FreddyBrown
Moderator
I posted this in response to a statement I saw elsewhere that UNI's second team could beat Iowa. I don't know if that's true, but I did see UNI's second team give Wichita State all they could handle for a good part of that game today, and Wichita State is one of the many teams that just handed it to the Hawks this season.
Whether that second five could beat us or not, I think that still illustrates a fundamental point. The sign of a good basketball coach is in how his team plays. That's a point that seems self-evident, and beyond debate. Yet we as fans who initially don't want to believe our coach is anything but competent have collectively spent a lot of time and effort over the last three years trying to rationalize why what we see on the court isn't indicative of the level of competence of our coach.
There comes a time when you have to get past that and accept the evidence that stares you in the face. Over time, a good coach makes lemonade out of lemons. You see improvement. You see cohesion. You see execution of a plan and a scheme designed to maximize the abilities of the players you have.
You could see that evidence clearly even in the play of the second team of UNI today, to say nothing of the first team.
Meanwhile, what you saw on the court against Minnesota was another abysmal display of basketball by players who in many cases have now spent two or three years under the tutelage of the same coach--more than enough time to allow the benefits of the coach's talent as a teacher, manager, motivator and communicator to become evident. I believe those same players, if they were playing for UNI or any of dozens of other programs with other coaches, would have performed as well as a group as what I saw from the UNI kids today.
Simply put, when you have a really good coach, you see the results on the court, even if the team isn't particularly talented and even if they are outmanned most of the time.
I don't know about you, but I don't see it here.
I don't know how to reconcile what Lick did at Butler--at least in a couple of his seasons there--with what he has done here, but the time to stop trying to explain the results here as solely the result of factors other than poor coaching (including all the facets of the job) has passed.
I'm resigned to the fact that barring some unforeseen events, Lick will be coaching here again next season. But that brings to mind the old Albert Einstein quote that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Whether that second five could beat us or not, I think that still illustrates a fundamental point. The sign of a good basketball coach is in how his team plays. That's a point that seems self-evident, and beyond debate. Yet we as fans who initially don't want to believe our coach is anything but competent have collectively spent a lot of time and effort over the last three years trying to rationalize why what we see on the court isn't indicative of the level of competence of our coach.
There comes a time when you have to get past that and accept the evidence that stares you in the face. Over time, a good coach makes lemonade out of lemons. You see improvement. You see cohesion. You see execution of a plan and a scheme designed to maximize the abilities of the players you have.
You could see that evidence clearly even in the play of the second team of UNI today, to say nothing of the first team.
Meanwhile, what you saw on the court against Minnesota was another abysmal display of basketball by players who in many cases have now spent two or three years under the tutelage of the same coach--more than enough time to allow the benefits of the coach's talent as a teacher, manager, motivator and communicator to become evident. I believe those same players, if they were playing for UNI or any of dozens of other programs with other coaches, would have performed as well as a group as what I saw from the UNI kids today.
Simply put, when you have a really good coach, you see the results on the court, even if the team isn't particularly talented and even if they are outmanned most of the time.
I don't know about you, but I don't see it here.
I don't know how to reconcile what Lick did at Butler--at least in a couple of his seasons there--with what he has done here, but the time to stop trying to explain the results here as solely the result of factors other than poor coaching (including all the facets of the job) has passed.
I'm resigned to the fact that barring some unforeseen events, Lick will be coaching here again next season. But that brings to mind the old Albert Einstein quote that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
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