@HighEliteMajor
Yes I want more.
More life.
More sex.
More money.
More travel.
More championships.
More HEM posts.
But I have worked hard to get to my !@#$%ing Zen state and so I have to keep things in balance. :-)
There is no doubt that Bill Self missed a couple of ring opps that he should have finished on.
There is no doubt that he has mastered winning percentage and conference titles and has not yet mastered winning rings.
There is also no doubt that everyone has begun to study and copy everything he does. Its not just the chop. Calhoun's Kemba team was a 100% carbon copy of what Self did offensively. Total. Even his defensive scheming was, too. Watch tape of Calhoun's pre Kemba teams. He hadn't started copying Self yet. Hell, half the coaches are now copying Self's technique of sending teams out flat for a low possession game against the lesser team in 2 in 3
in the season (Saturday Monday), or the tournament, in order to save an amping on full energy for the better team; that's why their are getting to be so many upsets. Its not about parity. Its Self's strategy to get the most out of what he has in 2 in 3 that is being copied. Its a high percentage strategy that a certain percentage of the time blows up in your face. But now that everyone is doing it we are seeing all kinds of upsets, because of the structural risk of doing it. People have copied his junk 3-2 zone with the two inside guys playing zone and the three outside guys playing man. Until this season, specifically the last three seasons, opposing coaches have been increasingly emulating his disruption statistic approach to winning. Steals plus blocks and alters divided by TOs. Self was the first to systematize trying to win that statistic. The new rules ended that emulation. But notice what Self did in response to the rules. He was among the first this season to abandon disruption totally, to focus instead on trying hold the trips down, raise the points per possession and basically turn games into FT shooting contests. Ryan may have beaten him to it, but more likely Ryan has always played this way and Self saw how perfect Ryan's approach was for the new rules. And there is probably a lot more that I am not smart enough to figure out. Self IS THE MODEL EVERYONE IS COPYING that cannot haul in a bunch of OADs each season and return two former OADS.
There is no doubt the competition has caught up to most of what he does. It has happened to every coach but one: John R. Wooden. That was why he was justly called The Wizard.
But there is also no doubt that Bill has already adapted a new model; that he is presently laboring some with it.
Last season he abandoned the one OAD supplementing an experienced core and moved to a 2-3 OAD model. He could have signed lesser players that would have been here longer--players like Kevin Young that helped get him to the National Finals--but instead, when the OAD door finally opened for him, he walked right in. We know it was consciously done, because this season he signed two more. Signing OADs is a one way street. Once you start, there is no turning back.
But notice Self didn't jump to Cal's unlimited OAD model. Why? Because Self rightly reasons that even Cal's greatest unlimited OAD teams only have had three players each with MUA that he could not scheme to stop. So: Self only seeks three OADs and that's what he now signs. He also knows getting three every year without a World Wide Wes is about the absolute max he can hope fore. Two is feasible. Three can often be done. He has Alexander and Oubre. The plan is obviously to sign Turner, because he couldn't attract an OAD PG; then he keeps developing the 3-4 year bigs another season, so that in next year's recruiting class he can hopefully get lucky and land an OAD PG, an OAD 3, only one OAD big, and slide by with a 3-4 year big, or a Cliff Alexander hold over. This is clearly what Self is trying to do.
But just as clearly it is all new to him and it has a lot of kinks to be worked out. Self clearly understands what everyone else comments on. His system has always been based on long term team building with guys that he spends years to build up their individual skills, teamwork skills, and emotional toughness. His prior system depended on conditioning his players to the point that he could push their buttons at will and get the responses that he sought. But he understood, and perhaps sooner than most, that that all had to change. Boot camps had to be cut. He couldn't run off prima donnas from the program anymore. He couldn't rip guys apart and put them back together. None of that stuff could be used anymore, No more benching stars and putting them in toughening boxes for a month at a time. No more any of that because he couldn't afford to run any one off, if he could help it. Nor could he give off the impression that having an OAD was anything but fun, even though deep down he probably thinks they are low foundation bumblers with high ceilings. No more playing an OAD like Josh Selby out of position. No more playing through Seniors and using Xavier to stretch defenses. The moment he went to the three OAD model, OADs had to start and they had to play most of the minutes most of the season. No more hard guy. No more driving players till they threatened to hit you in the huddles. No Marine Corp in petro adidas.
