Jim Boeheim

In the wake of a scandal involving widespread academic fraud in his program, Syracuse is at one of its lowest points in Jim Boeheim's 39-year tenure as the basketball coach. Will the team be able to survive the scholarship limits? Would the school really have to start thinking about pushing out such a legendary coach? Would his legacy be tarnished? The NCAA is stripping him of over 100 total victories - he is being publicly shamed in a way that it's hard to see every happening to guys like Coach K and Roy Williams. The difference between Boeheim and those guys is he doesn't pretend to be an idealist. He's a professional cynic. He has had to be to survive in a Siberian outpost like Syracuse. He knows his job is about getting wins.

When you are coaching on Tobacco Road in the middle of some of the most temperate landscapes in the country representing some of the most tradition-rich programs in the history of the sport, you can lie to yourself about what it is that you are doing. The players keep coming in and you keep winning. That's where the media goes when they want some self-serving bullshit about how coaches turn boys into men. When you are surviving winters in Syracuse, you are dealing with some cold, hard truths about yourself and the world you live in.

Before Roy Danforth took over in 1969, the program had no basketball history to speak of. They had made the NCAA Tournament twice in 50 years - this is not Duke or UNC or Kentucky or UCLA or Kansas we are talking about. In a world before ESPN, Syracuse was a basketball non-entity. So how did they become a national power? Boeheim, who played for Danford and then took over for him in 1976, followed his blueprint, making the 2-3 zone the foundation of the program. When you think Jim Boeheim, you should think the 2-3. There's a reason Coach K always brings him along on Team USA to be an assistant coach - there may be no basketball coach in the world who knows about the ups and downs of zone defense better than Jim Boeheim.

No NBA team uses a 2-3 zone full-time for the simple fact that NBA players are too good to zone full-time. If you consistently give NBA shooters open looks from the three-point line, no matter how far away they are from the basket, they are going to beat you. This is the basis behind most modern spread offense concepts - force the defense to extend out beyond the three-point line and attack them in space. Zones work in the college level because NCAA players aren't as good a shooters and they have more difficulty utilizing team offensive concepts to score. If you try to go 1-on-1 against Boeheim's zone, you are going to lose every single time.

If you have the right personnel, it's fairly easy to beat a zone. All you have to do is stick a passing + shooting big men at the top of the key and allow him to pick apart the defense. If you enter the ball into the high post, behind the top two guards, he will always have an opening, whether it's a shot or a pass. There's a reason that very few high-major NCAA teams run zone full time and why only one team that runs a zone (Syracuse) has won a national title in the last 15 years. Zone, as Bomani Jones always says, really is for cowards.

So why do it? It prevents you from having to man-up the other team, which is nice when you don't have the types of players they do. Syracuse plays zone against Duke and UNC for the same reason that most Olympic teams do when they play Team USA. Since 1977, here are the total number of McDonald's All-Americans at those programs:

UNC - 69

Duke - 60

Syracuse - 17

A lot of people ask why elite players come to Syracuse if they are going to play in a 2-3 zone that doesn't do a great job of preparing them for the NBA. The answer is they don't. As a rule, Syracuse is having to dig through the bargain bin for top prospects. In a given year, there are maybe 10-15 players in a freshman class who project as almost sure-fire NBA players, due to their combination of size, athleticism and skill-set. These are the one-and-done guys that have been in mock drafts since they were 15-16 years old. They tend to go to blue-chip schools with a long history of success beyond their current coach where the weather isn't below freezing for nine months of the year.

The guys Syracuse tends to get usually come with a few more flaws. The reason that Boeheim has been so successful is that he recruits guys whose flaws will be minimized by the system he runs. He recruits guys who don't fit positional archetypes - guards stuck between the 1 and 2, forwards stuck between the 3 and 4, big men stuck between the 4 and 5. The pitch is simple. Come play at Syracuse for a few seasons, rack up a whole bunch of statistics, win a whole bunch of games and then get drafted into the NBA. Once you are up there, you are on your own. That's how it goes in this world. All you can ask for is a shot.

Where people have it backwards is they think NCAA coaches prepare guys for the NBA. For the most part they don't. All an NCAA coach can really do is not fuck up a good thing. A lot of basketball players naturally get better between the ages of 18-22, whether they are playing in Europe, the D-League, the NCAA or the NBA. What an NCAA coach can do is put guys in a position to succeed by winning games and designing a system that maximizes their NCAA stats, which is what most NBA teams look for in young prospects. If your coach can't do that, unless you are one of those top 10-15 guys picked as future pros in high school, you are probably going to be out of luck when the NBA comes calling.

The NBA will reach down to smaller schools for stars and big men. If you are a role player, they might as well just draft you from one of the top programs, one of the schools they know regularly churns out NBA-level talent. Everyone puts Syracuse in that category because they win so many games. However, take a look at the Syracuse players drafted since the turn of the millennium and tell me if you notice a trend:

- Jason Hart

- Etan Thomas

- Damone Brown

- Carmelo Anthony

- Hakim Warrick

- Demetris Nichols

- Donte Greene

- Jonny Flynn

- Andy Rautins

- Wesley Johnson

- Kris Joseph

- Fab Melo

- Dion Waiters

- Michael Carter-Williams

- Tyler Ennis

- Jerami Grant

To paraphrase Jay-Z, that's one hot album every ten year average. Most NBA observers look at this list and think that Boeheim isn't preparing guys for the next level. What they aren't seeing is that Boeheim and his players have been systematically defrauding NBA teams that can't see the difference between a player's statistical averages and his skill-set. Does Dion Waiters get drafted at No. 4 overall if he's forced to play man defense in college? More importantly, if Waiters is forced to play man defense for 40 minutes, is his team one of the top teams in the country? 

NBA teams and media observers look at Syracuse players and their success against the top teams in the country and run their numbers through some computer models, thinking they can evaluate Syracuse players in the same way they do guys from Duke and UNC. Syracuse players exist in an alternate reality where a complete inability to play man defense has no effect on their team's ability to win basketball games. When they get to the NBA, the mask slips and the flaws in their game become exposed for the whole world to see. The problem is just as bad in reverse - you have to take anything a guy does against a Syracuse with a massive grain of salt. When Syracuse plays, you can put away the scouting notebook. What you are watching has almost no resemblance to a conventional NBA game.

When Otto Porter dropped 33 points on Syracuse, I knew he would be over-drafted. In a game like that, where he can dribble into open 3's, flash into the high post and cut into open spots behind defenders who aren't actually guarding him, he can look like a superstar. Otto Porter will have a 10+ year career in the NBA but he's never going to live up to be a No. 3 overall pick. If he got to face a 2-3 zone in a bunch of playoff series, that might be a different story.

Syracuse takes advantage of the fact that most NCAA players are not as fundamentally sound as Otto Porter. They don't have the type of patience and feel necessary to pick apart a zone that is attacking them. Most guys come into the NCAA game as products of the AAU system, with only a basic idea of how to play in a half-court game. Play against a team that controls tempo, forces them to execute in the half-court and throws a lot of random traps at them and they lose their minds. From there, Syracuse goes from defense to offense and gets a lot of easy points in transition to make up for the fact that they usually don't have an elite 1-on-1 scorer or playmaker.

It's no coincidence that their two most recent trips to the Final Four coincided with the two best players Boeheim has coached in recent years - Carmelo in 2003 and MCW in 2013. Those guys are the only two Boeheim stars who could have starred for any team in the country. With Syracuse playing their usually stifling defense behind them, Boeheim could give them the ball and count on them to bail out their less talented teammates on offense. It doesn't hurt that it's easy to hide shooters who spread the floor for Melo and MCW in a 2-3 zone.

Why have Melo and MCW been so successful at the next level? Because they have the physical tools and the skill-sets that some of their Syracuse counterparts have lacked. Jonny Flynn was a 6'1 combo guard. Dion Waiters is an undersized 6'4 scoring guard. Wesley Johnson is a 6'7 wing without a ton of offensive skill. Hakim Warrick was a 6'8 combo forward without an NBA position. Etan Thomas was an undersized 6'9 center. What all these guys have in common is they never had the tools to be high-level NBA players, regardless of who was coaching them. The difference is that because they played for Boeheim they were able to make a few million dollars out of unsuspecting NBA teams first.

“[Dion] had nothing to be frustrated about because he was 100 percent wrong,” Boeheim said. He added: “He played no defense last year. Not some. None.”

