Keegan: Realistic future awaits

By Tom Keegan     Apr 11, 2008

Take a cork off a bottle. Shove all the feelings you have right this minute for your favorite university’s basketball coach into that bottle. Put the cork back on it. Store it in a safe place.

When the next version of Marchello Vealy from Oral Roberts University comes into Allen Fieldhouse and shoots your favorite college basketball team down in an upset that leads SportsCenter, find that bottle. Uncork it. Drink from it. Put the cork back on. See if that doesn’t keep your knee from jerking all over the place.

It will happen. There will be more Marchello Vealys. There will be more upsets. There will be disappointing losses. Some will come in the NCAA Tournament. It doesn’t mean that the coach either has lost his touch or necessarily “had a bad game.”

It means that human beings – teenagers and 20-somethings, and, yes, even high-paid coaches – make mistakes. To err is human, never to forgive is inhumane.

Derrick Rose and Chris Douglas-Roberts formed a once-in-a-generation college backcourt for Memphis. They missed free throws and couldn’t hold a nine-point lead in the final 2:12 of regulation. Memphis fans had a right to be disappointed at the outcome, but not angry with the players or coach.

“They don’t make every one,” Memphis coach John Calipari said afterward. “They’re not machines, these kids. They’re just not.”

Neither are coaches.

In retrospect, Calipari should have called a timeout to reiterate his desired strategy, which was to have one of his players commit a foul once the clock got down inside five seconds, thereby sending a Kansas player to the line so the lead could be trimmed to one point in the worst-case scenario. The foul didn’t come, and Mario Chalmers sent the game into overtime with the biggest shot in Kansas history.

Does that mean Calipari is anything less than a magnificent college basketball coach? Of course it doesn’t. The team he built and taught every day in practice went 38-2, the only losses coming to a No. 2 seed and a No. 1 seed.

Will Bill Self be any less a winner when his team loses a game to a less talented team than he was when his Jayhawks won the national title to cap a 37-3 season? Same guy. Same brain. Same competitive drive. Same hunger for a second national title that he had for his first.

This isn’t to say elite college coaches are above criticism, but to draw definitive conclusions about a coach based on any one game, even any one season, borders on insanity.

Obviously, Self has been treated well enough in Lawrence – aside from the Bucknell fallout – that he chose to remain here when he could have cut a sweet deal at OSU. He has earned an extended second honeymoon period.

Self will make mistakes on the recruiting trail, but it won’t be because he didn’t try hard enough. He’ll make them during games. Even Bob Knight surely made many during his undefeated 1976 season.

It would be tough to argue with either Chancellor Robert Hemenway or athletic director Lew Perkins, both of whom said there isn’t a better fit for Kansas basketball than the man who decided to keep the job. The man, not the machine.

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