@justanotherfan
You articulated this very well. Thanks for the assist.
Over the years I have come to accept an insight once shared with me that smart persons don't do dumb things, so much as they make net benefit choices based on constraints and accept the costs as necessary to get what to them appear the net optimal benefits.
It follows that if you and I are smart enough to recognize and frame the issue as we have that Bill Self is also quite capable of doing the same also.
In turn, Bill Self must be making what appears to him an optimizing net benefit choice subject to constraints, and not a short sighted mistake.
Put another way, Bill Self must realize that he is trading off possible wins in March by playing guys hurt for wins earlier in the season and conference titles.
Thus the question is: what vision of costs and benefits and the context they occur in drives him to this choice?
If we concede Self is a smart coach--one with above average intelligence, and highly competent to coach the game to be played many different ways, then I think we have to look to the context he is operating in to see why he is making the choices he is making.
Self has not just a little but a lot of first hand experience at who wins the recruiting battles, at what it feels like to come up against teams with vastly more talent in March, while at KU, and in the regular season, at places like Illinois, Tulsa, and ORU.
Self has gone 0-fer, or nearly so at ORU. He knows coaching'em up can only do so much.
Self knows that taking over a program that is up, like Tulsa, was much more feasible to create a good coaching W&L statement than at a place that was down like ORU. He knows W&L statements and conference titles are the gold standard with management in his profession. Mostly you don't get fired when you win >25 games and you win your conference title. Period.
Self knows lots of coaches have gotten fired a few years after winning a ring. Self knows already people are beginning not to care a whit that he won a ring in 2008. Rings are the ornaments on a career. They help you get ranked higher than other guys by reporters and fans looking back. Coaches can't eat looking back. They can't create huge trusts for their kids looking back. They can do those things by winning more than >25 and conference titles. They need to get a ring once in a while, but most reason that that will take care of itself, if they keep the program up and winning >25 and hanging conference titles frequently. Rings just aren't controllable. Most guys aim to coach for 20-30 seasons, if they can hang on. No one has won more than ten rings. Next is 5 rings. Most top coaches win 1 or 2 rings. Rings are not controllable. Rings can buy you a few seasons of popularity and can get you into some recruits you used to not be able to get into see. But the rings are not controllable. Seeding by a system aiming to create the biggest audience determines a large share of which top team wins any given ring. If you are at KU in a small population state in the CST, you can pretty much know that you will usually get the raw end of seeding. Thus a rational coach logically infers that rings don't pay the rent and keep the lights on in a 30,000 sf house on an estate. Winning >25 games and conference titles, which are something a coach at KU holds a distinct edge in doing, and so has some control over, do pay the rent and keep the lights on. And the longer he coaches the bigger the trust funds he leaves for his kids. And never underestimate the extent of the desire of a parent to provide for his kids and ensure to the best of his ability that they never have to fend for themselves the way he had to, when he was young, unless they want to. A parent knows that some kids are gentle and not equipped to run with wolves, while others are. A parent wants to protect all of his children from the real world, if he can. Love, education and an enormous trust fund are the best ways to do that.
The longer Self coaches at KU, the more certain he is his children never have to fear for the rest of their lives. And the longer Self coaches, the more certain Self's grand children never have to fear for their lives. And so on. It is that simple. There is no end to the desire to secure the futures of the generations either. If Self could make a billion dollars coaching, he would try to do it. There is inelastic demand for wealth, because, as the Rockefellers demonstrate. No matter how much wealth they have and how much they control, they can further enhance it and further secure the order that secures them and their future generations at the top of the heap of the global economy. Self may say he doesn't foresee himself coaching a long time. Fine. He can say what he wants, but when he looks at his children eventually he will think: well, another year of $10 million, or another five, and they are iced at the level of the next grade of wealth up. All the talk about wealthy people doing what they do because they love it is only half the story--the half put out to the plebes. The other half is that they are highly incentivized and driven to enhance their wealth endlessly for their future generations and for their visions of how the world ought to be organized for their future generations. For every one wealthy person that talks about making their kids earn their livings there is in the back ground an enormous, unspoken of, and growing trust fund. Period.
So having covered the driver of wealth, let's get back to immediate context.
Self cannot land the best players...not yet.
Self cannot get nearly the numbers of the best players that other elite programs get...not yet.
And he's been at it for over a decade now at KU.
And he has been the most successful coach of his generation for a goodly portion of that tenure.