When you look at it that way, you can see why Boeheim doesn't have a ton of time for critics who blame him for his players lack of success in the NBA. The beauty of the NBA is that its basketball at its highest levels - a guy's individual flaws will be exposed. Your college coach can make you a marginally better shooter, scorer, passer, rebounder or defender by teaching you the basics and forcing you to be accountable but at the end of the day you are who you are in this world. All a coach can do is maximize the God given talent you already have on hand. People expecting Syracuse players to perform as well as Duke or UNC players in the NBA have the entirely wrong idea about what is really going on at the NCAA level.

The other thing NBA fans don't understand is that Boeheim doesn't really care who goes pro and who doesn't at the end of a given season. He would obviously rather have his best players on campus for as long as he can, but he doesn't need them. The guy has won nearly 1,000 NCAA basketball games in his life. His streak of 35+ seasons with at least 20+ wins is an NCAA record. He will be able to figure something out. Were it not for Chris McCullough's season-ending injury, Syracuse would have been right there in the mix for an ACC title, even with Tyler Ennis and Jerami Grant jumping early to the NBA.

Boeheim got a lot of flack for what he said about them but he was just calling it how he saw it. He knows that you only have so many chances at the NBA before teams move on. As soon as you get into the league, the clock starts ticking on your rookie contract. By the end of it, if you can't convince teams you can hack it at a high level, you are off to Europe. The only way you can convince teams is if you get on the floor and put up a bunch of stats and the only way you can do that is by either A) beating out a veteran who doesn't want to give up his job or B) having the team make a substantial financial commitment to you in the form of a high first-round pick.

Ennis was taken at No. 18 overall by the Suns but they never gave him a chance to earn minutes behind Eric Bledsoe, Goran Dragic and Isaiah Thomas. Now he's in Milwaukee and who knows how long he'll be there, given that they also acquired MCW in the same trade and they just cut ties with Brandon Knight even though he was playing at an All-Star level. If Ennis doesn't stick in Milwaukee, even if it has nothing to do with his game, people are going to start asking Q's. The problem with Ennis is that he doesn't have great size or athleticism, which was somewhat hidden in college by the Syracuse zone. He's never going to be great defensively so every aspect of his offensive game should be 100% on point before he comes in the league.

Grant is a different story primarily because he plays for the 76ers, who are trying something that isn't really attempted in the NBA all that often. You can't fault Boeheim for not expecting an NBA team to so fully embrace tanking and draft positioning - it's not something he has seen all that often. Most NBA teams never embrace that type of "commitment to youth" (i.e losing). In his experience, most NBA teams expect fully-formed players than get rid of them when they find out how much work they still need to do. If Grant was playing for any other team in the league, he would be a 2nd round pick at the end of the bench. See: KJ McDaniels in Houston.

If Ennis and Grant had stayed in school, they would be putting up big-ass numbers for a Top 5 team as underclassmen. Boeheim would have went Ennis - Cooney - Grant - McCullough - Christmas and destroyed people. In that scenario, Ennis and Grant are drafted higher than where they were. Neither would have been a senior this season. There was no real rush. Boeheim may have been thinking about himself a little bit but he wasn't some evil villain trying to screw over his own players. He had some pretty solid reasons to think Ennis and Grant should come back. Maybe it works out for them in the NBA or maybe it doesn't. When you have been around as long as Boeheim has, all you can really go by is your experience over 40+ years of being in the business.

Anyone who spends that much time doing anything is going to take the long view. Life becomes a bunch of probabilities - the probability that another team won't make its outside shots, the probability that a bunch of high-level basketball players won't have much interest in taking classes, the probability that the NCAA won't want to ask too many questions about one of its most high-profile programs. Syracuse has lost NCAA Tourney games because the other team shot them out of the gym with Boeheim steadfastly refusing to come out of his zone. He is a smart guy who plays the numbers and plays the odds and that's what this latest scandal comes down too.

The people worrying about his legacy forget that he's a cynic first, a ball coach second and a "leader of young men" third. It's not that he has something against being a father figure and he seems to have a good relationship with guys like Melo. It's that he knows his job is to win and that people don't really care about academic scandals if their team wins enough games. No one in an NBA front office expects Boeheim to teach trigonometry or to make sure his kids don't plagiarize other people's papers. They know that cheating is rampant in college and that it happens at every program and every school in the country. If a young man has no interest in getting an education, there's only so much you can do to force him to get one.

That was the point of his widely mocked defense about how this investigation took longer than the Black Sox. If you start poking around any NCAA coach in the country for 8+ seasons, some shit is going to pop up. Let's be serious for like 2 seconds. The entire system of college basketball is built on a house of lies and everyone knows it. If NCAA investigators went through the academic notes (!!) of every college basketball player and the financial statements of every player's relative, there wouldn't be a high major team in the country that could fill out a roster. We would be looking at a Patriot League vs. Summit League Final Four. Being an NCAA basketball coach is like speeding on a freeway. Everyone is breaking the law so the law can pull over anyone they feel like and hassle them.

Within the world of basketball, Jim Boeheim is a legend because he wins like he was at UNC or Duke despite coaching in the middle of nowhere. A lot of coaches get talked up in the media about their X-and-O ability when they run the same sets as everyone else, have the same offensive and defensive concepts and stick to a very narrow view of how to run a program. The only thing that separates them is the quality of the players they bring to campus. People talk a lot about "thinking outside the box" and "re-inventing the wheel". Jim Boeheim actually did it.

Whether or not his wins are "vacated" by the NCAA doesn't really matter either. They still happened. The NCAA isn't the MIB - they can't actually rewrite history. If you want to know how many games Boeheim won at Syracuse, you can look it up online and it takes like 2 seconds. The NCAA may have the "official history" but anyone whose really into the game of basketball can look up Boeheim's track record, peep game and decide for themselves how good a coach he really was. Joseph Stalin could edit pics and re-write the Russian Revolution all he wanted, people still knew who was there and who wasn't.

Boeheim's wins matter not because of what they say about him as a coach but because of what they mean for the history of Syracuse's basketball program. Basketball is a way of life in that part of the world and that's primarily because Boeheim has won at such a high level for such a long period of time that he has developed one of the biggest fan bases in the country. College basketball is a sport on the fringes of the national consciousness - they can't afford to thumb their noses at any part of the country that actually gives a fuck about what happens between November and February.

People pretend that college sports are popular because of amateurism when the reality is they are popular because we have allowed the professional sports leagues to run cartels that force the vast majority of places in the country to look somewhere else for a "home team". There's no NBA team in Kansas or Northern New York but people in those places are just like people in New York City and Los Angeles - they still want to belong to something bigger than themselves, they still want to root for the good guys against the bad guys and they still want to come together as a community to watch sports at a high level.

That's why Boeheim's job has never actually been in jeopardy - because no one can win at that school like he can win. Syracuse isn't Kentucky or UNC or Duke. They need a professional basketball coach first. They don't need someone whose selling an image. If someone is going to win there, they need to run Boeheim's schemes and recruit Boeheim's players and if he's still up to do it what's the point in changing up? If McCullough can come back at 100% next season, Syracuse should have one of the top teams in the country. It's not like depth is a huge deal at his program either. One of the beauties of running zone is you only have to play 6-7 guys the entire game.

Boeheim's legacy is the 30,000 people who come to the Carrier Dome to watch a bunch of 18-22 year olds play zone defense. That's real. Everything else is just a bunch of make believe.

The Hall of Fame

When Malcolm Butler stepped in front of Russell Wilson's pass a week ago, more was at stake than just whether or not the New England Patriots or the Seattle Seahawks would win the Super Bowl. As we had breathlessly been informed in the run-up to the game, this was really about Tom Brady's quest to win his fourth Super Bowl title and establish a legacy as the greatest QB of all-time. Beating the Seahawks was the only way he could surpass Joe Montana.

I think we all recognize the fundamental unreality at some level. Brady and Montana are individual players in a team sport yet we insist on judging them by the same standards as Federer and Sampras. If there are 53 different players on an NFL roster, how valuable could any one player be, at least in comparison to a sport like tennis? A billion different factors go into the outcome of a game that a QB has absolutely no control of. What if the Seahawks coaching staff had decided to hand the ball off to Marshawn Lynch one more time? What if they hadn't been blessed by a miraculous catch to give them the ball at the 1-yard line a few second before?

No matter how you spin it, though, Brady has been the QB for the dominant team of his era, winning 4 Super Bowl titles, playing in the game 6 times and appearing in the playoffs in every season but one of his 13-year career as a starter.

*Tom Brady wakes up next to Giselle, looks over at the Lombardi trophy* "Is this all there is?"
— RUSS BENGT$ON (@russbengtson) February 2, 2015

When Alexander the Great saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds left to conquer.

