A Tale of Two Coaches

Two of the most high profile coaches in the business made headline-grabbing moves today when Gator Golden Boy Billy Donovan quickly spurned Kentucky, which was foaming at the mouth to lure him, to return to Florida, while Bob Huggins made his escape from Manhattan (Kansas that is) and grabbed the freshly minted vacancy at his hometown school, West Virginia. What I find interesting is my gut reactions to both these decisions.

The Donovan announcement came earlier in the day, and to be honest, I would have been surprised if he had defected to the Gators' SEC rival. He seems to have a great life going in Gainesville, and his professional success has reached a stratosphere inhabited only by coaches like Krzyzewski and Wooden, as coaches who have led repeat national champions. When I read the news that he was staying, I thought to myself, "What a classy move. Now he has the chance to build a Hall of Fame career at one school, Florida. And he didn't just go for the supposedly more glamorous position at Kentucky just because the opportunity presented itself."

Meanwhile, when I found out later in the day that Bob Huggins, a coach who has more than a couple stains on his reputation, was bolting Kansas State for West Virginia, my thought process when something like this: "What a bum. He's leaving Kansas State high and dry after just one year. He just dashed the hopes of an entire university. Bush league move."

And there you have exhibits A and B of the typical sports fan's construction of sports as theater. For whatever reason, you need to create a hero and a villain, as if this was all just a grand stage with figures like Donovan and Huggins playing the opposing leads. But is that really fair? It probably isn't. What if Donovan decided he wanted to go to Kentucky because he wanted a new challenge? (Because let's face it, he was going to get paid a bundle no matter what his decision was, so I don't buy the argument that money would have been the deciding factor for him to leave Florida.) Don't people employed in everyday jobs do that all the time?

And what about Huggins? Generally speaking, he's a lot less likable than Donovan seems to be, but maybe we shouldn't decry his choice to leave so quickly. After all, West Virginia is his hometown school, and this opportunity probably would not have come around again if he didn't take it now. Don't important executives leave big corporations with regularity too? But the corporations usually find another talented person to take his or her spot and business carries on.
In an ideal world, everyone would love their jobs and serve out the balance of their contract happily, but that's not the reality of the matter, least of all in sports. All I'm saying is that we shouldn't let our own constructed - and sometimes, distorted - conceptions of what should and shouldn't be in sports (and I'm as guilty of this as anyone) lead us as fans into unfairly scrutinizing a decision when we don't have all the facts about the situation.

billy donovan
bob huggins

The NCAA Race is Wide Open

This is what's great about college basketball that you don't get in any other sport: the closer you get to the postseason, the more teams that have hope (unfounded hope in some cases, I grant you) for a berth in the NCAAs seems to increase exponentially. And this year takes that uncertainty that makes the sport so exciting this time of year to a level we haven't seen in quite a while. Not only do you have a crowd of teams trying to squeeze in to the field of 65, but this year, you have a host of teams that that have a real chance at making a championship run. The across the board parity along the college basketball landscape that has prevailed this year, in addition to the lack of a dominant team gives a bigger group of teams legitimate hope for reaching the Final Four.

Today was a perfect example of why there is no clear favorite. The #1 and #2 teams in the polls, Wisconsin and Ohio State played an underwhelming game for a matchup of such prominence, with neither team able to crack 50 points. The thing is though, this is the first big win of the year for the Buckeyes, who will likely be #1 in both polls as of tomorrow. They've been thumped by two other top 5 teams this year, Florida and North Carolina, both of whom will continue to be ranked behind Ohio State in the new polls.

Florida, the national champs, have struggled as of late, and while they will probably respond to Coach Billy Donovan lighting into them following their embarrassing loss to SEC bottom feeder LSU on Saturday, I don't believe the Gators will repeat. They've got the talent and the experience, but there's a reason why schools rarely repeat in college hoops - it's too hard to get through the pressure cooker of a 6 game single-elimination tournament two years in a row. Look at the last team that had a profile that was very much like the Gator team now - the 1997-98 Arizona Wildcats, led by Mike Bibby and Miles Simon. That was a team that won the championship a year ahead of schedule the season before, and was considered the odds-on-favorite entering the tournament the following year. But they ended up getting whacked by a streaking Utah team in the regional final that came in prepared and hungry. I think it's very possible that we could have a similar situation with Florida in this tournament.

In my opinion, the most solid team in the country, the one that should be considered the favorite among a muddled field, is UCLA. They were #1 in the polls for a number of weeks earlier in the season, and have no alarming losses. They lost by 2 to a very dangerous Oregon team, by 7 to a good Stanford team, and by 5 at West Virginia in a game they did well to get back into following a horrendous start. They have two of the best players in the country in Aaron Afflalo and point guard Darren Collison, and you know that with Ben Howland as their coach, they're going to play good defense. The cherry on top is their hunger to finish the job they got so close to last season when they got ambushed in the national championship game to the Gators.

Some of the other teams may be flashier and have bigger name stars, but the Bruins deserve the mantle of favorites in a crowd of flawed teams.


aaron afflalo
ucla bruins
ben howland
billy donovan
final four