It was unrealistic for anyone to think he was going to put his program through a complete revamping like this and win a ring instantly. I seriously doubt Self thought for a red dirt minute that he had a prayer of winning a ring this season the moment he saw that Wigs and Selden couldn't hit the broad side of an agent runner from trifectaville. I bet he didn't fantasize about a ring until Embiid came around quicker than quick. To be blunt, Self was using Wigs, Selden and Embiid and their low foundations and high ceilings to underwrite a transition year into this new model without having a .500 season. Self is probably tickled to death with 10 losses and a conference title from a team full of overrated freshman that couldn't buy a 40% trey with ten bricks of Vlad Putin's gold bullion.
At the same time, there is no doubt that Self has run into serious speed bumps the last three seasons, before retooling for the OAD era.
His speed bumps started after missing his golden opp for a ring with the last season of the Morri. Self admitted he missed a golden opp with the last Morri team. He just didnt dwell on it after admitting it. And I guess in this age of Oprah-conditioned confessionalism, apparently nothing short of Bill going on Ellen and admitting to liking Four Weddings and a Funeral would have sufficed. But I guaranty you that Self knew he missed his shot, when he held the aces; knew he would rue the day down stream when a season like this past one finally had to be endured without a ring more recent than '08.
But acting as Bill's apologist in this post, who else would have thought to prepare a team to have to play 2 in 3 versus a Princeton team (Richmond) and an XTReme Conditioned team (VCU)? This is what so many forget. And that VCU team was a heckuva club, too, with an athletic freak at center (a tireless 6-9 260 pounder grinder/runner). We should have beaten VCU. We would have beaten VCU if we had played any other kind of team than a Princeton team 48 hours before.
That VCU loss IMHO pushed all of Self's buttons and was what produced the phenomenal job he did with the 2012 Finals team. That team was supposed to have had Ben Mac and Jamari on it. They had to sit. Ben's greatness and both players added depth might have gotten that team past even UK's stacked deck. We'll never know, but that team did fight back and got close to Kentucky. What if Ben Mac had come in at that point and ripped off two quick treys and a lob dunk? What if he had been able to play 20 minutes a piece for Travis with a bad ankle and EJ with a bad shoulder? Ifs and buts, I know, but Self would probably have another ring and everyone would still be post tumescent still!
The next year his five star point guard has a knee that never heels and he never gets his pop back. And Zach Peters, for what ever reason, goes to head injury hollow, and reputedly starts talking to people that aren't there, and then bolts the program. Oh, and Self has to patch EJ with Tharpe, because of some recruiting misses, and Tharpe can't guard his own shadow and turns out, we learn a year later, to be an erratic personality a selfie short of an iPhoto album regarding insight off the floor and insight about how to run a team on the floor.
Then this season, he signs the low foundation, high ceiling triplets and has to learn to coach a new way. You know the way. Lots of smiles, the kind of reassurances you used to reserve for older women you were trying to bed. Heels of palms pressed on eye balls when the short timers aren't looking.
I am making excuses for Self, because that is what an apologist is supposed to do. I'm trying to lay out the best case for Self, because so many have been laying out the case against him.
Great men, or should I say men who are exceptional at what they do, need defending sometimes. Not often. But sometimes. Self isn't the first one I've defended and he won't be the last. Its a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it.
He's won 80% plus of his games, etc., etc. yattta, yatta.
Along the way, Self turned 50 and until a man, even the best adjusted man, turns 50 he doesn't know the wringer it can be. Its like a de-Bar Mitzvah in which you are saying good bye, rather than hello, to the prime of your life. Its looking at your woman and knowing no matter how cool you were to her, you're not that cool anymore, and that dorks half your age that have no idea what cool even is, are now cooler than you can be with all the money in untraceable bailouts Blackstone could buy shares in adidas with.
