on the failure of bill self

-
Bill Simmons is my favorite columnist/blogger. He may write sports, but he is consistently hilarious and loves to reference pop culture. His column on ESPN's Page 2 is worth checking, even if you're not a sports fan. In yesterday's column, he refers to Ben Howland as the coach "who pulled Bill Self's pants down on Saturday." He also opens up the end of his blogs to emails from his smart and/or witty readers. Brandon from L.A. had this to say:

"Hey Bill, you more than anyone do a great job of calling out coaches that are killing their teams. So along those lines, how has Bill Self gone under the radar all year with you and ESPN? This should be the running subplot of this tourney. He almost single-handedly blew their chances on Thursday. Everyone knew what type of team Southern Illinois is and yet he has no counter to them and his teams are always ill-prepared. How do you not spread things out and isolate your quicker guards who also have a size advantage? And read his postgame quotes -- he says that Southern Illinois is a team you can't run plays against. What??? As you would agree (and I've been preaching all year), Kansas is by far the most talented team in this tourney. Hands down. Yet Bill Self is terrible at game planning and preparation. Look at his past tourney flameouts at Illinois and Kansas with ridiculous talent. If Howland were coaching them, they'd be destroying everyone. UCLA has half the talent as Kansas and yet will probably win Saturday because of game plan and execution. This topic has to start being covered and you are the man to do that."

Bill Simmons response: (Important note: We received this e-mail on Friday. Thought that was funny. By the way, I will always be outraged that Kansas didn't make the Final Four with THAT much talent. It's absurd. Remind me never to pick Bill Self to win a title ever again.)

I'm not the only one! Is it now officially time to start http://www.firebillself.com? Or should we do to him what the Chiefs did when they brought in Dick Vermeil and announce that we've hired a new coach before we fired the last one? I desperately want to love Kansas basketball again, and I don't think that will happen in the Bill Self era. I will give credit where it's due: he is a damn fine recruiter. Unfortunately, talent alone will not win championships.

Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to comment. Happy reading!

Popular posts from this blog

book review: A Dangerous Place by Jacqueline Winspear

-
Image
The backstory: A Dangerous Place  is the eleventh historical mystery featuring Maisie Dobbs. My reviews of the other eleven (plus Winspear's stand alone historical novel) are in my Book Review Database . The basics: Set four years after the last Maisie Dobbs novel, Leaving Everything Most Loved , in A Dangerous Place , we meet up with Maisie in Gibraltar in 1927 during the Spanish Civil War. She gets off her England-bound ship in Gibraltar because she's not quite ready to return. Note: this review contains spoilers about what happened in those four years of Maisie's life between books, all of which are revealed in this novel's first thirty pages.  My thoughts: Sunday I wrote about the Maisie Mail I received. These postcards appear in the book itself, along with many others. After setting the stage in Gibraltar in the opening pages (Maisie stumbles upon a dead body), Winspear recounts the last four years of Maisie's life in the form of postcards, letters, an
Read more

book review: Run by Ann Patchett

-
Image
The backstory: After loving State of Wonder  ( my review ), I set out to read all of Ann Patchett's books. The basics: Run  is the story of the Doyle family: Bernard, an Irish Catholic ex-mayor of Boston, his deceased wife Bernadette, their adult son Sullivan, and their two adopted college ages sons, Tip and Teddy, who are biological brothers. My thoughts: I'm beginning to think Ann Patchett is my soul sister. Her writing reaches me deeply, and I've adored everything she's written. It was a special treat to read Run , the novel of hers I knew the least about going in. Although I had the framework of two of her novels and one memoir, I didn't know what to expect. Run  isn't as universally loved as some of her other works, so I was particularly curious to see how it measured up. Admittedly, Run  started off slowly for me. It took two chapters to really get into the heart of the story, but once it happened, I was hooked. One of the things I love most about
Read more

book review: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

-
Image
The backstory: Gilead  won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2004, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2006. The basics: As Rev. Ames nears the end of his life in the 1950's, he begins a letter to his young son because Ames realizes his son is too young to really know him. Gilead  is that letter. My thoughts: Gilead  is a novel I'm been meaning to read for years. It's a character-driven, Midwestern narrative by one of our best contemporary writers. It should be a novel I love, yet I struggled to finish it and admit I was wowed by neither the story nor the writing. Gilead  seemed almost stream-of-consciousness at first. I appreciated that Robinson jumped right in: this novel is a letter from father to son; the reader's ignorance of these two characters is not the focus. As the novel progressed, more details began to be filled in, and the reader begins to understand the characters, setting and purpose. I enjoyed the fir
Read more