Now, with Brady near the end of his journey, the only question is who will be next? What young QB of the next generation will one day join him atop Mount Olympus? Who will lead his team to the most championships? Who will bestow the most glory on all lucky enough to share a stage with him? In the history of the Patriots franchise, these years shall be called the Brady/Belichick era and they will be long remembered for the bountiful harvests of playoff victories they showered upon their devoted followers.

As someone who covers the NBA draft, I watch players at the other end of the process, raw lumps of clay not yet molded into the icons they will become. At last season's McDonald's All-American Game, I spent most of my time watching Karl Towns, Jahlil Okafor and Myles Turner going at each other. At this point, I think it's a pretty safe assumption to say that all three are going to make ungodly sums of money playing professional basketball over the next 10-15 years. The only thing they need to worry about is developing their games, staying healthy and not getting into too much trouble off the court. In the grand scheme of things, life is pretty good for guys who have been blessed with that type of size, coordination and athleticism.

In the world of the NBA draft, though, they are kept in a constant state of insecurity, as their value as basketball players - and ultimately their self-worth - is in a state of limbo depending on their most recent performance. Are they worthy of being taken at No. 1? No. 5? In the lottery? Where is their draft stock at this exact moment? What can they do to make it go up or down?

We treat the whole thing as if they are political candidates running for office. In order for Jahlil to go No. 1 overall, he will need to put up big numbers on a Duke team that makes the Final Four. If Towns is going to have a chance, Kentucky will likely need to go 40-0 while outplaying Jahlil in an NCAA Tournament game. Turner never had much of a chance given the team around him and the flaws of his campaign manager (Rick Barnes). What does it matter how good a candidate is if he doesn't have the team around him that can put him in a position to succeed?

Even once they have achieved stardom in the NBA, are they allowed to be content or be satisfied for even a moment? No. Being content, we are told, is the enemy. You have to constantly manufacture slights against yourself in order to reach ever greater heights of self-actualization. The greatest players must live in constant fear of whether or not they are respected by their peers, the fans and the basketball industry in general. What exactly does Damian Lillard have to do to get everyone's respect!? Nevermind that he was just in the All-Star Game last season. For him to be recognized as one of the greatest players in the NBA, he requires ever constant validation lest doubts and whispers start to emerge.

The result is a world where the greatest athletes can never humbly accept all they have been given and can never really be happy for the accomplishments of their peers. The world of awards is a zero-sum game - there can only be one No. 1 overall pick, one MVP and one GOAT.

No matter how many All-Star appearances you make, it is never enough. Kobe Bryant has been to 15 All-Star Games yet the biggest story surrounding him coming into the season is where he was voted on in the Big Board of Life aka NBA Rank. Instead of wondering how he would be able to stay healthy all season after seeing his last two seasons ended by injury, people were obsessing about whether Kobe would be able to prove his doubters wrong. Don't they understand that Kobe isn't human?

As it turns out, he was. Basketball players are just human beings like everyone else and they have the same types of issues that everyone else has except they have more money and people are constantly sticking cameras and microphones in their face in order to ask impossibly mundane questions about the most basic aspects of their job. The disconnect comes when we are confronted by the difference between the image of them we have built up in our minds and the reality of who they actually are. This is what most of Jay-Z's (aka Jay Hova aka The God MC) songs are about. This is what happens with every man who becomes President. First they love you then they hate you then they love you again. It's the gift and the curse.

How will you remembered when your career is over? For the guys at the highest levels of the game, everything is building towards one final judgment, when their fans weigh it all, good and bad, in order to determine whether or not they are worthy of the ultimate honor. Who will be on Mount Rushmore?

In a lot of ways, Hall of Fame voting resembles the process of sanctification in the Catholic Church. Which of these historic figures should be elevated to Godhood? It's the ultimate merit badge, the shiniest gold sticker. The mark on the resume of their life that elevates them above mere mortals in order so that we may have an inspiration to strive towards. The difference is the Church is elevating people who renounced their worldly possessions, changed the lives of thousands of people and died for their faith instead of guys who use a lot of performance enhancing drugs to hit a lot of baseballs really far for a long time.

History has judged Pete Rose as it will soon judge Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez. All the money they made, all the records they broke and all the games they won - what would any of it mean if they didn't have a plaque in an office building in a small town in upstate New York? We can be sad for the legacies they have thrown away but we can never forget their own hubris is what prevented them from ascending to Olympus. The Gods of Baseball have cast them aside, forcing them to spend the rest of their wretched lives wandering the Earth while performing acts of penance and atonement in the hope that one day mercy will be shown on their souls.

When someone makes the Hall of Fame, we always want to ask them - what does it feel like? A former athlete is a former athlete, no matter what they did in their playing career. I went to school with a few brothers whose dad played for the Dallas Cowboys for three seasons, The Dallas Cowboys! All of the kids were in awe of him. Just by making it that far, he had already won the game of life. How does it feel to have your ego validated on the ultimate level? I imagine it feels pretty good for awhile and then you kind of get used to it.

For guys like Kobe and LeBron, the biggest carrot of them all is dangled in front of them. Forget the Hall of Fame. They could be better than Jordan. They could transcend mortality and achieve Godhood in the flesh as the Greatest Of All Time, the best there ever was and the best there ever will be. We must consult the ancient myths and legends - everything they do, everything they say, everything they are - it must all be compared to the Jordan standard. Is it something Jordan would do? Jordan would never team up with his greatest rivals. Jordan would never pass the ball in the final moments. Jordan would never subtweet his teammates. Well, he probably would have done that.

In this telling of the story, the city of Cleveland has been wandering through the desert for more than 40 years in search of the Promised Land. In their hearts, they were starting to wander if they would ever get there or if they were forever destined to fall short, the victims of some tragic curse. They couldn't go back and they couldn't go forward. Had they been lied too all this time? Did they live in a world where God kept his promises? Did they live in a world where God even existed?

LeBron leaving Cleveland was Moses abandoning Israel, deciding the only way he could overcome the enemies who were guarding the way to the land of milk and honey was by leading a different people, a people with more money and more cosmopolitan tastes. Or maybe LeBron was just a 26-year old who wanted to live in Miami with his friends for a few years. Then, when he got older and started thinking about where he wanted to raise his kids, he decided to move back home. It's all how you want to look at it.

The ultimate standard for any player is he a guy I will tell my grandkids about? Is he a guy with a timeless game, a game good enough to transcend his era and be passed down as folk tales to people who had never seen him play? MJ, Kobe, LeBron - maybe our grandkids will care about those guys and maybe they won't. We care about Babe Ruth. We don't really care about Jack Johnson. Will their grandkids care? And their grandkids? Soon enough, the basketball players of the NBA become the gladiators of Rome. Who was the best chariot racer in the Byzantine Empire?

What would I ask to the greatest athlete during the reign of Justinian The Great? I don't think I would ask him about his greatest chariot race. I'd probably ask him about how life back then was. Kanye West asked Paul McCartney if pussy tasted different in the 1960's. What is there to ask really? At a certain level, it's all the same. Nothing ever really changes.

The actions of 2015 matter a ton from the perspective of 2050, a good amount from the perspective of 2150 and a small amount from the perspective of 2650. We are a society constantly worried about the judgment of History - we sit in judgment of History and we do not wish to be judged so ourselves. The key fact to remember isn't the fact that History is written from the perspective of the winners. It's that it isn't really written at all. From the perspective of 4150, the actions of the year 2015 might as well not exist. From the perspective of 8000, they won't. Ancient Egypt has a history that stretches back thousands of years. The Jews were slaves in Egypt longer than the United States has been a country.

Maybe global warming or nuclear winter or The Singularity will change everything. People have always looked for signs of the apocalypse. For a society of narcissists, the only thing worse than thinking the world is going to end is knowing that it will keep right on spinning without us. All the world is a stage, everyone is a player and they all have their entrances and their exits. The music cuts, the light comes off, you get gently ushered off the stage and someone else takes your spot. Your entire career becomes a one-minute TV ad.

"Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!" 

What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun? Generations come and generations go but the Earth remains forever. No one remembers the former generations and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them. 

I denied myself nothing my eyes desired, I refused my heart no pleasure. My heart took delight in all my labor, and this was the reward for all my toil. Yet when I surveyed all my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind. Nothing was gained under the sun. 

The fate of the fool will overtake me also. What then do I gain by being wise? This too is meaningless. For the wise, like the fool, will not be long remembered. The days have already come when both have been forgotten. Like the fool, the wise too must die!

