I have distilled your question about Self to some colloquial bluntness.
Excuse me if I have put the wrong words in your mouth. Let's just call them mine. :-)
The subject is a little complicated, as anything really worth thinking about is.
We get to be a bit reductive as fans watching results, just like the media folks do.
When we do our part right, we discover what Self is doing, or trying to do, and we can admire him for it. And occasionally find he makes an error or two that any human being makes in real time from time to time.
We tend to go astray, when we stop at seeing him do something apparently illogical and simply conclude he was wrong, and say, "ah ha, see, if he had done what we say then he would have won."
In the instances where he does something that appears illogical, it seems wise to return to "why" he would logically be doing.
First, let me describe the team just a bit. Self has a Swiss Cheese team. It has holes everywhere.
It has a championship grade perimeter shooting team with a championship grade point guard, but this perimeter strength of the team has serious holes. Devonte is only a credible back up to Frank, when the action is not hot and heavy, because Devonte is a true freshman, not an OAD. At the 2, Selden just HAS lost his pop and cannot get up unless he is on the end of a very long run at the hoop. Behind Selden there is Devonte, who, again, is a more credible back up at the 2, but still not strong enough to handle many opposing 2. He also has Brannen and Svi. Brannen is a great shooter with defense issues that have improved some, but not a lot, and a proclivity to shoot before he is instructed to, even by February. Svi cannot make shots in games. Svi cannot guard over a pick by February. At the 3, Self has Oubre, who keeps getting better and prettier each game, but who is not migrating into the junkyard dog Self thinks the team needs him to be to steal the extra possessions (rebounds, strips, disruption) the team needs to get more FGAs than the other team, and so score more points. At the 4, Self has Perry, a finesse scorer, who as of February his junior season, is finally just now deciding that contact is fun and productive for his game. Perry has been a microcosm of the Swiss Chesse team. He has been an unquestionable strength with a hole in it. Behind Perry there is, um, well, Jamari Traylor, who has, or used to have extraordinary explosiveness, but no knack for rebounding and no credible jump shot. And now Jamari has a hip pointer that seems to make the once explosive one, move about without even the pretense of trying to rebound. At the 5, we have, uh, hmm, well, we have Cliff Alexander, the enigma inside a riddle wrapped in a mystery. Cliff can be play for, oh, say anywhere from 16 minutes to 6 minutes, and still be on the NBA draft board. And perhaps the only person that could reach him, Mr. Oreos himself, Snacks Howard, is, um, suspended for misdemeanor cannabis possession he forgot to tell his mentor about. And when Self has to sub Cliff out, he has, uh, well, he has some options that are kind Swiss Cheese themselves. Let's see here, he has Jamari, with the holes he has, and whom he can only go to when Jamari is not spelling Perry. And Self has Landen Lucas, who moves well, guards the post some, outlet passes well, but has no discernible offense and gets rather few rebounds, especially the offensive kind. Self gave up on Hunter Mickelson apparently because he had to make a triage choice and develop either Landen, or Hunter, and Hunter seemed not to offer as much ballast, which Self felt KU would need more from time to time, than Hunter's better shooting. This is the inventory that Self has to try to win a B12 conference title with, and which even after losing on the road in Morgantown, finds himself still remarkably in the lead of in mid February, 2015 Common Era.
I am not trying to knock our team, just paint an accurate picture of it from which to proceed with remarking on Self's choices.
Self appears to assess the Swiss Cheese this way. We can shoot the lights out over the course of a game from outside. If we could just develop our inside game to even just adequate, we could be a dangerous tournament team. If we don't, we are little more than a blue blood program with mid major Swiss Cheese.
A person, as humans are apparently constituted, has to believe in something to get on with it everyday; this is why we have so many religions and so many gods, and their equally extraordinary counterparts of agnosticism and atheism, and their umbrellas in epistemology--philosophy. We apparently don't do well starting each day entirely from scratch, entirely with our memories erased, our personalities de-patterned into complete openness to receptiveness to all possibilities that random context, or Big Brother, or well meaning culture, can implant in us at the drop of a hat. Even Lao Tse, who pretty much rejected everything about conventional culture as bogus, had "a way" he got to get up with each day.
Bill Self has a philosophy with two givens he starts each day with:
Given 1: We can get better at what we work on.
Given 2: When they can and do take something away from you, you have to do something else to try to survive.
