@CRH107
There is a basic, often overlooked difference between great coaches like Self, Knight, K, Cal, Roy and Dean, versus someone like John Wooden.
John Wooden is in the BHOF as a player, not just as a coach. Great players beat opponents in the moment on the floor.
None of those other great coaches were great players. None of them every really knew what it was like to play at a championship level themselves.
They had been subs on teams and some had been assistants on teams that won rings, or got close.
But there is a another layer of coaching than watching it up close. It is the level of having actually done it and knowing what it is REALLY like to do it.
John Wooden was an incomparably great athlete in his time. He had a level of intensity and competitiveness in the arena at the highest level that none of the other coaches had ever experienced first hand.
Self and the other great coaches I mentioned are some of the greatest coaches EVER. But not a single one of them has ever known what it is like to play at the highest levels a human being can play at. That is a mountain top that only Wooden among the games greatest coaches ever rose to.
Being a great player is for many a great obstacle to being a great coach. They are bored, or frustrated, by the limitations of what lesser players are capable of. Or they are lacking in some of the core skills a great head coach requires, of which there are many.
Wooden was NOT the greatest coach of all time for a very long time. For a very long time he was a stubborn sunnuvabitch determined to do it one way. That was was good enough to become a good college coach, but not a great one. Wooden did not become a great coach until he was about to lose his job in his late 40s and was finally willing to first hire, and then listen to Jerry Norman about the 2-2-1 zone press and about recruiting some players. With the 2-2-1 press, which he furiously resisted, and recruiting, which he barely engaged in even after he let Norman start recruiting, he had a couple of edges that got him the kind of players (a team of great 6-5 and under athletes that the other coaches had passed on as being too small) and the kind of strategic edge that could take him deep in the tournament and let him actually use his first hand experience of recognizing which players really had what it took, and knowing what they were capable of. He understood African Americans athletes for what they were–an untapped resource of competitive fury and in many cases great athleticism. Having been the best of the best as the Indiana Rubber Man, Wooden was not blindered about what really made great players great. It was a combination of great athleticism, worked at relentlessly, with a nuclear furnace of competitive fury within harnessed to taking the highest percentage shots off the hardest to guard 45 degree angle cuts, of doing EVERYTHING not just the UCLA way, but the way only great athletes could do them. Once he had great athletes drilled to the point of doing things in their sleep the way great athletes could do them, then it was all about identifying which could be “at your best when you need your best” and who had “competitive greatness” that could be directed to explode for 40 minutes in a game played so perfectly and with such quickness that lesser athletes and coaches could not keep up even when they knew exactly what was coming. All that Sam Gilbert’s reputed recruiting cash under the table did for Wooden in the years after he had already won two, or 3 rings, was give him essentially as many such players as he wanted, and a lot of top players he could choose among to get those that were not just great talents, but winnow to those that were GREAT ATHLETES. Other coaches had had alumni hiring players the same way that Wooden reputedly (I say reputedly because Wooden was never actually penalized for ANY infraction that I have ever heard of) finally let Norman and Gilbert do for him. Most forget that coaches like Dean Smith and others had some great runs of talent, at the same time that Wooden did, but none of them really knew the 10th tenth of what great players were capable of. They could win a ring or two, when they had a super player, or two, and everything clicked, but Wooden got so he could win a ring every season with the same kind of players the other top programs were signing, increasingly with more, but for one difference. Wooden could pick the ones that were at their best when they needed their best, and that had competitive greatness coursing through their veins in every big game UCLA ever played for 10 or 11 seasons. Wooden took coaching to a whole other level by being able to pick not just the top talent, but the top talent that could rise to competitive greatness when it was needed. Wooden did not need a learning experience after awhile. Wooden already had everything hardwired at the beginning the season. Wooden coached a way to play that great players could play, if they really wanted to submit to playing at 10 tenths of their abilities, if they really wanted to tie their shoe laces the UCLA way, and live the Pyramid of Greatness, and let Wooden reset their shooting mechanics, and run the stuff exactly the way he wanted it run. Wooden said that they didn’t hide what they were going to do, they just practiced till they did it so well with such great athletes that other teams could not stop them. Wooden NEVER had to rebuild a team in midseason EVER in his great run. He looked at his material before the season started and schemed it just right the first time. Wooden was an architect. He had blue prints for each season. He coached many different schemes. Every year it was the same out come. The players were fitted to the scheme from day 1 and they fitted it perfectly, or he got rid of them and had someone else that would fit, if necessary.
