"In college basketball, you have more of an opportunity to impact your roster in terms of recruiting the kids you want and the kids who fit you and your system and your university and your school," he said. "Where in the NBA, with guaranteed contracts, it's a little different. I've always felt, from a coaching perspective, that the NFL is the best pro sport leagues that there is, partly because there's a constant accountability. You have to be accountable year in, year out."
Is it just money? I think there's more to it than that. The great college coaches cannot handle not having the suffocating, life-and-death control over players they exercise at the college level. Get them "young and dumb" -- young enough to run through the brick wall and dumb enough not to know that ultimately crashing into the wall really doesn't matter.
Listen to what one of the young UCLA players, Jordan Farmar, said about the sometimes tense relationship between an NBA coach and a player. "No matter what level you're at, your coach is your boss, and you're supposed to do everything in your power to do your job and please your boss," he said.
money and respect
His teammate Cedric Bozeman agreed. "Maybe at the professional level, it's the salary thing or money or whatever," he said. "They make more than the coaches, so maybe they feel they're higher than the coach. But right now, I've been taught to respect my coach and do whatever he tells me."
That's now. See me in a decade.
I enjoy March Madness, but I wonder about the coaching-genius labels that we'll be throwing around so freely during the NCAA tournament.
There is a deficiency in a system that supposedly has so many geniuses but so few who successfully make the transition to the NBA.
We talk about preparing players for the next level. Maybe we've been tweaking the wrong part of the food chain.
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