Given 2, though expressing an operant logic, is also kind of an animal faith, if you like Santayana, or maybe a postulate if you are more prone to geometry and math, but I am going to call it a theorem, for the sake of further discussion, and say it has at least three corollaries, for the sake of some kind of at least linguistic coherence.
Corollary 1: They can't take away our god given, or existential, rights to play defense, so we work tirelessly on defense as our cornerstone.
Corollary 2: They can rarely take away our rebounding, so we pursue this as if it were our god given, or existential, right and work tirelessly on rebounding.
Corollary 3: They can and do take away parts of our offense, but they can't take away all of our offense, so we play take what they give us.
There are three basic things worth doing offensively in the Self philosophy: play outside (shoot high effective percentage long treys), play inside (high raw percentage shoot short treys), and transition off pressure defense triggering stolen possessions and high percentage open looks at the end of a fast break (i.e., this and offensive rebounding and defensive rebounding converging to yield more total FGAs than the opponent and so more made baskets in most cases).
If one believes one holds that any part of one's offense can be taken away, and one believes in getting better at things, then the only logical thing to do is to make sure you execute well what you are good at, and get better at what you are bad at, because you ARE going to have to do both, sooner or later, whether you like it, or not.
This is what Self gets up everyday believing. This is the wheel, at times it seems, even the Mandala, he does not reinvent.
There may be no truths outside the Gates of Eden, as Bob Dylan sang, but inside the game of basketball, you gotta believe in something to get each day started and not waste one.
Herein is the great advantage of unwavering faith, and a blue print for building with, assuming neither is completely misguided. One never wastes a day, if one wakes up with the same philosophy, and keeps working on it. One may make more, or less progress, one may make mistakes and miscalculations, one may cut errantly because of only measuring once, not twice, but, more days of work and measuring twice can correct that, and that correction contributed to the net progress in building to our goals.
Here is the secret of all great persons. They spend more days building to their goal than the other guys do. They never waste a day, some not an hour, some like Self, not a minute.
This getting better thing is very big medicine, when it is applied to a sound philosophy with a good blue print.
We here that point out apparent logical truths like 3>2 are in some sense willing to junk Self's philosophy that you have to be able to score inside and score outside, because sooner or later, they will take one away from you.
Self says, "Fine, you take a few days off and create your new philosophy. My season has a time constraint. I blue printed the team this way and I am not wasting a single day of getting better on building from my blue print. I keep making adjustments and tweaks to try to get through game to game, but in mid February I have to make certain hard choices. If there is something we are not good at in February, then I have to play as if we were and keep working on it, AND, if there are players that just can't get it by now, then they have to sit. If they can't do a simple fundamental task that I ask them to do after 4 and a half months of me telling them, teaching them, coaching them, reassuring them, upbraiding them, and benching them, then I have no choice but to bench them both to keep trying to wake them up, and to keep them from doing damage to our pursuit of getting better at being a team capable of playing consistent with our philosophy, theorems and corollaries. There are not days to waste. There are no games to waste in our pursuit of our goal, which is not so much winning as becoming the team that can win. That Self wins and develops teams that can win is a testament to his ability to race and wrench simultaneously.
But how does this justify losing a game in Morgantown that might have iced the eleventh title by not taking more treys, and by not playing your OAD center more than 6 minutes?
Strategically speaking, Self was mastering the obvious. This team can afford to lose this game, because it is a road game and we are in the lead, and we will beat this WVU team at home, but this team cannot afford NOT to keep getting better, not to keep trying to get better, at what we are trying to become. For this team to be the best it can be in March, it HAS to:
a.) learn when to take a trey consistent with our blue print;
b.) learn to score inside; and
c.) learn to beat bigger teams within the blue print of our team.
Self believes in playing take what they give us.
Self believes in getting better and that anything can be gotten better at.
Self believes that this team does not need to become exceptionally good at scoring inside, just good enough, and he thinks it is within these players abilities to get that good.
He was willing to take a road loss he could make up at home to "keep working the problem people," as NASA's Gene Kranz was reputedly famous for saying.
And the team came within one of doing it.
And that is what the team and the fans need to carry away from this game.
WVU is a pretty strong, robust test of this team's ability to get better at scoring inside, at playing ruggedly against a rugged opponents, at taking what they give us, even when it is NOT our strength they are giving us.
Coach Self is staring his team down again.
He appears to be saying something I will paraphrase as, "You all thought life wasn't easy, wasn't fair, because of the many disadvantaged places you came from, and the many obstacles even the prosperous among you have sprung from. Well, I am here to tell you that you are absolutely correct. Life is never fair, because the other guy always tries to take from you WHATEVER you are good at. That is how the game of basketball and the game of life are played. And you better learn it now, and you better learn it fast, because it is February 17th, and our season ends less than a month if you don't learn the lesson, and it ends in April if you do."