All this horseshit about poor, poor women losing their looks at 30 is nothing compared to men losing their cool at 50. To get some perspective on this, leap out of the neutered present and go back to the golden age of Hollywood, when men were at least still portrayed to have a pair. Look at Clark Gable in Red Dust, or It Happened One Night, then look at him in Mogambo. In Red Dust he could burn Jean Harlow down with a look. By Mogambo he is worldly and knows women inside and out, but look at him, at how he moves and his facial expressions. The unselfconscious cool is gone. When you're 50 try it. Dress cool, wear your favorite shades, and take them off in front of a cougar and watch her keep sniffing for scent in other directions. Smell is the last untamed sense in humans. It can be covered, but it cannot be mistaken. A young man's scent is not musk, or anything that can be smelled and put into words. It is to women's olfactory system what an ultra high pitched whistle only a dog can here is to a person, something going on without their conscious awareness. When its gone its gone. People that love you, pals that still care about you, still say you're cool, that you could still chat the panties off the Kate Upton clone on the next bar stool, but deep down you know it could only happen with money and the worldly schtick and plugging into the daddy port on the babe 1.0 auto-bulls eyeing on the bar at the hottest restaurant in town. You know that 23 year old hottie that you used to be able to get the attention of with scent a lone, would now take a few thousand bucks and plane tickets to ski the Mer d' Glas above Chamonix to bag. Turn 50 and you know that they are interested in your mind and your money and not in that order. The want to is there, even the prove it all night virility is there for awhile longer, even the killer smile may remain, but the scent that makes glances turn into next mornings, or long nooners, without words; that is gone. In time you learn good riddance to it, but in the moment it is like someone cut off your arm and it still feels like its there even though you know its gone. Ghost sent I named it. Scent for a short while you think is there that isn't. Great comedians and great ass bandits have great timing and know when to quit the job, when to leave it to younger guys. But that doesn't mean they don't wish they didn't know it was time to hang it up--not just to continue being honorable some have been throughout the entirety of their marriages, but because the scent is gone.
(Note: I'm not suggesting anything about the nature of Bill's fidelity, or lack there of. Some of the coolest men I have known, some of the men with the most powerful scent--scent that ignited women into Cherries en flambé with just a holstered smile--never once cheated on their women. Not talkin' bout cheatin'. Talkin' bout scent.)
Self has probably lost his scent.
It happens.
What the lord giventh, the lord taketh away.
Self has probably gotten adjusted to it about now.
But its absence changes how you look at everything, how you see everything.
It changes what you think is important and which sacrifices are worth making.
Its not that you lose your chip on your shoulder, its that you look at it differently, and you have to find a new way to take others down before they get a chance to knock it off.
Some men do their best work after the scent is gone.
Some men don't.
Only time tells.
My hunch is that Self has gotten through the worst of the change after this past season.
And he got through it without falling to .500, like all the other coaches did when they lost their scents.
I'm not saying he won't have another tough season or two.
Cliff Alexander, good as he may be, IS NOT going to be as dominant as Joel Embiid--the sweetest ballin' macaroon from Cameroon that ever strapped 'em up and dunked through his own scent.
But Cliff may be good enough, especially if Oubre happens to have a higher foundation than Wigs had, which really is not very improbable at all (talkin' bout foundations, not talkin' bout ceilings), and our 4 year bigs keep getting better, and someone takes the Point Guard pill and learns to be a ball distributing, rim driving, dervish that guard his shadow and keep his phone in his pocket and his pecker in his briefs (gimmme back my briefs!!!, as Frankie shouts in the anime cartoon) at parties.
Well, HEM, even an apologist has to man up to certain realities like point guard.
Until a point guard develops, or gets recruited, or randomly mutates, or gets MK/Ultra-ed into KU silks, another 10-12 loss season is probably the best we can hope for.
But think about it (with or without scent).
A couple of 10-12 loss seasons is tolerable to start moving toward getting this new hoops model Self is working on greased up and running smoothly.
In fact, its great.
Not falling to .500, not falling entirely out of the hunt for lady luck's ring, is not bad at all.
And that's the thing about Self.
You get to win more.
You don't fall as far, when the inevitable retooling happens.
And when he figures this new model out, you're going to get another ring.
And contrary to popular belief, he does learn from his mistakes. He just happens to be human and sometimes makes more that compound with the original one that he nearer to solving.
If I can leave you with one thought in this long winded (that's my middle name, right) apologia, it would be this quote by a smart Buddhist woman whose books have helped me a few times over the years.
"Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know."--Pema Chodron
These early exits in the tourney persist because there is something not only Bill needs to learn, but all the rest of us in this living myth of KU basketball need to learn too. And they will go away when he and we have learned it. For this reason, I want to thank you and all the rest of our august board rats here laboring away in the bothness of life because I can feel that we are all inevitably getting to what we need to learn.
Go, Bill, go!!!!
Go, HEM, go!!!!!!
Go, Kate Upton, go!!!!
Go, Jayhawk nation, go!!!!!
