The Drizzle

When you write a blog, you gain a certain appreciation for columnists who write to a regular schedule. It is hard to think of things to write about after awhile. But one thing I’ve been kicking around for about a year now is the idea that one of the more overrated sports’ personalities in the past fifteen or so years is Coach K at Duke. Accordingly, I polled the few guys on the trading desk this morning- asking how many national titles Duke has won since 1993?- and no one was even close (Note: the correct answer is below).

Being honest, I don’t really follow college basketball outside of our glorious Conference USA closely enough to rail against or praise anything definitively. Although Day One was not encouraging to the forces of mid-majors at large: a lot of them got blown out, only VCU came through versus the worst Duke team I can remember.

But one of my fellow BlogPollers labors under no such restriction: The Drizzle. Okay, the blog is a little harder on Duke, Coach K and Paulus than I would be- but his points are kind of correct, his remonstrance not ungenerous- and there is a chuckle or two. Anyway, link is here for the whole thing- pertinent excerpts are below.

In the end, I’m not sure what I really think here myself- just think this post is interesting. And some ugly part of me thinks Coach K gets a lot of lavish praise for a guy who gets every player he wants and doesn’t have much in terms of ultimate success to show for it for an increasingly long time:

You'd assume we're talking about the dominant team in the nation in the last 10 or 15 years, but is that really in any way true?

Conveniently enough, it's been about 15 years since the back to back titles in '91 and '92, so we'll use that as the jump off point. Since that time, they've won exactly one National Title… including that season, they've been to 4 Final Fours over that stretch, which would of course be 2 less than Carolina's 6, and equaled by Michigan State's and Kentucky's 4, so we're hardly talking about any sort of national hegemony over that stretch. Now, I will give them credit for holding sway over the ACC Tournament, and to a lesser degree over the ACC regular season title, over the last 7 or 8 years. But, in my opinion, they've always been greatly benefited by the Duke factor when they're playing in ACC country, as any other ACC basketball fan will quickly corroborate. It's a lot easier to win games when you're playing every game with a free throw and foul advantage facilitated by the Cloak of Invisible Charges that every Duke defender wears. Of course, once tournament time hits, that protection goes away and the results become more indicative.

So that's why I'm no great believer in the overblown Coach K love fest. He's done no more in the last 15 years that a half dozen other coaches have also done, probably with less talent. In fact, you could argue that in some ways, he's underutilized the supposed wealth of talent that he gets and shows a marked lack of ability to adapt to overcome the same problems that plague in every year, namely an inability to develop any quality depth, which always come back to haunt him in March.

But now it's like Duke has reached some nadir of talent, but rather than call it what it is, they're going to try to continually convince me that Greg Paulus is an effective point guard. Have you watched this kid? Can you think of another primary ball handler for a top 20 team that is often completely unable to bring the ball up and initiate an offense against someone playing active defense on him?

Honestly, if making ill conceived passes and diving on the deck for loose balls that you created was a marketable skill he'd be in great shape, but otherwise, they need to start warming up the patented Wojo Asst. Coaching seat for him.