Watch me sink this half court shot …” Even if you miss, you don’t look that bad because of the scale of the challenge and the bravado with which you’ve undertaken it. You don’t really risk losing face with your friends, because nobody is taking you seriously. So I disagree with you Justin, but in kind of a “Yeah, you failed, but I was impressed just to see you hit the backboard” kind of a way.

I have three issues with your argument.

First, I think your understanding of what it means to be a coach is all jacked up. When you posted your entry, I read your headline to my sister’s boyfriend. His response: “Coaching is recruiting.” He’s right. Recruiting is an art, and one that not all coaches have mastered. Urban Meyer’s relentless recruiting is going to turn UF into college football’s new juggernaut, whereas other good “Xs and Os” guys can’t get the talent they need. In NCAA basketball, given the insane talent coming out of high school, who wouldn’t prefer a good recruiter to the “Xs and Os” guy? Again, I think your idea of having two awards, one for Coach of the Year and one for Recruiter of the Year, sets up a false dichotomy. But if we’re going to do it, I hope that my alma mater can bring in “Recruiter of the Year”, because assuming as the corollary to your argument that the “Coach of the Year” can’t recruit, he’ll never win a championship, especially given the new NBA age requirement. NEVER.

Second, you give too much credit to the guys ranking incoming recruits. Why is it that in professional sports, the front offices always seem to take the blame for draft picks who flop, while in college, scouts never take the blame when a blue-chip recruit turns out to be a dud? Do you remember which NFL coach was at the helm for Ryan Leaf? Yeah, me neither, because he didn’t take the blame for Leaf’s failures. My point (which I admit I’m not articulating very well) is that just as there are players who can’t make the college-to-pro transition, the same holds true for high school-to-college. I think measuring a team’s success too strongly against their recruits’ rankings is a mistake.

But my biggest problem with talent-result comparison you and many others engage in is that it tends to set the bar so high that even a guy who has one TWO NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS IN A ROW can somehow be criticized. In this, you’ve set up a standard that inverts the one I alluded to in your engaging a far-fetched argument: if Billy Donovan makes the half-court shot (hell, twice in a row), you and others are saying, “Two in a row? Big deal. Look how expensive your basketball sneakers are… Iwon’t be impressed until you sink three in a row. And what about the one you missed last week?” Basically, by your standards, a guy that gets great players is either good or bad… there’s no middle ground. In other words, Phil Jackson was a great coach, but only after he won half-a-dozen NBA Championships. If, say, he had only won one or two, he’d be awful, because he had Jordan and Pippen, and then Shaq and Kobe. Maybe the way we should be looking at it is by acknowledging that a talented roster guarantees nothing if the players have no synergy (ie, the Lakers before Phil Jackson showed up). I can give you the finest auto parts, but they’re worthless unless the someone has the know-how to throw them together into a well-functioning machine. Billy Donovan has built a Lexus, and if he doesn’t get credit for it now, just admit that he’ll never earn your respect unless he starts recruiting girl scouts and gets them to the Final Four. Having exceptionally raw talent on your roster presents its own challenges, none the least of which is teaching your players to work together as a team. That’s hard a message to inculcate into individuals who know that their commitments to being team players come at the expense of their own individual stats.

PS – So Billy Donovan had a few bad seasons and has now figured things out to the tune of two straight championships. Couch K won two back-to-back championships 15 years ago, and this year VCU cashed in his chips for him. You’re according improvement the same degree of respect Anna Nichole Smith accorded chastity. Was that too soon?!

Workin’ for the weekend,
Ryan