Self by comparison is a sculptor, like Henry Moore, or Michelangelo. He sees something possible in the stone and he begins chipping away at it to reveal what may turn out to be. It is not all written with Self from Day 1. Self has a strong vision of something being possible in this gob of material he has, but he begins molding some of it, and chiseling other parts, and fitting pieces here and changing the composition until it is as perfectly balanced and integrated as the parts permit.
Architects are creative creatures, but they draw blue prints of their comprehensive vision and revise those blue prints until they are ready to build the building. The changes during the building are almost never so great as to transform the building into something other than what was envisioned.
Sculptors and painters will sharply alter a composition in process. They are feeling their way along to find what CAN be.
Self is a painter/sculptor kind of a coach. No matter HOW strong of a vision he starts the season with, who we are can morph from one kind of a team into another. It even happens sometimes when he is resisting the evolution with all of his being. He knows that is not who we are, until he can no longer deny who we are is other than what he thought. Usually, then, he becomes completely consumed with this new vision of who we are. This means Self is not playing every game with an optimal, set script and saying see if you can beat us. Self is saying see if you can be what we are given the level of getting better we have achieved now. And sometimes they do.
Interestingly, it is the coaches that are very set in what they have their teams doing that tend to beat him the first time. They are optimized and Self and KU are still trying to find exactly who they are.
You speculate reasonably that this might explain why Self and KU do not win as many rings as titles.
I think it is a factor that comes into play, since Self and KU have faced an apparent embargo (for whatever reason one cares to rationalize) on top talent at the critical 1 and 5 slots.
Self proved in 2008 that when he had as good of talent as anyone, that he could win the ring, even against a team loaded with ringers.
But in the years since, as his MUA in talent has tended to dwindle, he has taken what he had far, but he has not had enough to go all the way, except maybe one season.
I think the talent deficiency has been tougher for him than it was for Wooden.
Wooden’s first two ring teams were, frankly, not teams with all the puzzle pieces. They were instead teams brimming with great athletes of the kind Wooden understand completely. He understood what things they could do in ways that great coaches that were ordinary athletes simply could not grasp.
During the apparent embargo at the 1 and 5, and increasingly the back up positions, Self has shown himself brilliantly resourceful at understanding how coach more and more guys like himself, when he was a player. He has proven brilliant at understanding exactly how players like himself can be blended ingeniously with 2-3 top athletes and playing against Big 12 competition, he can overcome a few failed first meetings and relentlessly get better over a season and in the long haul simply find a superior composition/scheme for his team and walk off with 14 consecutive conference titles.
But at the same time, this approach cannot overcome opponents that are stacked 6 to 10 deep with OADs, and his predilection for getting better after first meeting with a new opponent conspire with hot three point shooting to make his teams vulnerable to upsets by lesser teams.
Self feeds into this dynamic, if you will, by also believing in amping for the better of the two opponents in an NCAA comprised of three two game tournaments. Self amps for the better of the two teams, and coaches his players to find ways to win while laboring for victories against lesser teams. Some upsets result.
But here is the thing: Self probably knows all of the above and is probably working relentless to find a way to get better at the first meetings. He is incredibly resourceful and incredibly determined and my guess is that he will get better at it as Coach K, and Knight and Roy have gotten better at finding ways to compensate in their coaching approaches for never having been great players.
Self can never make himself one of the all time great players and so know first hand what the greatest of the great athletes are truly capable of the way Wooden did.
But I have had a hunch for years that Self is so incredibly resourceful and has so much genius for the strategic aspects of adjusting the schemes of teams, that if he could ever get past this apparent embargo ate the 1 and 5, and get his roster depth back up to snuff, he might through sheer human ingenuity find a bridge across that gap he has in first hand experience of what great players know can be done.
This is why I have so long been kvetching about KU’s recruiting problems at 1 and 5.
This apparent embargo, whether an accidental appearance, or a real contrivance, gets in the way of him trying to find a creative away around his own limitations.
Or so it seems to me.