That was written over 2,000 years ago yet it remains as true now as it will be 2,000 years from now. We are only this Earth a short amount of time and nothing we do here really matters. It's all going away one day. Make whatever peace you can with that fact but don't pretend there's some tragic nobility in striving towards an impossible goal. There is no such thing as immortality. Not for athletes. Not for kings. Not for any of us. From dust we came and from dust we shall return.

My name is Oyzmandias, King of Kings: Look upon my works, ye mighty, and Despair!

The Big Board Problem

Not too long ago, a few Redditors doing the Lord's work noticed Chad Ford's big boards on ESPN Insider changing retroactively. There was a ghost in the machine, moving players who had done well in the NBA up his draft boards and knocking down guys who had done poorly. Just like that, Ford has been on Giannis the whole time, putting him at No. 9 despite his lack of a track record either at the club level or in major international tournaments. It was history in Soviet Russia all over again, with enemies of the state wiped from the record books as if they had never even existed.

The difference is no one actually cared whether Ford nailed all of his picks on the Big Board. It just doesn't make a lot of sense - is the reward of a negligible improvement to your reputation worth the risk of being discovered as someone who doesn't have the integrity to stand by your predictions? Nor has ESPN been very forthcoming. All they have told us is that A) Ford denies doing it and B) they have no way to know who changed the rankings. Ford has made no public comments about the controversy and he has continued writing articles as if nothing had happened.

The message is clear. Nothing to see here, move along. I would love to hear Ford's side of the story, but my guess is we never will. Here's why - no matter what he says, it would look really, really bad for ESPN. Since we know for a fact the rankings were altered by someone within the organization, there are only three things he could say.

1) Someone below him did it without his knowledge.

So chad ford is arguing for the existence of friendly secret helper gnomes who sneak around and make you look better without you knowing?
— jay caspian kang (@jaycaspiankang) January 26, 2015

2) He did it.

A moment of weakness becomes an addiction, a compulsive habit that he can't break despite the insane risks he was taking? Or perhaps he thought he couldn't be caught? He has been around long enough he might not realize how much the internet has changed. Did the Way Way Back Machine exist when he first started covering the draft?

The problem with admitting this is that it destroys his credibility as a reporter. If he is willing to lie on something so small purely out of a sense of vanity, how can we trust him not to lie on other things he is writing? Most of his job is quoting people anonymously. Who knows what people are really saying to him? How could we ever check? If we aren't taking Chad Ford at his word, there's really no reason to ever listen to anything he says. That's what I keep coming back too - the risk/reward for pulling anything like this is totally out of whack. Stephen Glass was pushing an agenda and Jayson Blair was too lazy to actually do any reporting. Ford has been doing the work. Why put his job and his reputation on the line?

 Then I saw this report in Deadspin:

That means just about anyone, including Chad Ford, could have modified his rankings without leaving a trail. The motivation? As an ESPN Insider writer, Chad Ford has significant incentive to have his track record be—or merely appear to be—as accurate as possible. While to casual fans this sort of prognostication may seem silly and a waste of time, to industry experts and hardcore NBA wonks the best predictions are worth the money, and we're told Chad Ford drives a lot of ESPN's Insider revenue. [emphasis added] That would make it worth the while of anyone with a vested interest in Insider's success to tamper with Ford's records.

If Chad Ford is going to say he didn't do it, that leaves only one explanation for how the rankings were changed. And you can see why he won't be allowed to give that explanation.

3) Did someone above Chad Ford edit his rankings?

Here's the other way to ask that question - just how far does the rabbit hole go? This is the point in the story where the trail goes cold. If there's a conspiracy, there's no incentive for anyone within the conspiracy to talk. Unless we are going to go all Woodward and Bernstein on ESPN, there's really no way for any of us to find out. When you try to make sense of it, all you are left with is the final scene in Burn After Reading.



It's a Schrodinger's Cat problem. Either A) Ford did it or B) one of his bosses did it, but you have no way to collapse the equation and find out. You don't want to operate as if either one is true because you want to believe the best out of A and B.

Like most under-30 basketball writers, I grew up reading Chad Ford. I want to believe him. I have never met him, but he seems like a nice enough guy.

Conversely, if higher-ups at ESPN are doing this and then letting their employees take the fall in the public eye .... what is there to say? Everyone at the media wants to work for ESPN. They are the Evil Empire. They have all the money. They are one of the only organizations still hiring. In the world of sports media, they are holding every key and guarding every door. In essence, you either play ball with ESPN or you become an un-person.

There's only one way to collapse the equation. Ask yourself this question - does it even matter who changed the rankings? Whenever there is a breakdown in a large bureaucracy, when some of the dirt that happens behind closed doors slips into the public eye, there's always a rush to find a scapegoat. Who is responsible? Who is abusing their authority? Where are the bad apples and how do we get rid of them? Maybe the problem isn't any of the players in the bureaucracy. Maybe the problem is the bureaucracy itself.

That was the theme of The Wire. In David Simon's telling, our institutions - whether it's the police force, the education system, the newspaper or your friendly local neighborhood crack gang - are the Greek Gods of our era, hurdling down thunderbolts and immune to any of our efforts to reform them. In his version of Baltimore, it wouldn't matter if you changed every detective and every teacher and every politician and every newspaper reporter. The system itself would keep on going on. McNulty becomes Sidnour, Avon becomes Marlo, Omar becomes Mike, Bubbs becomes Dukie, Royce becomes Carcetti.

ESPN wants you to focus on whether or not Ford has enough integrity to do his job for the same reason they want you to focus on whether or not Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith have finally crossed the line on First Take. It's the same reason the NFL wants you to worry about whether or not Roger Goodell lied about Ray Rice. If only we had a good commissioner, the media tells us, if only we had a strong commissioner who could investigate these things further, then we would have some justice in the NFL. Down with Goodell! Can't the owners see what a terrible job he is doing?

Of course, the converse of that question is whether the owners would even want someone who is more "effective" than Goodell in office. Would Robert Kraft really be fine with Adam Silver grilling every member of the Patriots organization up and down about Deflategate? Or would he rather have someone who isn't going to ask the tough questions, someone who knows when to back off without even having to be asked? Why do you think Goodell is being paid $45 million dollars? To do his job or not to do his job?

Does Goodell think he should take a pay cut? "That's up to the owners. They evaluate my compensation every year. I don't argue."
— Manish Mehta (@MMehtaNYDN) January 30, 2015

Translation: I'll take anyone's money if they just GIVING it away.

The question isn't whether or not Skip Bayless is an asshole. If Skip Bayless didn't exist, ESPN would have had to invent him. Which is funny because that's basically what they did. Without ESPN, Skip is a local sports columnist trying to fill the airtime on his 3-hour call-in radio show. Without ESPN, Chad Ford is a college professor in Hawaii who likes to watch a lot of college basketball. If someone else took their jobs, would it really look all that different? If ESPN Insider needs their NBA Draft expert to generate a lot of subscriptions, he had better be accurate.

An actor reading a script. 

Here's a thought experiment to illustrate Ford's dilemma. Let's make a Big Board of the 2011 draft and compare it to where guys were actually drafted:

1. Kawhi Leonard (No. 15)
2. Klay Thompson (No. 11)
3. Kyrie Irving (No. 1)
4. Jimmy Butler (No. 30)
5. Jonas Valanciunas (No. 5)
6. Nik Vucevic (No. 16)
7. Tobias Harris (No. 19)
8. Markieff Morris (No. 13)
9. Kenneth Faried (No. 22)
10. Chandler Parsons (No. 38)
11. Brandon Knight (No. 9)
12. Kemba Walker (No. 8)
13. Donatas Motiejunas (No. 20)
14. Nikola Mirotic (No. 23)
15. Reggie Jackson (No. 26)
16. Alec Burks (No. 13)
17. Enes Kanter (No. 3)
18. Tristan Thompson (No. 4)
19. Marcus Morris (No. 14)
20. Iman Shumpert (No. 17)

For starters, NBA teams clearly haven't figured out all there is to know about the draft. This is not an easy thing to do.

I'm not saying this is in anyway the definitive list. If you put a gun to my head, this isn't the list I would make, but that isn't the point. Make your own list and you will start to see how difficult an exercise this is. What are we judging on? What they have done in the last 4 years or what they will do in the next 4 years? Is there even a difference? Tobias Harris is still only 22 years old. Nikola Mirotic is in his first season in the NBA. Are we really ready to put a ceiling on their game? How will this list look a year from now?

