That's not unfair. I never liked his press defense or his hockey line substitutions it required. It didn't work against high quality competition and I believe it's the reason why he never won a BIG title, in spite all of Raveling's NBA talent.
Iowa banks on the system developing any able bodied back to succeed... We've had solid years just the last couple haven't left the best of tastes in our mouths. But that's the combination of Oline and playcalling as well. Situational play calling certainly factors in how successful RBs can be. I'm not so sure about trying to use 3 guys a ton is the way to go either. I kinda like riding one guy as your horse and using another one situationally be it 3rd and longs or whatever. We seemed to have no rhyme or reason to how we used ours for the most part... I'm not sure the players themselves knew what their roles were week to week.
For sure. But how do we know Toren Young isn't that? I'm not sure if we had one we'd give them the chance to be one either is kinda what I'm getting at too. I'm not saying Young is either but you know what I mean.
That 87-88 team lost 10 games. As did the 88-89 team. 10 games!
Pressing worked in the second half of the eighties/early nineties (Iowa, Cleveland State's run-n-stun, Tulane's posse, Loyola Marymount's seven second offense, Oklahoma, etc.) because there were too many dinosaur coaches still playing the Wooden era high post offenses, the Twin Towers, and others. You needed athletic bigs to make those offenses work and the well that had been flowing since Lew Alcindor largely stopped after Patrick Ewing. Once coaches had adapted to how the three point line could change the game the small forward, once the glamour position in basketball, gradually became extinct. Teams were spreading the floor with three and even four guards, playing inside out, and there was enough quickness on the floor negate pressing defenses. The trends set in place in the early nineties are still going strong today.
Those teams had no rim protectors and BJ was a defensive sieve. He didn't have a prayer against Rumeal Robinson, to name one example. I would have loved to see Acie Earl on those teams. Earl, as his brief NBA career would attest, was overrated but he could rebound and block shots.
Rim protector my ass. Way too much talent to lose 10 games, rim protector or not! The defense that Tom Davis ran WAS the problem. Sorry. Tom Davis was an average coach, at best.
I remember watching this game with my old man. Iowa down 1, 8 seconds to go in Bloomington. Out of a timeout, Acie Earl lobbed a freaking 3. I thought my old man was gonna have a gripper he was so livid. Of course, the Hawks won it, but this was not genius level coaching we were dealing with here.
Oh, there was much more than that. His point man in the 1-2-2 was often lazy getting out and identifying shooters at the top of the key.