There isn't going to be any reliance on crutches.
There isn't going to be any reliance on what we are good at.
Not until we have gotten enough better at what we are not good at--not until we do not need crutches at all.
If we rely on crutches, they will take those away from us.
And we can't be champions that way.
Thus, while we can argue that there may be other ways to skin the cat of this season, other ways to make use of the sketchy material at hand, other ways to win, other philosophies to embrace, Self's philosophy and use of his material is sound in its own way and given what he is trying to accomplish.
Always remember what Self said: "If I did the popular thing, I wouldn't be around here very long."
He is, behind the fracture syntax and Okie dialect, a professional and when push comes to shove part of a shaman class descended from Henry Iba that believes in a particular philosophy of how to play the game.
There will always be disagreements about such things. Forest Allen reputedly though Henry Iba was brilliant, but at a certain point he began to strongly criticism Iba for reducing the game to deliberate perfectionism of execution, the same as Allen criticized the dunk and gamblers as bad for the game, too. Note: it was probably no coincidence that Allen grew irritated with Iba, since Allen was a bon vivant and tireless experimenter with the new that believed in innovating so as to let other teams beat themselves in confrontation with the new and different. Iba was saying, I'm going to let you beat yourself with being new and different, because my deliberate perfection allows me to make fewer mistakes and biases total FGAs, FG% and defensive field goal percentage in my teams favor every time. See why Phog might have been a bit exasperated?
We have as our coach the latest, greatest, apostle of Henry Iba's approach to basketball that largely determined John Wooden in his adaptation of the philosophy to a full court game, Bob Knight in his fanatical commitment to precision offense, Dean Smith in his fanatical devotion to a single high low post offense (the Carolina passing game), and Larry Brown himself. And this is leaving out Iba's hand picked disciples Doyle Parrock, Paul Hansen, Don Haskins, Jack Hartman, and Eddie Sutton. And even someone as far from the Iba tree as Ralph Miller referred to Iba in the same breath with Allen.
When we talk here about 3>2, we are applying a deceptively simple formula as foundation shattering to the epically influential Iba school of basketball, as e-mc^2 was to Newtonian physics.
To apply it without understanding that the Iba school of basketball is an ice berg of which we fans mostly only appreciate the small tip sticking out of the water, is to be both careless and less than serious about the game.
I happen to think that 3>2 will over the next 30-50 years force a complete reformation of catholic basketball philosophies, but that it will be slow in coming and will almost certainly not come in the way that anyone today might simplistically expect.
To put what I am saying in a metaphorical perspective, Einstein rewrote theoretical physics with specific and general relativity nearly about a century ago. But as a working physcist once told me in some confidence, its all very interesting what Einstein did, but when I actually figure out how a satellite must be sent to Mars, I still use Newtonian physics, and when I study particles in the CERNE accelerator I use quantum physics assumptions of paradox, spooky interaction and absence of locality that Einstein insisted absolutely could not hold. In short he was saying there was no doubt that e-mc^2 and the formalizations it was embedded in were descriptively accurate and enlightening in helping us conceptualize the universe, but human beings often have to "operate" in a universe differently than their descriptions permit. Process differs from conception. Execution differs at times from conception. And all along the way uncertainty and action on incomplete information are yielding unexpected outcomes with unforeseen consequences.
Self and the entire Iba school of basketball are, metaphorically speaking, like contemporary physicists staying grounded with what works understandably in Newtonian physics, and what works without complete understanding, like Quantum physics, because they are in the business of getting on with it each day, of applying it each day, not just thinking about it. But they know 3>2 as surely as contemporary physicists know e=mc^2. And they think about it. But so far, it remains, however logically valid, a formalization they view as a gross oversimplification without a proven philosophical and theoretical framework underneath it.
Working physicists say to the theoretical physicists, well, fine, but I still have to get some instruments to the Martian surface now.
Likewise, the basketball coaches are saying, you may be right, but this season is here now, and March is less than two weeks away, and my blue print is the blue print I have to work with for this season, and I have fit it to my players the best i could, based on the philosophies that have made Bill Self win 82% for ten season, and win 10 straight conference titles and be leading for an 11th in mid February.
Pudding is, as they say, at least a partial proof.
And the more successful something is, wrong or right, the harder it is to give up.