A year ago, not many people would have Klay at No. 2 or Jimmy B at No. 4. A year from now, maybe Kyrie is the 2nd wheel on the defending champs. Maybe Reggie Jackson goes to New York and becomes an All-Star. Maybe Terrence Jones never stays healthy and Donatas Motiejunas develops into a 15-8 player on a championship contender or maybe Jones gets his starting job back and D-Mo starts bouncing around the NBA as a shooting PF who comes off the bench. Always in motion is the future.

For that matter, what are we even ranking anyway? Is Markieff Morris a better player than Jonas Valanciunas or Brandon Knight? Would I want the two-way shooting PF, the solid young C who isn't elite at any one thing or the first option PG who needs to be hid on defense? Well, it would probably depend on the rest of my roster. That's like trying to compare a FS with a LT or a QB with an OLB. These guys play completely different positions and they have completely different responsibilities so there's really no way to say definitively which one you would want on your team. Then people will say - what about in a vacuum? So we are speaking hypothetically? How exactly are we supposed to come to a resolution on hypothetical arguments?

What is #NBARank if not an attempt to create a Big Board for the entire NBA? Does anyone feel super proud of what we've done with that? Besides the people whose job it is to boost the number of clicks that ESPN's NBA section gets?

I could talk about the problems with NBA Rank all day, but in the interests of time, let's go with the Kevin Love example. What's Kevin Love's NBA Rank when he is the primary option in Minnesota? What's his NBA Rank when he is the third option in Cleveland? Do you ever wonder if there are players in the NCAA who are stuck in a Kevin Love in Cleveland situation? Look at how Chris Bosh's numbers have gone up now that he is not on a super-team in Miami. John Calipari builds a super-team at Kentucky every year.

Furthermore, if we can't come to a consensus on grown men who we have more than a decade's worth of data on at the highest levels of the sport, how exactly are we supposed to do the same exercise for 18-19 years olds with 1-2 years worth of statistics in vastly different situations, all of whom are still growing on and off the court into the players and the people they will become?

If you did a Big Board of each draft class at the end of every season in the NBA, how long would it take until things finally started to shake out? Year 4? Year 5? Year 6? A lot of guys are coming into the league at 18-19-20 and not peaking until they are 26-27 years old. I'm not sure you would have a 100% solid consensus until Year 8-9-10.

So what are we to do? Is there any way to sift out the pieces of gold from all the dirt that is caught in the wash?

What you want to do is look for the things that hold constant over time, that don't change every season as young players get new teammates and new coaches and get put into new roles on new teams at different levels of the game. How big is he? How tall is he? How long are are his arms? How well can he shoot the ball? How well can he dribble? How does his handle hold up against ball pressure? Can he run off screens and consistently knock down catch-and-shoot jumpers? What type of defense can he play? Does he have the speed to hang with NBA players on the perimeter? The size to play with them at the front of the rim? In short, what are his tools?

Tools change over time, but they change at a much slower rate. Guys don't just become great jump-shooters - that takes a ton of dedication and a ton of work and possibly some luck. There are some guys who work their asses off at trying to be a better shooter and it never happens for them. It's the same when it comes to handling the ball, reading the floor, defending a position at an NBA level and having a nose for the basketball on the glass.

In the stock market, this would be called investing on the fundamentals. That's what Warren Buffet does. When you have as much money as Warren Buffet, you aren't really thinking short when it comes to the market. You are thinking real long. You are trying to make the long term play based on the underlying assets of a given corporation, the type of market they are in and the demand for the product they are selling over the next decade.

Mr. Large Sample Size

Say what you want about how Chad Ford covers the NBA draft, but I think we can all agree that he doesn't cover it like Warren Buffet. Whose stock is up? Whose stock is down? Will the big game change how we view a prospect? Did the big game change how we view a prospect? What are the latest rumors? Who likes a guy? Who doesn't like a guy? If you follow every twist and turn of the NBA draft board, guys are going from underrated to overrated to back to underrated in the span of a few months.

Does Warren Buffet need 7 mock drafts between when the season ends in March and the draft happens in June? The information isn't changing. The data is there and you can make of it what you will. All that's changing is the amount of noise around it.

Here's a fun game - try to be the Chad Ford of your fantasy league next season. See how well that goes over. No one really wants to give away their draft strategy. If everyone knew what they were going to do, they would have to change it. More importantly, the draft is a chaotic system - a butterfly flaps its wings and halfway across the world starts a hurricane etc. All it takes is for one team at the top of the draft to make an unexpected pick and the entire dynamic changes. If Chad Ford was given the chance to predict who a team would take right before they made the pick, he would do pretty well. Cleveland stuns everyone and takes Anthony Bennett at No. 1 and the entire thing is fucked. Think of all the man hours it took to assemble all those mock drafts and you could throw them out 5 minutes after the draft started.

All that chatter, all those web chats, all those Sportscenter hits, all those feature tabs on the home page on ESPN with every rumor, it was all a bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing. There's only so much you can learn from covering the draft that way. There's only so much you can learn from covering anything that way.

This is a lot funnier if you pretend it's Louis CK doing a bit.

It's just like Bernie Madoff. Why does anyone cook the books? Because they don't have confidence in the product they are selling. That's the thing you have to understand about making a Big Board. The only way to get the questions right is to fill them in after you see the answers.

The Spread Revolution

When Mike Leach came to Texas Tech in 2000, no one knew what to expect. Tech had never been a huge football power in the state and they had struggled mightily since the formation of the Big 12 in 1996. They seemed condemned to mediocrity, stuck in the same division with two of the most storied programs in the history of college football and Texas A&M (boom, roasted) and without the resources to compete with the Joneses. The biggest problem for Tech was their location in the dusty oil town of Lubbock, located literally in the middle of nowhere and far away from the main recruiting areas in the state - Houston, Dallas and the I-35 corridor from Austin to San Antonio. A coach at Texas Tech had an uphill battle get the same type of players as his competitors.

If there's a bright spot at the center of the universe, we're at the place that's farthest from it.

Leach came with a palpable buzz - he was the OC at Kentucky where Tim Couch broke a bunch of records to become the No. 1 pick in the 1998 NFL draft (more on him later) and he was the OC at OU who helped Bob Stoops put the program back on the program. They won a national title the year after he left with Josh Heupel at QB, another decorated NCAA player who never lived up to expectations at the next level. Leach was known as an offensive guru, a guy who would spread out other teams and pick them apart with passing. They played "basketball on grass".



Me and my college roommates used to have epic Madden marathons where we would be in 4 WR shotgun the whole game, chucking the ball around. For the most part, if it was even close, you were going for it on every 4rth down. Mike Leach had turned football into a video game and the craziest part of all was that it worked. All of a sudden, Texas Tech became the one team none of the big boys in the conference wanted to face. They played such a unique style of football that it forced you to adapt to them and gave them a chance regardless of the disparities in talent.

Kliff Kingsbury, whom you might know now as the most handsome coach in college football, was the only one of his QB's to be drafted. It didn't take long for NFL teams to figure out that it really didn't matter who Leach had behind center. In a sport where finding good QB play sometimes seemed like a borderline miracle, Leach was churning out passing machines on an almost annual basis. Were it not for their names, it would be hard to tell most of them apart:

Everyone wants to act like football coaches are secret geniuses, but what Leach was doing was fairly simple. If you look at the highlights from his games, not many of his WR's were getting double covered. Leach had four guys running routes who were attacking vertically and horizontally, so he was putting the defense in a tremendous of space. From there, once one of his guys won their 1-on-1 match-up, the QB was supposed to get the ball out very quickly.

This had three important advantages for Texas Tech, a team that was usually punching up when it comes to future NFL talent.

1) They didn't need QB's with big arms (i.e big recruits)
2) They didn't need OL who could dominate 1-on-1 match-ups
3) They didn't need WR's who could dominate against the elite CB's on the outside. Leach's teams would kill you from the slot and force you to field 4 competent DB's all game long. Since most of the best athletes want to play WR, Leach had a pretty good chance of winning those match-ups against second and third string DB's, even without the best recruits.

Most importantly of all, the decision making process of the QB was simplified. He didn't have to take the ball from under center, drop back 5-7 steps and read a very complex route down the field before stepping into a throw with a 300 pound defensive lineman running at his face. Instead, the QB stayed 5-7 feet behind the line of scrimmage, surveyed the field rapidly and got rid of the ball as soon as he saw an open man in front of him.

Another benefit of making a lot of quick passes was the pace Tech could play at. Since there weren't a ton of collisions to untangle at the line of scrimmage, they could snap the ball quickly and get back in play. As a result, they always kept the opposing defense on their heels and forced them to simplify their defensive calls. You couldn't have Rob Ryan diagramming some exotic zone blitz for a bunch of 19-20 year olds who barely knew what was going on and were struggling to catch their breathe as Texas Tech relentlessly pressed the ball at them.

