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huck the fuskies - BostonCard - 04-08-2014

No, not them.  Anyone but them.  OK, they were clearly the best team in the country, but still.  Isn't it time for someone else?  Especially since the men also won it.

BC

Re: huck the fuskies - CowboyIndian - 04-08-2014

Geno Auriemma vs. Notre Dame.

If elected, I will ensure there's some way they could both lose resoundingly.

Re: huck the fuskies - BostonCard - 04-08-2014

Yes, rooting for a building collapse would have been unsportsmanlike, but I am not necessarily better than that.

BC

Re: huck the fuskies - fullmetal - 04-08-2014

I didn't watch either championship game, but I'm sure the NCAA is still laughing its way to the bank.

Re: huck the fuskies - OutsiderFan - 04-09-2014

A bitter friend on when two hated teams play each other:  root for injuries.

It's totally unsportsmanlike, is in very poor taste, and probably is profoundly bad karma, but I'm pretty sure the "second place male" in an all or nothing breeding community isn't shedding any tears if a poacher takes out the one inseminating all the females, when he's next in line.

Our winner take all sports society is a bit analogous to certain animal species' breeding behavior.  So when Clayton Kershaw signed his contract with the Dodgers a few months ago, knowing the Dodgers have that Time Warner cable deal that gives them a profound revenue advantage over the Giants, and knowing his record against the Giants, you bet your ass the first thing I thought was "I hope he tears a rotator cuff or an elbow ligament and needs Tommy John surgery."

It seems nobody minds being beat "fair and square," but when you factor in the unfair or unattainable competitive advantages of others that can never seem to be overcome by honest hard work, people tend to turn to wanting their foe to be weakened.  It seems like a natural response for any competitive being.  I doubt many NY football Giants fans were feeling sad when Leonard Marshall knocked Joe Montana out of the 1990 NFC CG.  No, they were more likely wishing for it all game.

Think how many die hard women's hoops fans of other PAC-12 teams must feel about the Stanford women's team and it's umpteen titles.  Or those fans who want a Director's Cup even.


Re: huck the fuskies - Roberton3 - 04-09-2014

OutsiderFan, you're totally missing the point.  I don't hate Geno because he wins, or even because he wins unfairly.  I hate him because he's a total jerk about pretty much everything.

Re: huck the fuskies - fullmetal - 04-09-2014

IIRC, Stanford only has two women's basketball championships.

http://champions.stanford.edu/history/stanfords-national-championships/

Impressive tourney history though:
Quote:Since its first NCAA Tournament appearance in 1982, Stanford has won two national championships (1990, 1992), reached the aforementioned 12 Final Fours, 17 Elite Eights, and 21 Sweet 16s.

http://www.gostanford.com/ViewArticle.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=30600&ATCLID=209452211



Re: huck the fuskies - OutsiderFan - 04-09-2014

(04-09-2014, 04:06 AM)Roberton3 link Wrote:OutsiderFan, you're totally missing the point.  I don't hate Geno because he wins, or even because he wins unfairly.  I hate him because he's a total jerk about pretty much everything.

I'm much more OK with someone being a jerk when they win than I am OK with someone who wins because they cheat, have artificial competitive advantages, etc.

Few things in sports are more upsetting to me as a fan of "pure" competition than John Wooden being fawned over, with no mention of Sam Gilbert's role in his success.  If people can gripe about Barry Bonds' suspected PED use, where's the griping about Wooden's success?

Anyway, Auriemma is a first class jerk.  No doubt about that. 

Re: huck the fuskies - Cardinal96 - 04-09-2014

I have come around on Auriemma.  At first, I couldn't stand him.  Yes, he is arrogant and can be an @ss.  But this prick has coached UConn to play basketball at another level in the womens' game.  They are unselfish on both ends of the floor.  Yes, they have talent but he also gets more out of his talent than any coach in WBB.  He has made comments this season that they are in another league and that if they play their A game, no one beats them.  And he is right.  My grandmother would always say it isn't bragging if it's true.

Re: huck the fuskies - OutsiderFan - 04-09-2014

Living in CT, I get plenty of exposure to UConn.  Last week a local news station asked one of his players to describe what makes Auriemma so great and different than other coaches.  Her response:

Most coaches drill you on something until you get it right.  Geno drills us until we can't get it wrong.

This really was insightful.  It suggests how obsessed Auriemma is about execution.  Other coaches of course preach it, but it would seem there aren't that many that really obsess about it.  This also suggests the UConn playbook isn't very big.  You can't have infallible execution when there are so many things to execute. 

This is the philosophy that Chip Kelly, Gus Malzahn, and Art Briles, and Pete Carroll have had so much success following.  It's a keep it simple, let the players play, and make them perform as a result of countless repetitions of simple tasks, philosophy.  It flies in the face of the "we'll out-scheme them" approach Bill Walsh made so famous.  More success will be had with better execution of more complexity, but good coaches know you can't sacrifice execution just to have more complexity.  This was Jeff Tedford's downfall at Cal, IMO.  He had a complex scheme, but sacrificed execution to have it, and that led to his own execution.

