I’m With Coach K on This One
Over the years I’ve been down on Mike Krzyzewski many times. Arrogance is a personality trait I have serious trouble with, and Krzyzewski’s stiff-arming of the local media for years and years while being most accommodating to the national luminaries such as Dick Vitale is one of the many ways Coach K has allowed his arrogance to show through. It’s especially galling to remember how cooperative he was to all of us back in the early 80s when he was in the process of putting his powerhouse program together. It wasn’t until he had won his first two national championships that he decided he didn’t need the Winston-Salem Journal, the Greensboro News and Record, the Charlotte Observer, the Raleigh Observer or even the Durham Herald-Sun enough to return our phone calls.
Even more frustrating was the realization that when we did have a chance to ask Krzyzewski questions, in a setting where he was settled and reflective, and not choking on the bile of his competitive nature, the answers you got were incredibly insightful and compelling. The man has a brilliant mind, and I love the way it works. He’s not a bit afraid to take on conventional wisdom and as a result he’s always looking for, and finding, new and often really innovative ways to put a formidable basketball team on the floor. If he doesn’t have a serviceable point guard, he puts Jon Scheyer there and tweaks his offense in such a way that Scheyer’s scoring average actually goes up while the team wins more games. If he’s caught without the kind of talent he usually has inside, he cobbles together a front court around Brian Zoubek and Lance Thomas and goes off and wins another national championship.
Something Krzyzewski said back in 2005 comes to mind every year about this time, when the ACC preseason polls are released. Krzyzewski’s Devils were picked uncommonly low that season (probably around third or fourth, the real depths for Duke), and after they won the ACC title in Washington, Krzyzewski was asked if he took any special satisfaction from proving “the experts” wrong.
His reply was perfect. He wasn’t being antagonistic, as he can certainly be, and he went out of his way to explain that he wasn’t criticizing the media for their pick. But he also revealed that he never worried about it for one day either. The reason: It’s meaningless.
How, he wondered, can anybody predict the fortunes of teams they’ve never seen play? It’s really impossible in college basketball, particularly in the modern game where so many of the critical players are freshmen who have never played a game of college basketball. And even the ones coming back are going to be different players. Some are going to be better, some are not. And that’s not even bringing into account the injuries that can so dramatically affect any team in any sport.
Dave Odom and Skip Prosser were two of my favorite coaches to cover ever. But both were prone to trumpet their successes by pointing out how they were picked to finish seventh, and they actually finished third. I don’t blame them for pointing it out, but again, so what? It’s meaningless.
None of this is to say that we don’t know that Duke should be better than Wake this year. It should be, and it will be. But to pretend to know enough about 12 teams we’ve never seen play to predict an exact order is a real stretch.
My method is to bracket the teams into three and sometimes four divisions. This year, for instance, I suspect Duke will be the best team, with its main competition coming from Virginia Tech and maybe North Carolina. I’m almost ready to put Miami in that mix, remembering how good the Hurricanes were last spring after Durand Scott and Reggie Johnson found their bearings. But I’ll lower the expectations on my friend Frank Haith and include Miami in the middle tier with N.C. State, Florida State and Maryland. And among the others, Clemson, Georgia Tech, Virginia, BC and Wake, I don’t see a great deal of difference. All have serious limitations they’ll have to overcome to compete for even a first-round bye in the ACC Tournament, much less a conference title.
Now watch Virginia Tech go 7-9 in the league and Virginia go 9-7. If it happens, I can blame my prediction on ignorance, because we’re all ignorant until we learn what, for the time being, is impossible to know.