They never were able to win the Big 12, but they got awfully close a few times, waging some Titanic battles with OU and UT in the process. The Big 12 South when Stoops and Mack Brown were in their primes was a lot like the SEC West today - the best teams in that division were competing for a national title pretty much every season. In his last five years at Texas Tech, Leach had as good a run as any in school history - 9-3, 8-5, 9-4, 11-2, 8-4. The problem for them, and the recurring knock on his program, was their defense.

Was Leach's style of play and overall aggressiveness conducive to playing great defense? Most defensive-minded coaches preferred to play more conservatively, holding the ball and limiting the number of possessions for the other team. Leach didn't care how many possessions you got because he was pretty sure he was going to score when he had the ball. The reality is that Leach never had the athletes at Texas Tech to play high level defense in the Big 12 - that would require fielding a defacto NFL farm team on that side of the ball like Texas and OU. Leach was having to make do with two, three and occasional four star recruits and there was only so much they were going to do to stop guys like Vince Young and Adrian Peterson.

Nevertheless, the charge of him not caring about defense hung around him. What didn't help matters was his brash and fairly imperious attitude. Leach was the kind of guy who always had to be the smartest guy in the room and he made more than his few share of enemies in Lubbock. Being the head football coach at a big state school in Texas is a lot like being the head of one of the great houses in Game of Thrones - there is constant politicking going on at every level of the program and being a politician who knew when to bite his tongue was never Leach's strong suit.

It's still not entirely clear exactly why Leach ended up getting ousted in 2009. There was a guy in a locked room, a candidate for the Texas Senate and a series of contentious lawsuits over money. SI has all the gory details - even for the world of college football, it was pretty crazy stuff.

After a few years in purgatory, Leach wound up at Washington State, where he's trying to pull an equally difficult rebuilding project than the one in Lubbock, if not more so. The big difference this time around is that everyone is using his principles. He's no longer running a contrarian offense. Oregon, the big player in that part of the world, has taken the spread offense to a whole different level in terms of tempo and the caliber of athletes they are using. They are using Leach's principles with big-tine athletes and they are winning at a level he never could.

It's the same story across the country. From Ohio State to Oregon, TCU, Baylor, Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Auburn and Texas A&M, most of the top teams in the country are running offenses based on uptempo spread principles. There are still plenty of teams running pro-style offenses, from Florida State to Alabama, but they are starting to be the new contrarians at the highest levels of the game. To be sure, this is a fairly simplistic dichotomy and all offenses exist on a continuum, but the broader point remains. Mike Leach may never won a championship, but the revolution is over. The principles he represents have already won.

***

When Mike D'Antoni took over as the interim coach in Phoenix in 2003, few knew much about him. After making the playoffs with a promising young core of Stephon Marbury, Amare Stoudemire and Shawn Marion the year before, injuries had knocked the Suns out of the playoff race and it cost Frank Johnson his job. MDA pretty much played out the string for the rest of the season, not getting to install his system until the following season. The Suns signed Steve Nash that summer and you probably know what happened from there.

Like Texas Tech, the Suns were never quite able to get over the hump against their two main rivals - losing to Tim Duncan's Spurs and Dirk Nowitzki's Mavs in the WCF. Like Leach, MDA was endlessly criticized for his offensive-minded approach even though he never had the players to form a great defense. Just like Leach, MDA has to sit there and listen to people act like he's a gimmick coach while his offensive schemes take over the sport. The Kobe/Pau Lakers were the last NBA champions to not crib liberally from what the D'Antoni did with the Suns.

The spread pick-and-roll, like Leach's Air Raid offense, was based on a few fairly simple concepts.

1) Instead of trying to pound the ball into the paint where the other team's biggest defenders are, MDA's teams elected to open up the floor and force the defense to move in space. The inside run is the post-up, the 8-year slant is the pick-and-roll.

2) MDA's system didn't require the hardest player in basketball to find - the elite low post center who could command a double team in the paint. There's no better offense than the Triangle to take advantage of a guy like Shaq. The problem is there aren't many guys like Shaq out there. Similarly, if you are Alabama and you can line up a five-star prospect at all five offensive line positions, there's no need to over-complicate what you are doing. If you are Auburn or Mississippi State, you need to figure out some way to level the playing field.

3) The key with both offenses is that it simplifies the decision-making process of the guy with the ball in his hands. When you are running a pick-and-roll against a spread floor, the decision-making process is pretty easy. If the defense switches, attack. If the defense goes under, shoot the jumper. If the defense extends out, hit the roll man. If the defense sends help, get the ball to one of the shooters and they rotate it for an open shot. No matter what the defense does, they have to give up something.

4) The converse of that is guys running conventional offenses have to make plays in tighter windows. You hear that all the time about NCAA QB's - do they know the difference between NCAA open and NFL open? In the NBA, all you have to do is look at the amount of space that Mike Conley plays in with the Grit N Grind Grizzlies verses the amount of space that Steph Curry and Klay Thompson have in Golden State. Conley is being asked to cut through rush hour traffic. Curry and Klay are cruising down open lanes on the highway.

5) Here's the most important point of all. If it's easier to be QB/PG in the spread offense that means that the talent pool of guys who could play QB/PG is much wider than we had previously imagined. The spread isn't making guys look better than they actually are - the spread is changing the way we have to evaluate the position entirely.

This concept is pretty easy to grasp when Leach is turning 2 and 3 star recruits into 5,000+ yard passers at Texas Tech. However, when a coach like Urban Meyer does it with big-time recruits at Florida and Ohio State, we still have a tendency to pin everything on the QB even though Meyer's offenses have a long record of churning out record-setting numbers pretty much regardless of whose behind center.

Let's consider Tim Tebow aka the greatest QB in the history of college football. After watching him in the NFL, are we really so sure it was his indomitable will that was leading Florida to those national titles? Not running behind Mike and Maurkice Pouncey, who are now two of the best interior linemen in the NFL? Not throwing the ball to Aaron Hernandez and Percy Harvin? Chris Leak, not Tebow, was the starting QB for Florida when they won their first national title in 2006. I'll submit to you that you would have to be a pretty garbage QB to not win 10+ games a year in Meyer's system with that type of personnel.

 Can't wait for the 30 for 30 on that team.

Remember when Ohio State was doomed when they lost Braxton Miller for the season? Remember when they had no chance without JT Barrett? Cardale Jones was their third string QB - surely no one could have three QB's that good on their roster! Look at their passing numbers at OSU and try to tell me they weren't all replaceable cogs in the Urban Meyer Machine:

Braxton Miller (2013) - 2,094 yards, 24 TD's and 6 INT's on 63.5% completion percentage
JT Barrett (2014) - 2,834 yards, 34 TD's and 7 INT's on 64.6% completion percentage
Cardale Jones (2014) - 860 yards, 7 TD's and 2 INT's on 60.9 completion percentage

Teams running a pro-style offense are devastated by the loss of their QB. For a team running the spread, it's kind of like losing an OG. Plug the next guy in and keep it moving. My first thought when I saw Cardale Jones getting NFL talk was how many high school QB's could play in the NFL if only they got the chance to play for Urban Meyer, run his system and put up a whole bunch of stats on national TV? Remember Tim Couch, No. 1 overall pick in 1998? He probably doesn't get drafted in the first day if he's not playing for Mike Leach. Here's Chris Brown at Grantland going over this idea in more detail when he talks about "the democratization of the QB position".

What's funny is that everyone in Texas was freaking out about how Urban could have 3 good QB's and we don't have any. Maybe instead of focusing on the personality quirks of 18-19 years olds we could look at the offensive structure they have been put it? Maybe the system they are being put into is dysfunctional? Here's my guess - Cardale Jones would have really struggled behind the garbage offensive line that UT had this season and then everyone would have been like, wow Mack Brown really didn't know anything about evaluating QB's, how come he didn't recruit Hot QB Prospect A who wound up at Ohio State?