Bill Walsh changed the face of football... - Redrum - 04-09-2014

and I'm not sure he would agree for one second that he didn't devote time enough to getting the execution right.  And Walsh was just building on the work of others, including Paul Brown.  So you could argue that Bill Walsh was more practical and basic because he concentrated on making some intellectual concepts work on the field at game speed.

Pete Carroll is a good coach, maybe a great coach.  I just don't buy the idea that he is better than Walsh because he uses more reps in practice.











Re: huck the fuskies - StanFan88 - 04-09-2014

I respect Auriemma as a coach, but not as a person.  It's called winning with class, and if he hasn't figured out how to do it by now he never will.

Great program, but if I had a daughter who played HS basketball I would not let her go to UConn.

Saving grace for Stanford - they were just as good as any team in this tournament except for UConn, who was just head & shoulders above everyone else.  Not sure how Tara solves the UConn problem - but she's not the only coach with that problem, not by a long shot.

Re: huck the fuskies - Renaissance Man - 04-09-2014

Quote:I'm much more OK with someone being a jerk when they win than I am OK with someone who wins because they cheat, have artificial competitive advantages, etc.

Few things in sports are more upsetting to me as a fan of "pure" competition than John Wooden being fawned over, with no mention of Sam Gilbert's role in his success.  If people can gripe about Barry Bonds' suspected PED use, where's the griping about Wooden's success?

Anyway, Auriemma is a first class jerk.  No doubt about that.

There was plenty of complaining about Wooden during UCLA's reign.  Jerry Tarkanian's Long Beach State teams of the same era complained loudly about the Bruins refusing to play them--very similar to Duke refusing to ever play a non-conference road game, or any tough OOC opponents other than an occasional tournament matchup--usually in a favorable locale for Duke.

Re: huck the fuskies - Roberton3 - 04-09-2014

(04-09-2014, 06:27 AM)NYCCardinalFan link Wrote:I have come around on Auriemma.  At first, I couldn't stand him.  Yes, he is arrogant and can be an @ss.  But this prick has coached UConn to play basketball at another level in the womens' game. 

So what?  Even if you're an incredibly talented, hardworking, successful @ss, you're still an @ss.  I hate people like that.  And their success doesn't make me hate them any less (or any more).

I've heard the argument that a personality like that is necessary to be that successful, but it's just not true.  As an athlete, I competed against (and lost to) a number of people who are Olympic medalists.  Some were nice people, and some weren't.  In my career, I've known a substantial number of Nobel Prize winners.  Again, they run the range from arrogant SOBs to the nicest people you'd ever meet, and everywhere in between.  (To pick a Stanford example, Ken Arrow is both utterly brilliant -- someone who stands out as extraordinarily successful even among Economics Nobel winners -- and one of the nicest people around.)

Re: huck the fuskies - terry - 04-09-2014

I think UConn does have a structural advantage, which I consider an unfair advantage: they are the home team of that TV network down the road in Bristol. I suspect that if there were some way to measure it, we would find that ESPN gives the UConn women's team more coverage, and more favorable coverage, than anybody else. ESPN sets the agenda for all of sports broadcasting these days, so the advantage is multiplied. I don't know how to judge the impact of that advantage. Perhaps UConn would dominate even if the program were in, say, Michigan, and didn't get the home team treatment from ESPN. That's entirely possible. And you could argue that UConn deserves to get more coverage than anyone else because they're so good (though other programs such as Tennessee wouldn't agree). But in my own subjective, unscientific, probably biased opinion, I think UConn does have an unfair advantage.

Re: huck the fuskies - CowboyIndian - 04-09-2014

(04-08-2014, 10:38 PM)Boston Card link Wrote:Yes, rooting for a building collapse would have been unsportsmanlike, but I am not necessarily better than that.

I actually wrote that....and thought better of it., which is not typical of me or runaway horses. I'm getting older and softer.

Re: huck the fuskies - Viking_Guy - 04-09-2014

Terry--

Not only a structural advantage from ESPN currently, but in helping to build the program.  Specifically the 1995-96 team.

UConn had been good before; they made the Final Four in New Orleans in 1991 (I remember seeing them there and thinking their coach was a bit over the top).  But in 1995, they had a good team (adding Nykesha Sales from Bloomfield, CT to Rebecca Lobo), they played in a bad league, their toughest game (ESPN's first big women's college regular season telecast against Tennessee) was at home and they went undefeated.

THAT was when the synergy started.  ESPN gushed over everything that team did.  Connecticut was in the process of losing its only major league franchise - the Whalers moved to Carolina in 1997.  They showed more highlights from that team than any prior women's basketball team (and UConn's Wikipedia page for women's basketball says "That team was credited with helping popularize women's basketball."  Why that team, and not the great Tennessee teams that surrounded it?  Oh, and the 1996 Olympic team may have had something to do with it as well.)