Self probably looks at the field of coaches at elite programs, AND the field of inexperienced coaches with much less talent than himself, with dump truck loads of OADs and 5 stars backing up each season and thinks, well, that's not how it is at Kansas. I'm not bitter about it. I have one of the great jobs in my profession. I get a lot of very good players and always tend to have more than the other teams in my conference. I have an unfair advantage in the conference, and if I use my skills wisely, and keep trying to get better as a coach and keep trying to make my teams better, with what talent the system allows me, then I can pretty much hang on her indefinitely and get richer than I ever dreamed, and amass a fortune that will ensure great lives for all of my family for generations to come. And I am doing what I love. And I have great kids. And I am a midwesterner that has been to Paris and learned that there are somethings in Lawrence that I like better than in Paris. I like to visit Paris on the private jet for a long weekend, but I like living in Lawrence. I like walking down Mass Street and popping into this cafe, or that pizza joint and talking ball and small talk with the towns people. They are my kind of people outside of basketball people. They like me and I like them. They aren't asking me to work miracles. They are asking me to be the best I can be with what I have to work with. They are asking me to keep Kansas being Kansas, not turn it into Kentucky. I like that. And I will work my butt off for them and for my kids and my wife and my staff and me. This is my home, unless something drastic changes.
The key to Self's choices about when to ask players to sacrifice their bodies lies in what I have outlined above.
My hypothesis is: Self looks at at the talent distribution and the seeding system, and the inherent talent advantage he usually holds in conference, and the seeding benefit of winning the conference, and the talent disadvantage that he operates at increasingly in the Madness, and comes to a VERY rational conclusion.
Let's win as many games as quickly as we can and sacrifice our bodies for the conference titles, because even if we rest up and get healthy for March Madness, between the biased seeding, the biased refereeing, and the great advantage in talent the other elite programs tend to have over us, we are almost never going to have a significant chance to win six straight games when healthy.
Let's make the best of what we can control. We can catch a lot of teams in development in pre conference, and if we are willing to lay it all on the line in the conference, we can beat a lot of teams in conference simply with greater talent, I can get us the rest of the wins we need, and when we occasionally run into a coach with an unusually good team in conference, well, he will be trying to figure out how to position for post season, and we can leave it all on the floor against him and win that conference title to. And, so, who cares if he wins another game or two in the Madness and we go out the second round in our off years, if we go out elite Eight in our good years, and, when once in awhile lady luck smiles on us in our match ups and injuries, we get a ring.
Do you see what I'm saying here?
Self is a realist.
That he is also a risk taker sometimes obscures that.
Self is an enormous risk taker, when he thinks he has a significant chance of winning something.
Self saw that he had the talent needed to win a ring in '08 and he played his cards very close to the vest in the conference run. He conserved his team for that Madness for sure, because he had the horses to win it all. And once he got there he took outrageous risks against UNC with that surprise lane jumping defense the first half. And he was always willing to risk defeat by sending teams out flat in that Madness until he got to UNC. He was so sure he had to take risks that he was willing to play his A game against UNC and then hope to win with his B game against Memphis with a coach he knew he could outcoach, one way or another, since he had equal talent,or maybe more, despite all of Cal's ringers.
But most of the other years?
Its been apparent that Self's most talented teams were less talented than at least two of the other elite programs in any given season.
Self plays to win.
In life and in the game.
The way you play to win is to aim at what you CAN win at.
Getter done.
Then worry about how to steal another slice of cake later.
But you better win what you can.
And he does that.
Mostly he has the talent to win the conference and he does it.
Once he had the talent and experience needed to win a title.
It seemed he had the talent in Wiggins and Embiid, but then he realized that Wiggins and his posse were not going to let Wiggins play full tilt. So he shifted gears an put the saddle on Embiid, who was the only player with a ton of talent willing to play hard enough to win a conference title. And he lacked a point guard. And then he lost Embiid to injury using him to try to win a title at all costs. Why did he risk him? Because he probably guesses that Wiggins and his posse would never let Wiggins play full tilt even in the Madness. Without Wiggins AND Embiid playing full tilt, there wasn't enough talent on the rest of the team to have a prayer of winning a ring. When Embiid got injured, Self had to have known how serious it was and that the likelihood of Embiid ever returning 100 percent that season was slim and none. So: a ring was never really in the cards, unless Wiggins was willing to step up. And the Stanford game made clear that that was never going to happen.
I frankly am impressed with Self's grasp of the context he is coaching in.
I am impressed with how level headed and calculatingly rational and insightful he has been during his KU tenure.
He really hasn't misread the level of his talent once.
I think the guy gets it totally.
I think the fans are still learning.
Rock Chalk!
