For the next two weeks, college basketball fans will watch some of the greatest minds in the sport going at one another: coaches in small programs taking on and beating larger programs and highly regarded coaches in established programs crushing rivals with fewer resources.
Here's my question: With all of this brainpower on display, why hasn't all this coaching "genius" at the college level translated into success at the professional level? The NBA -- if we believe what we read -- needs the guidance and the fresh ideas that college coaches bring to the table.
Why have some of the great college basketball minds never tried their hand at the next level? Why have college coaching "geniuses" like Rick Pitino had limited success in the NBA? Mike Montgomery had great success at Stanford, where he had to do more with less. But he is perilously close to the bubble in the NBA, where he has access to some of the greatest players.
If college players failed at the rate of their college coaches, we'd be calling for an overhaul of the system. On the contrary, college basketball has been a tremendous pipeline to the NBA. Maybe the coaches are the ones who need refinement.
Control freaks
College coaches are dictators and overlords. They have the shoe contracts, the radio and the television shows and the country club memberships.
The players have, at best, a one-year athletic scholarship.
"To be honest, I think a lot of college coaches have gotten some pretty bad jobs," Mike Gottfried, the coach at Alabama, said Friday. "You look at Atlanta a couple years ago. Lenny Wilkens may be one of the best the NBA's ever had, and he couldn't win with the group that the Hawks had. Then Lon goes in there," referring to Lon Kruger, "and they don't win, and now, all of a sudden, college coaches can't win in the NBA.
"Well, they got a terrible team, a young team. So the college guys aren't getting the best jobs with the best players. Sometimes they're getting those tough jobs, and that makes it difficult."
Gottfried added: "You're not going to be in control of everything, and I think that has hurt college coaches. I would like at some point to see some college guys get the better jobs. They've gotten tough jobs at tough times and almost been viewed as transitional guys, expendable guys: get them in and out of there for a couple years and then get somebody else in there."
Gottfried has a theory: If Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski could lead the US men's basketball team to a gold medal in the 2008 Olympics, his success could raise the credibility of the college coach who aspires to coach NBA players.
"I think it would help," Gottfried said. "He's got stature, first of all. I think stature helps in that league. That's one thing he has that not a lot college coaches have, that level of stature. I think he would do good if he was in the NBA. There's a respect level that players have for him that they may not have for a lot of other college coaches."
UCLA coach Ben Howland disagreed that college coaches had not successfully made the transition. "Last time I checked, Larry Brown started in college, for example, and he might be one of the top coaches," said Howland, who also mentioned Chuck Daly, who coached at Penn before guiding the Detroit Pistons to two NBA championships.
Loss of control
Those are exceptions. In any event, Howland conceded that the major issue with college coaches who go to the NBA is control.
"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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