What was interesting was that UConn really wasn't that successful in the succeeding couple of years - they had great records in a weak conference, and beat Tennessee in Knoxville in 1996, but lost to them in the 1996 NCAA semifinals, then failed to make the Final Four again until 2000.  And yet, they were the program that appeared on ESPN all the time, especially their games with Tennessee.  I don't know, do you think that might have had something to do with the fact that in 1998, they signed a class featuring 5 of the top 15 players in the country?  That really was the catalyst for their dominance in the last 15 years.

It became a self-reinforcing cycle - UConn appears on TV UConn signs dominant classes UConn wins a lot UConn appears more on TV.  Even in their down years, the late 90s and the mid 2000s (after Taurasi graduated), they still were on TV more than any other program.  Heck, in Connecticut, every game not televised by ESPN was picked up and broadcast by public television.  They were the only game in town.

The other side of this coin - ESPN made them into THE national brand for women's basketball, along with Tennessee, but with a heavy dose of "Pat Summitt is the Evil Empire" that Geno liked to run out when UConn was losing to them consistently in the late 90s.  NO OTHER PROGRAMS got enough national exposure to build a national following - there wasn't any other national media space for women's basketball.  And a lot of other programs ONLY got national exposure through their interaction with UConn or Tennessee; Notre Dame rose to prominence in part as the only program in the Big East that ever showed any sign of being able to challenge UConn (with occasional forays from CVivian's Rutgers and the slow-down play of Villanova).  Their dominance in recruiting is a natural consequence.

Again, Auriemma has made the most of it - he's a great coach, and he's made the most of his advantages.  I also think there were long-term consequences of Tara's taking the year off to coach the Olympic team and the post-1996 exhaustion that Stanford has never really recovered from - the lost opportunity to build on the success of the mid-90s teams with a lull in recruiting in the late 90s.  But it helps to have a national cable network catapult your program to everyone's TV screens and saturate every high-caliber recruit with UConn coverage.  It would be interesting to do what some people have done with football recruiting classes - track recruiting rank against lagged results.

VG


Re: huck the fuskies - Viking_Guy - 04-09-2014

One other thing on ESPUconN:

I HATE their typical sports media narrative style of hyping one particular player, and sticking with that story line through thick and thin.  Especially the concomitant derogation of the impact of the "supporting cast," which in and of itself is a loaded phrase.

Breanna Stewart is a great player, but she didn't win the national championship for UConn.  Heck, she wasn't the best Husky player on the court against Stanford - I'd go with Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis for that honor, or maybe even Moriah Jefferson for her utter tenacity (and ability to not get whistled for quick grabs fighting through screens).  But every highlight, every replay was of her plays.  The difference in the semi wasn't Stewart getting the better of Ogwumike - it was KML, Jefferson, Dolson, and Hartley being COLLECTIVELY better than Orrange, Thompson, Ruef et al.

They've done it in the past as well, with Maya Moore, Diana Taurasi, Brittany Griner, Candace Parker, Chamique Holdsclaw, et al.  Each of those players was a GREAT player.  I would say each one of them was about as dominant as Elena Delle Donne.  The difference is always not that they have one great player, but that great players had other great players or nearly as good players around her.  In the first game against the Huskies this year, I said the difference wasn't the best players - Amber and Chiney were two of the best four players on the court.  The difference was that UConn had players five, six and seven out of the top ten starters.  Which comes from not just superstar lead recruits, but DEEP classes.

Let me put it another way.  The classic aphorism about a great coach is "He can beat you with his players, and then take your players and beat his team."  I don't think Geno Auriemma, despite being a great game and motivational coach, could have beaten many of his UConn teams with the personnel they were facing.  And yes, recruiting is a big part of the job.  But then we could also delve into some of the unsavory anecdotes about Geno's recruiting tactics when UConn was in a "down cycle."

VG

Re: huck the fuskies - yvonne - 04-09-2014

Bill Lewis: "When you get a thinking athlete, that's when you get in trouble."

Re: huck the fuskies - Jskass - 04-09-2014

let's remember that part of the UConn-TN hostility also relates to his ability to attract Maya Moore in part via an ESPN "tour." I recently read another post in the Cardboard referring to ESPN as ESPUConn, and thought that was unfortunately brilliant. I hope Aja Wilson resists the allure of the UConn championships and stays in South Carolina to help them build under Staley!

Agree with the comment that I'd never want my daughter to go to UConn and play for Geno. Academics aside (of course, who can compare UConn to Stanford or indeed lots of other schools), who wants their daughter to play for that type of personality? His response to McGraw denigrated women's basketball with comments about the girls and drinking wine. Give me a break.

Then he says how Notre Dame was so much better than any other team he played. Sounds like post-game niceties, considering we were beating them for part of the game and our game was actually a few points closer. Next year, however, will be lots of rebuilding for us -- but we have a bright future now that we've begun attracting faster guards and have a few coming 'down the pike (as they say in the Northeast)!