Quote:
Originally posted by 26 Year Gap
You pulled a bait-and-switch on me in bringing Knight into the discussion after starting with Calhoun, but it's an instructive example. My knock on Calhoun is that he hasn't been consistently excellent.
My knock on Knight is that he didn't prove to be adaptive at all. He won three titles in 12 seasons, then made only one Final Four in his last what, 13 seasons?
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I am mildly surprised that you are disparaging the guy who gave Coach K his start in coaching.
Your knock on Calhoun is based in ignorance [as in lack of knowledge, not as in namecalling]. He was a consistent winner at Northeastern and I saw his club many times at UVM. He went to a fledgling UConn program that was in a doormat position in the Big East after it left the Yankee Conference. Yes it took a few years to build up the program, but let me ask you this: Is it easier to recruit a kid by saying 'We are ready to take the next step here. We are not on TV that often, but once we build up, we will be.' OR 'We are in one of the most storied basketball conferences in the country. You can count on national TV games when we play UNC & NC State and our conference from top to bottom is second to none.' ? And who do you suppose had a tougher job recruiting between Calhoun's start at UConn and the NIT championship? I think you know the answers to these questions but they are not important considerations as your tai chi would be disrupted.
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Gap,
My argument wasn't that Calhoun didn't do a great job at Northeastern, nor was it that he had a trivial task in turning UConn into a power. As for your recruiting angle, though, the similarities between K's and Calhoun's situations are remarkable. You don't think that Calhoun was pitching to recruits the fact that they would have TV opportunities when they would play the likes of Georgetown, Syracuse and St. John's? When Calhoun got there in 1986, the Big East had won two of three national championships, and was within a whisker of three out five. I think recent success has a lot more to do with selling your school and its conference than history does, when it comes to getting the top players. Even if that's not exactly right, I'm willing to concede only a slight recruiting edge to K in his early years at Duke, especially given the pool of enrollable talent that he was drawing from, one much smaller than that of Calhoun. (Please don't misconstrue this last line. I'm not arguing that the admissions committee at Duke doesn't make exceptions for some of its athletes. I'm just saying that the pool is smaller)
An earlier poster made some comment like, "send K to Northeastern and see what happens." My reply is that, though it's not a one-to-one mapping, that K's success at Duke, in only his second head job, should serve to demonstrate that he could have built and sustained a program almost anywhere, even Northeastern.
As for Knight, that he was K's mentor does not make him a saint. My father gave me a large part of my "start," but that doesn't mean I think he's perfect. That being the case, I still don't understand why you're surprised that I would critique Knight.