At TCU, they kept the QB (Trevone Boykin) and changed the system, bringing in Sonny Cumbie, one of Leach's old QB's at Texas Tech, to install an Air Raid inspired offense. Take a wild guess as to what happened:

Boykin (2013) - 1,198 passing yards, 7 TD's and 7 INT's on 59.7% completion percentage
Boykin (2014) - 3,091 passing yards, 33 TD's and 10 INT's on 61.2% completion percentage

I wonder if there have been any dramatic turn-arounds like that in the NBA recently? Let's take a look at what Brandon Jennings and DJ Augustin were doing in Detroit before and after they got rid of Josh Smith and began running the spread pick-and-roll:

In the Pistons first game without Jennings, DJ Augustin went for 35 points, 4 rebounds and 8 assists against a Toronto team that cut him the year before. I'm a big Kyle Lowry fan but it's pretty obvious that he got outplayed in that game by a guy who was an NBA journeyman a few years ago. It's not because DJ is better than Lowry - it's because the game is a lot easier for him. How many points and assists would Lowry have running the P/R with Drummond? More importantly, how many PG's are out there could run that play with him at a high level? The Pistons got 2 points and 2 assists from Spencer Dinwiddie (a rookie 2nd round pick from Colorado coming off an ACL injury) in 11 minutes against Toronto.

Maybe the reason there are so many good PG's in the NBA is because it has never been easier to put up big offensive statistics at the position than ever before? Maybe Jeremy Lin succeeded with MDA in New York for the same reason that all those QB's succeeded with Mike Leach at Texas Tech - because it would have been almost impossible not too. I like Jeremy Lin and I think he's an NBA player, but you can't tell me there aren't a number of guys in the D-League who could put up numbers like he does if given the same opportunity.

It don't take genius-level PG play to throw alley oops to Tyson Chandler just like it doesn't take a high-level NFL QB to hit Michael Crabtree on a 7-yard slant. The key with the spread offense is that it isn't about the guy throwing the ball, it's about the guy catching it. He's the one who has to make the 1-on-1 play and get open or force the defense to send an extra man and leave someone else open. All the decision-maker has to do is read his receiver and make the right play.

In case you have forgotten (and Texas fans never will), here's the biggest play in Leach's tenure at Texas Tech:



Everyone looks at the success of the New England Patriots with Tom Brady and a bunch of different WR's and says oh Brady can make anyone WR look good. Well the reverse is just as true. There are a lot of guys like Graham Harrell out there. There aren't many Michael Crabtrees. There are many guys who could be Brandon Jennings, but there's only one Andre Drummond.

In the 21rst century, QB's and PG's are becoming increasingly replaceable. That's the end point of the spread revolution.

Jason Kidd: The Player Coach

When Jason Kidd took over as the coach of the Brooklyn Nets, the outrage was palpable. Unlike former players like Brian Shaw and Patrick Ewing, Kidd never paid his dues as an assistant. He went directly from playing to running an NBA team, almost as if he were thumbing his nose at the very idea of coaching experience. Everything he needed to know as a coach, Kidd seemed to be saying, came from his 20 years as an NBA player.

And while most new coaches are given young or rebuilding teams with little chance of winning right away, Kidd received the type of cushy job that veteran coaches think they are entitled too - taking over a 49-win team with a $100 million payroll that had expectations of winning immediately. 

The moment that everyone remembers from those first few weeks was the infamous soda incident, when Kidd was captured on camera telling reserve guard Tyshawn Taylor to knock over his cup during a stoppage in play. The Nets were out of timeouts in the final minute and Kidd needed to draw up a play, which the time needed to clean up the mess would allow him to do. He was eventually fined by the league and widely blasted for his unprofessional conduct:

It was something no other coach in the league would have done. Kidd was bending the rules in an almost ludicrous fashion, doing everything in his power to help his team win. As a Mavericks fan, my mind instantly went to a play he made against Mike Woodson in a regular-season game in 2010:



I've watched a lot of NBA basketball in my life and I've seen a ton of coaches walk onto a court, but I've never quite seen anything like that. Jason Kidd thinks the game at such a high level that he sees things no one else does. He's a ruthless competitor who will do whatever it takes to win, even if it means stepping on other people's toes - literally, in the case of Woodson.

With the Nets struggling to integrate all their new players in the first month of the season and the media circus around the team escalating, Kidd knew he needed to do something to let everyone know that he was the one in charge. Many people seemed to believe he was nothing but an empty suit being used by Mikhail Prokhorov to sell tickets while Lawrence Frank, his former coach with the Nets, was the one doing all the actual coaching.

"Writing daily reports" is a great euphemism for firing someone. He won't be coming into the office anymore; he's writing me daily reports.
— Jonathan Tjarks (@JonathanTjarks) December 13, 2013

That's where the infamous daily reports came from. Kidd felt that Frank was undermining his authority so he laid down the law and banished him from the team. However, Frank was still drawing a paycheck and Kidd wanted his basketball insight, so he made him write book reports about the Nets and other teams. Did he read all of them? Probably not. However, I'm sure he perused them from time-to-time and it's not like Frank could complain, given how much money he was making to be a glorified blogger.

For most people around the league, including the many who wanted Kidd to fail, this was further proof of his inability to manage people or handle all the demands of an NBA head coaching job, especially in a market like Brooklyn. What it reminded me of was a scene from the American version of The Office, when Jim becomes a regional manager and has to deal with an unruly employee (Ryan) who doesn't respect his new authority:

Don't get it twisted, Kidd was saying. Just because I got a promotion at a young age that you may not think I deserve, don't think I'm scared for a second to exercise my authority. I am the boss and you will respect my decisions or I'm going to have your ass writing daily reports too.

The Nets, meanwhile, quietly became one of the most interesting teams in the league over the second half of the season, finding a new identity without Brook Lopez. Kidd's fingerprints were all over the resurgence - there was no coach in the NBA who was more inventive and more fearless with how he deployed his line-ups, starting Paul Pierce at PF and running a ton of stuff through Shaun Livingston, even though he was one of the lowest paid players on the team. Brooklyn became a bizarre hybrid of a 4-out team, using waves of similarly-sized 6'6+ players around Kevin Garnett and Mason Plumlee at the 5. They had one of the best records in the league over the second half of the season and they wound up upsetting the Toronto Raptors in a tightly-fought seven-game series, a victory that looks all the more impressive considering how well Toronto has played this season.

Their run ended with a 5-game loss to the Heat in the second round. The Nets just couldn't close out LeBron James, who took over several games in the fourth quarter and sent them home. It was a disappointing outcome for a team that started the season with as many expectations as Brooklyn, but it was hard to pin any of that on Kidd, who had dealt with a ton of adversity and gotten the absolute most out of his players. For all the mockery he had endured, he had established himself as an NBA coach.

If he was any other coach in the league, Kidd would have re-dedicated himself to the Nets in the off-season, eager to improve on his debut. Brooklyn wasn't seen as a title contender, but they were returning more than enough talent to be a factor in the East and their size and experience meant few would want to face them in a playoff series. However, if you look at the actions of a lot of the veterans associated with the team this off-season, you can see that something was up - Paul Pierce left for Washington and Shaun Livingston left for Golden State.

It reminded me of something I heard during the 2012-2013 season, one of the only times the Mavs missed the playoffs in Dirk Nowitzki's tenure with the team - the players always know. Once you have played in the NBA long enough, you get a pretty good feel for what the guys on your team can and can't do, especially after a few weeks of practices. Cuban eventually told the media that Dirk called him very early in the season and told him that it wouldn't work, something we didn't figure out for a few months. Interestingly enough, Kidd had backed out of a deal to re-sign with the Mavs that off-season, almost as if he knew that the party was over. Jason Kidd is living proof of the saying that you can't shit a shitter.

When Kidd was traded from the Brooklyn Nets to the Milwaukee Bucks this summer, the story was that it was the result a failed power play for GM Billy King's job. Kidd, a habitual line-stepper, had finally stepped over the wrong line and was banished from the Big Apple to basketball Siberia for his trouble. Even worse, his machinations resulted in Larry Drew losing his job in Milwaukee, further sullying his reputation. Kidd was a no good very bad man that the Nets would not miss.

"I think there is a nice proverb in English: Don't let the door hit you where the good Lord has split you." http://t.co/ghXfFvEEWR
— Sean McLernon (@SFMcLernon) November 4, 2014

Six weeks into the season, it might be time for us to take a second look at what happened. Under Kidd's leadership, the Bucks have been one of the most surprising teams in the league, sitting at the No. 6 seed out East despite starting two under-20 players. The Nets, meanwhile, have been one of the disappointing, a game behind their old coach in the standings and hanging on to the No. 8 seed. It bottomed out this week, when Billy King announced that their three best players - Lopez, Williams and Joe Johnson - were all on the market.

Once again, Kidd was one step ahead of everyone else, getting out of town before everything went south. If he had stayed in Brooklyn, he would have had the thankless job looming ahead for Lionel Hollins, who will have to keep the team competitive as they try to rebuild on the fly. It's the type of situation that ends up getting a coach fired, something Kidd well understood. Instead, he gets to coach one of the most up-and-coming young teams in the Eastern Conference. It's almost as if he wanted to be fired by the Nets so that he could coach the Bucks!

