@jayballer54
I jerked it right down the power alley and out of the park.
Coach K, Cal, and Roy would have been long forgotten had they not had the Dump Trucks for much of their entire careers.
Self is so much better coach than these guys it is not even close. I suspect each of them would admit. Bo Ryan is the only guy even close to Self the last ten years. I’m not positive Self could have coached some of Bo’s teams and beaten Bo coaching some of Self’s teams. Bo was a flipping genius that passed himself off as just another cheese head. And Bo, after all, was the guy Self stole drive ball from and put it on steroids to create BAD BALL. I would have to rate Bo and Bill about equal, because even though Self won at a much higher percentage, well, he was doing it at KU and Bo was doing his magic up in the cheddar tundra, where the great basketball legacy got truncated back in the 1940s in Mad Town until Bo was able to build on what Dick Bennett built the foundation of and do some just plain amazing things without dump trucks. Imagine Coach K trying to gut it out to stay above .500 with most of Bo’s teams!
But I don’t want you to think I don’t respect Coach K.
I think the first 20 years of Coach K’s career he was one of the all time great coaches with a great coaching foundation from Knight and a helioarc weld grade of fire in his belly. As long as he did what Knight told him and got some players, he was ferociously competitive and he apparently taught that Big Ten cheap-shot-em into the next century whenever you get ten down in order to stay in the game that he apparently learned from Knight at Army. He was very successful, because of his competitive intensity and his encyclopedic knowledge of the stuff Knight taught him. He probably should have won another two titles back in those days, but was struggling with Dean’s Dapper Dan-Sonny Vaccaro Proto-Dump Truck teams and the usual asymmetric whistle young coaches face. But from the moment Coach K first had to bail out of a season, because of his health problems and burn out back in the mid 1980s, or was the first time a little later, IMHO he’s never been up on the same edge since. He’s just been a sound coach willing to go to the wall with the cheap-shotting to stay in a game long enough for his superior roster talent to weigh in. I don’t know what happened to K back then. I never really understood it. He was really driven to beat Dean and maybe he just drove himself too hard. Whatever, ever since, when he had superior material, he won a lot, and when he didn’t, he just fell back to the pack until he could round up another bunch. Somewhere in there shoes appeared to became the biggest driver of his recruiting success and it never changed afterwards.The big problem with Coach K is that he is just not creative. Self has made more brilliant innovations that spread around the game of basketball and changed the way the entire profession coached than Coach K has in his entire career. Self is just the most incredibly adaptable coach in the country the last 10 years. He was running high-low when everyone here and everyone across the country was running other stuff. As soon as 2/3s of the country had copied him, he shifted gears and took small ball out through the roof. When everyone else was trying to control tempo like Wooden and Knight and Calhoun and then Calipari had taught them, Self was at a completely new level of the game letting the other team set the tempo. When half the country started letting the other team set the tempo, Self jump shifted into setting the tempo. For years Self was stretching defenses with the high low and perimeter passing to create impact space, while the rest of the coaches were getting wet about the Princeton, the Princeton on Steroids and other timing offenses. When every one jumped on his bandwagon and was going on about “spacing this” and “spacing that” Self started collapsing the spacing with Drive Ball, and then later with Bad Ball. And then when everyone copied that Self leaped in 4 out 1 in that a few others had pioneered and then before you know it he is playing 5 out at times. And I’m not even talking about all the defensive wizardry he has introduced. Hell, Self tells everyone what he is doing on the offense, but its the defense where he is secretive and they can’t figure out how to copy him. He was running junk defenses a full two seasons before anyone at this web sight even figured it out. He finally had to tell everyone. Hell, Self has tried and thrown away more terrific ideas than Coach K ever even thought about and couldn’t figure out how to try.
Don’t even get me started on Calipari. That guy has never had an original idea in his life. Everything you see is either LB, or that high school coach that came up with the Dribble Drive. Calipari has two secrets: WWW and Nike.
Roy? Roy did really well aping Dean’s “system” at KU, which was Iba’s 3-2 high low that Dean called the Carolina Passing offense, and taking the west half of the Dean-Sonny-Nike Tennis Shoe-Industrial complex feeder line. This was very much like Coach K aping Knight. But the thing about Roy was that the last two years at KU he (and probably Dean and Gutt) FINALLY figured out running systematically, rather than running to outrun and wear down another team. He finally worked out the math, so to speak. Spike the number of trips, take more high percentage shots on more trips, run the secondary break to get super high percentage shots, trap on the other end to give up an easy basket or two in exchange for a half dozen strips, and against a team that is trying to slow it down and run the stuff, your athleticism is going to weigh in over time, even when the opponent starts the rough stuff. It was a brilliant insight and lead to two fine years at KU and then a half dozen at UNC, before folks like Self exposed how to jump the passing lanes and funnel to the lane for help and, boom, the race horse is stuck in glue. Roy stumbled around trying to find another way to keep running, but without Dean and Gutt to help him come up with another hat rabbit, Roy bogged down for a few years at UNC. And then he got into that awful “Easy Class Gate” stuff that UNC maybe should have gotten a death penalty for, but didn’t, and low and behold, ol’ Roy starts running drive ball and the weave and aping Self pretty much the same way Calhoun did when he was in his flat lining days UConn trying to eek out another ring. Both Calhoun and ol 'Roy should have dedicated their last rings to the Master Hat Rabbiteer, Bill Self, and to their Shoe Companies.
Don’t get me wrong. Coach K, Cal and ol’Roy are hall of fame coaches. But they just couldn’t take Self’s players and beat if Self were coaching their players. Not in this basketball universe.
And, well, Self has shown he can beat Roy AND Cal, when they had equal, or better talent.
Self up here.
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Coach K, Cal and Ol’Roy down here.
