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I was listening to Colin Cowherd on ESPN radio this morning and he made a very rare but probably very true comment about how teams play come Tournament time. He was mentioning Texas Tech Coach Bobby Knight on how his team has hardly ever gotten past the first or second rounds since he's been there. Basically Cowherd's point was that Coach Knight is always intense and hard on his players every day all the time and come Tourney time they fall flat on the their butts playing the likes of Pepperdine and some other lesser schools and end up getting beat. The pressure of a coach to be perfect makes alot of players today too nervous and uptight when Tourney time comes. This might explain alot about our success in the Mac Tourney under Dakich which is very little. It makse alot of sense to me. You can't ride players constantely 24/7 about every little mistake they make otherwise they will play with apathay and constant fear of being yanked, (Ala Vandameer?). Does this make sense to any of you? :-\

What else besides not enough talent at certain postions can explain why we never do well outside of first rounds at AA. Only one time have we even gotten to the final game and we of course lost to good ole' Kent State. This Mac Tourney has apparently been around since 1982 and our record in this Tourney is horrid. What makes us so certain that we'd fair well in NCAA's if we got there. On the other side of this coin , Cowhered also mentiond coaches who have mastered the art of coaching your team in the Tournament like Coach K of Duke who always , always leads his team to the Final Four every year without fail it seems. Frankly I'm surprised I hadn't thought of this before. This seems to describe coaches like Knight and Dakich to a tee. 15-25 years ago Knight's style of coaching got results pretty often with the 18 year-olds of the 70's and 80's , but so far the Knight way of coaching doesn'st seem to resonate with todays youth all that much. Agree or disagree post on. :-\

I think Bobby's problems in the NCAA Tournament have a lot more to do with inconsistent guard play rather than him pressuring his players too much. Coach Knight finally has put some athleticisim into his line-up in the last year or so, but that was his greatest downfall on taking over at Tech, was that he simply couldn't guard people in the NCAA's, much less the Big XII.

So much of the intense man-to-man defense that he preaches comes from ball pressure. This, in turn, is our biggest weakness as well. John Floyd is simply not quick enough to guard most MAC point guards which leads to penetration and then leaving posts and wings to offer help-side hence all of the open looks. Before the arrival of John Floyd, Steven Wright and Ron Lewis just simply refused to play defense and the result was very much the same. I see defensive potential in Moon. He's very aggressive on the ball, but he reaches quite a bit and ends up in foul trouble often. The Knight-Dakich-Coach K-Jimmy Crews, etc . . . philosophy also shies away from zone defenses as well despite being the foundation of success for the early 90's UNLV teams, Syracuse and Temple.

To say that Coach K is not as intense as Bobby Knight is precisely one reason that I refuse to listen to Colin Cowherd. He will make a really rational argument for about 3 minutes and then say something completely illogical like this.

The biggest difference in establishing success and maintaining success is talent evaluation. Seeing how each kid fits into a specific role within your program. Coach K and his assistants are able to continue to dominate, whether any of us will root for them this weekend or not, b/c each player is given a role. Coach K and that specific player are well aware of everything that kid can do and CANNOT do. Rarely, despite a glaring weakness, will an individual Duke player lose a game for his team. A system has been established and the players are willing to buy into that system and each accepts his role within the system.

The difference between Coach K and Coaches Knight and Dakich are finding the personnel to fit the system and recognizing what each player brings to the system to enhance it. Recently, we've made a lot of recruiting miscues by recruiting guys and trying to make our system fit them, rather than finding guys with skills that complement our system.

Coach K has allowed himself to evolve as basketball has evolved into a more athletic game and used the principles he learned in West Point under Knight to serve as the foundation to his success. Dan and Bobby, it would seem, are still hanging onto the glory of New Orleans circa 1987 and trying to win in a completely changed climate of college basketball.

I miss Tony Kornheiser on ESPN Radio. I think The Herd is a tool. I get tired of hearing the same "Around the World" in the 10am hour and again in the 1pm hour. Bad use of recycling. Plus, he takes 10 years to make a point and ends up beating a dead horse. Maybe we should get him to post on here about attendance.

I never meant to imply that Coach K is not hard at all with his players. Cowherd said as much , but he was making the point that outside of pratice when he probably does lay into his team , he lets his team play as loose as possible in actual games hence their long , long success in the NCAA Tourney. I wan't really talking about kids not doing what coaches want , but more or less on what the mental aspect of a coaches demeanor during games of the magnitude of the NCAA Tourament impact players of today. Cowherd seemed to be making a very good point in the fact that Coach Knight is constantly hard and nitpicky on how his players play possibley leading to the fact that Texas Tech under Knight has done virtually squat in the NCAA Tourney. Also hence the my tie-in with DD and how we never seem comfortalble whenever we play in any games but especially in Mac Tourney games. We always seem to uptight and tense. So I'm surmising that DD probably makes them that way.

Dakich, from my seat, roughly the same spot as yours, is harder on certain players rather than the whole bunch. Floyd makes as many mistakes as Moon and probably more consistently, but he "seems" to ride Moon harder as an example.

Either way, I don't buy Cowherd's argument. It comes down to one team executing a game plan more precisely than the other and having a comparable amount of athletes on the floor or more athletes on the floor than your opponent.

Colin Cowher sucks. As Will Rogers said, "it ain't what he don't know that worries me, its what he knows for sure, 'cuz it ain't so."

OptionQB wrote:Dakich, from my seat, roughly the same spot as yours, is harder on certain players rather than the whole bunch. Floyd makes as many mistakes as Moon and probably more consistently, but he "seems" to ride Moon harder as an example.

I've often wondered the same thing. It seems like there is almost always someone in DD's doghouse, perhaps to be "the example" for the others. Also, he seems to be much harder on freshmen than other coaches (...hmmmm....Harwell, Hobson, Crawford, Moss, Doliboa...). Floyd, Ryan, and Lewis are two players that he has gone inexplicably easy on.

However, I believe that there actually is something to argument that DD's style leads to a tired team by March. From my seat, there appears to be emotional and physical exhaustion, as well as complete lack of looseness, come tournament time.

I will not argue against the fact that John Reimold and Josh Almanson had zero left in the tank in Cleveland. After logging as many minutes as they did throughout the year, it was only a matter of time before they hit a wall emotionally and physically.

Again, I do not mean to harp on this, because Dan and the guys do deserve credit for an 18-11 season that with different officals could very well have been 14-15, but that's an argument for another day. Anyway, the morale of the story is until Dan utilizes his bench, regardless of how many scholarshipped players he has or who does or doesn't answer an alarm clock at 5:30 AM (Raheem Moss), we are going to struggle at the end of the year from simple exhaustion issues.

I will agree with Dan that it doesn't help having your emotional leader arrested in the final week of the year, but the staff has to have a gauge and control over the emotional character of their team as well and at worst use such events as motivation in an us v. the world mentality.