Like Pierce and Livingston, Kidd could see the writing on the wall. The New York media had it completely backwards. It wasn't that Kidd needed a job from the Bucks because he was fired by the Nets - Kidd was fired from the Nets because he wanted a job from the Bucks. In essence, he had a better offer waiting him, but first he needed to get fired from his existing job. If that sounds familiar, it's because it was ripped directly off a plot from Seinfeld, when George Costanza is trying to get fired from the New York Yankees.


I really want to leave my mark. I want to walk away from the Yankees with people saying, "Wow. Now that guy got canned."

When you look at it that way, the stunt that Kidd pulled this summer was one of the most glorious moments in the history of employee-management relations. What would you do if you had to get fired from your job? Kidd told his boss (Billy King) what he really thought of him and he tried to get him fired. King isn't the worst GM in the world, but he isn't the best either and Kidd (like any coach in his situation) would have every right to believe that he would do a better job of picking the players. If you have ever had a boss whom you thought was kind of an idiot, how could you not appreciate that?

Once you look at things from Kidd's POV, everything else that happened this summer makes a lot more sense. What people in Brooklyn think of the new coach of the Milwaukee Bucks matters not at all. What they think of the Nets management matters a great deal. Brooklyn could hardly afford to say that their coach got a better job, could they? When things are being leaked to the media, the first thing you want to ask is cui bono, who benefits?

Kidd has proved his worth to the Bucks almost immediately, as there was no one picking them to even contend for the playoffs, much less be ahead of a team with as many big names as the Nets. If you watch his teams for any length of time, you can see that Kidd has an intuitive feel for the game and he knows exactly what he is doing. How can you tell that? By looking at how he manages his rotation.

The Bucks made a big change in their starting line-up a few weeks ago, one that should benefit them both this season and going forward.

They went from this:

PG - Brandon Knight
SG - Jared Dudley/OJ Mayo
SF - Jabari Parker
PF - Ersan Ilyasova
C - Larry Sanders

To this:

PG - Knight
SG - Mayo
SF - Giannis
PF - Jabari
C - Sanders

They started the season with Jabari Parker at the 3, but it wasn't a great fit for his game. At 6'8 250, he's a huge guy without the quickness you would expect from an elite perimeter player. As a big SF, he was constantly having to create offense against smaller players or trying to put them on the block, which is not the most efficient way for a young guy to score. Instead, what Kidd quickly realized was that Jabari would be best as a small PF, spreading out the floor for other guys and using his advantage as a quicker player to try and get around slower big men.

That, in a nutshell, is what coaching is, at least on the NBA level. It's figuring out how to deploy your players in a way that allows them to succeed. From the POV of a player like Kidd, the main job of a coach is to figure out his rotation and get the best players on the floor. If you have the right mix, everything else will figure itself out. These guys are grown men playing a children's game - they know what's happening on the floor and it isn't rocket science.

There's a lot of time and energy spent on Basketball Twitter dissecting the minutiae of coaching, the arrows and the squiggly lines that indicate where a player is supposed to be in a given coaching scheme. There are a few certain philosophical underpinnings to how and why players should be on certain parts of the floor, but once you clear that bar, it becomes less about the lines on a diagram and more about the players running those lines.

That's why I hate this idea that certain coaches are "defensive masterminds". There are coaches who emphasize defense and who play defensive-minded players, but if they don't have the guys who can carry out their assignments, none of the other stuff matters. Personnel dictates scheme - scheme does not dictate personnel.

If you have the personnel of the Memphis Grizzlies, a coach better be able to have them playing elite defense. If not, he will get fired and the FO will bring in someone who can. Lionel Hollins, the guy who replaced Jason Kidd, is a good coach and he was a really good coach in Memphis. The Grizzlies fired him and the team went right on winning. Hollins is good at his job, but you can hire his assistant (Dave Joerger) and he can do about as good a job too. A coach either has the players or he doesn't and he can be fired at a moment's notice.

The most important thing for a coach is having the right players. If you aren't in a situation to succeed, you won't. That's what Hollins is finding out in Brooklyn - he may have just walked into a trap. It's hard to blame him for taking the job since he had had been out of the league for over a year, but if you wait for jobs until they are open, you may not end up with a lot of opportunities for good jobs. Kidd saw that he had a bad job and he went out and found a better one.


Sometimes, the only way to win is to put the pieces back in the box and play a new game.

At the start of every season, the front office gives the coach a bunch of pieces and tells him to figure it out. Most coaches will play the guys the way the front office wants them to be played and they will defer to older and more experienced players. Kidd takes the pieces, he throws them on the board and if he doesn't like them, he is changing them quickly. How many coaches would have tried Paul Pierce at the 4? Not many and they certainly wouldn't have done it as quickly as Kidd. Once you do that, you have done about all you can do as a coach.

A lot of coaches would look at an under-performing line-up and think it's a matter of getting the guys to execute better. That was one of my main take-aways from the 2012 NBA Finals, the first I covered for RealGM. After Game 2, I asked Scott Brooks whether he had any thoughts of switching his starting line-up, due to how much they had been struggling at the start of the game:

Yet, instead of focusing on the match-up difficulties Spoelstra's adjustment gave his team in the first quarter, Scott Brooks pinned their slow start on intangibles: "I just think we were missing shots. We didn't come out with the defensive toughness, the disposition that we need to play with. We have to do that first, and then if it doesn't work, we'll think about [changing our starting line-up]".

Brooks is a former player but he thinks like a coach. He never changed the line-up - he just watched his team lose four straight games. His first, second, third and apparently fourth thought is always I can coach these guys better, we can tweak this or that or get them playing with more togetherness or whatever. I can do some coaching and make it work. Kidd still thinks like a player. He knows there's only so much good he can do for those guys on the floor. Sometimes, they just aren't good enough. If you have to coach those guys, you are going to lose.

This all goes back to Kidd being able to see the game at a really high level. He has developed a philosophical worldview about basketball, one that doesn't necessarily depend on results to validate it. He has models in his head for how the game will go and he can plug in new information to those models and come up with answers faster than anyone else. That's what allows him to be 2-3 steps ahead of most of the league, particularly the media. He can look at a roster and tell you what's going to happen before it does, just from his feel for the game.

How else would you explain him walking away from the Dallas Mavericks in 2012, the New York Knicks in 2013 and the Brooklyn Nets in 2014? The Mavs were coming off a first-round loss while the Knicks and Nets were coming off second-round losses. The next season, Dallas and New York missed the playoffs and Brooklyn looks well on their way too doing that, especially if they end up trading some of their best players. Jason Kidd knew the game was up before anyone else and he got out while the getting was good.

Where that rubs people the wrong way is that it shows a lack of loyalty to management. However, Kidd is well aware that management has no loyalty. The NBA is a bottom-line business and every coach and every player is constantly fighting for his place in the league. If you don't produce, you will be fired. Management doesn't owe you a damn thing.

The reverse, then, has to be true. If a player or a coach can get himself in a better situation, he owes it to himself to do it. If he wants to depend on the intelligence and kind-heartedness of management, he's not going to survive. Once management fires Lionel Hollins in Brooklyn, is he going to get another job as a head coach? Probably not. That's what he gets for being a good solider - to be run off at the peak of his success in Memphis and then given a much worse team so that everyone can blame him for their lack of success.

A guy with Kidd's basketball IQ knows full well that most basketball games are won or lost before the ball is ever tipped. That's what happened this summer - Kidd looked at the board and realized the only way he was going to win was to get new pieces. Maybe it means he's not the nicest guy in the world and maybe he owes an apology to Larry Drew, but owners and GMs fire guys all the time and no one complains. Billy King wanted to be able to blame Jason Kidd for whatever happened to the Nets this season and Kidd wasn't going to sit there and take the fall for someone else's mistakes.

Jason Kidd wins basketball games. It's in his nature. He has no time for losing and he's not going to be associated with a loser. He's a basketball nomad whose won, and won big, at every place he has been. And with Kidd coaching two guys with as much upside as Giannis and Jabari, my guess is the Bucks end up winning big too. Think of the difference in where his coaching career could be after five years with Milwaukee's two young stars than where it would be if he had to watch the Nets age in front of his eyes for a few years and then get fired. If you knew what Kidd knew, you would have to be crazy to stay in Brooklyn.

Everyone acts like being the first rat off a sinking ship is a bad thing, but rats know they can't stop a ship that be sinking. All they can try to do is try to survive. It's not their fault they can see the iceberg coming before anyone else.