@HighEliteMajor
We are far, far, far out to sea now.
IMHO, there are things Self is dealing with here beyond this season and this team that would already have shattered lesser men than Self--The SHOEWARS, specifically.
For this reason, I am willing to see Bill's way as valid, even though you and I are advocating another path base on a different goal--a ring.
The point here is that Bill and Rick are NOT coaching on a level playing field.
When Self coaches in the Big 12, he is coaching against 8 other programs that are not being stacked. And he is coaching against a 9th program, Texas, that may, or may not be, joining the stacked list.
The Big 12 is a conference of non stacks.
Self is trying to win that, because that is a realistic goal.
Self proved in 2012 that he can take a non stacked team to the Finals if he has one rim protector, a good PG, and a draft choice 4. But even when he did that, he came up against a Nike stack in the Finals and lost.
Rings are increasingly unfeasible right now, unless you are a healthy Nike, or adidas stack. I know UConn squeezed through the filter last season, and persons say they weren't stacked, but they lucked out, because Embiid got injured, Stumpy can't coach a lick even with a stack, and Noels did not come back, so NIke-UK just didn't have enough experience to finish even though stacked.
I read your post first, and I read @REHawk's post second.
Clearly my logic and sense of fight is on your side.
But @REHawk is speaking from the philosophical point of view of a coach that has had to think of the best interests of young men and a program, and so I not only respect his POV on this, but also have thought it through carefully.
The bottom line is this: a coach's job is to read the situation of a season and do the best he can for his young men and his program, but always do so given the realities of the situation.
Leaders can and should aspire to and inspire to greatness for it is important for young men to learn that greatness is not limited only to those that have all the advantages.
At the same time, leaders should teach their young men the nature of reality and what greatness involves, and that reality's unfairness is as real and in need of acknowledging, as is reality's opportunities for greatness.
If I understand @REHawk's POV, and what I believe is Self's POV, this season's philosophy, and may be all season's philosophies, goes something like this.
A coach can give a great deal to a group of young men by showing them that hard work at individual and team improvement, sacrifice of self to team, and learning to release of competitive greatness are things that are within our reasonable grasp to achieve in a conference season. Winning a conference title and achieving a good record, are important and lasting distinctions of accomplishment that cannot be taken away from an individual, or a team of individuals, any more than a ring can be taken from them. The ring is the greatest achievement of all. But the odds of its achievement are very small, unless one has all of the pieces and three every game MUA at 3 of 5 positions, and even then risks of injuries, bad calls, and off nights, make a ring a risk with very long odds. Specifically the rough odds are 1 in 64, or something less with a high seed, starting in March. But the odds of winning the Big 12 are 1 in 10, and with KU's level of talent and coaching, probably something less. Thus for a coach like Self, or @REHawk, it seems unwise not to focus on winning the conference, since it is something lasting and real that their young men can carry with them the rest of their lives with considerable probability, and given that winning it does more to put them in position to get a high seed in the post season, which is greatest gift of winning of all that he could give them.
But each season, a leader must look at what is feasible. Some times the best we can probably be is a conference champ. Some times the best we can probably be is conference champ and a national champ.
So: given that Bill apparently thinks the surest way to a conference title, is to be able to play both inside out and outside in, he is continuing to labor on getting his guys so they can play inside out in a conference, where they are not really smaller than 8 of their 9 opponents.
In turn, if they learn to play this way, and if Self can work his usual coaching magic and find a way to finesse Barnes one out of two, Self can do his best to give his young men the best they can hope for, given their level of talent: a conference title and a seed high enough that if they were to tap deeply enough into their own abilities, and get some luck, they MIGHT make a run.
But if they don't, that is alright, too. They don't really have talent comparable to 8 of the top ten teams currently, because of SHOEWARs. That is not their fault. And it probably is not Self's fault. It is probably the fault of the NCAA and Nike and adidas and KU, and in a short time, Louisville, are odd elite programs out.
I know you can probably tell that I am struggling defending the position of Self and @REHawk; that it is not where my heart lies.
My heart lies always with the daring enterprise outside the box. It is who I am. So: I am not a coach of young men for a reason. A coach of young men--at least honorable ones like Self and @REHawk --has to think of things like trade-offs about how much he probably can give his young men to take away for all their hard work, rather than just the long shot of winning it all and being a champion for the rest of their lives.
Leadership is full of such uneasy trade-offs, where leaders must subordinate their ideals, morals, intense ambitions and furious competitiveness to the greater good of those they lead and the country they are pledged to deliver through peril to live to fight another day.
Lincoln compromised virtually every value he held in an attempt to prevent the Crown of Great Britain, the Habsburgs, and France from dividing and conquering both USA and Mexico, simultaneously. People still do not honor him for what he really did. They misunderstand what he was up against and what he did. Little people pick out his flaws and his prejudices. Little people reduce the greatness of what he did to single issues, like slavery, or winning a war, or railroads, or greenbacks. What he did was deliver for an entire people, even as his own base was trying to use him to highjack control, and his opposition was trying to succeed from the Union, the greatest, the only worthy thing about America--government of the people, by the people and for the people, so that such government should not perish from this earth, as it was surely on the verge of doing, and as it again is in peril of doing.
Our Presidents have always had to make some of the most horrific choices between what they ideally wanted for America and what was then feasible to deliver the country from its immediate predicament--one that usually what had been created by a long process before they came to office.
Our presidents are elected by narrower, and narrower private oligarchies, but they must still, if they are to be more than lackeys, act in the interest of the greatest good they can perceive and achieve for all the people; that they often cannot achieve much is often the product of the complexity of the context such a leader must operate in. The only ones we should loath are those that decline to do the best for the most when such was feasible.
Lincoln had to have known that the moment he printed greenbacks to take financing the Civil War out of the hands of the Bank of England, which was then not only financing both the North and South against each other, but also financing the European great powers conquest of Mexico, so as to both divide and conquer USA, but also to make sure that neither faction of the USA would ally with Mexico to control an interocean canal through central America, that he would surely be assassinated as soon as the moment were right. And yet Lincoln did it, because he apparently knew that despite the complexity of the forces at play, and the hateful greed of great fortunes pursuing trade route monopolies and the inhumane viciousness of sunk costs in slavery, a moment had improbably presented itself to cement the existence of USA for at least another half century, if only he were willing to risk his own life for every American then and for all peoples after that might one day escape the darkness of non-representational orders controlling representational governments because USA did not perish from this earth.
Leadership can be lonely.
I believe there is much more at stake here than the 2014-2015 season.
I believe that at another time, under different circumstances, Self might act differently than he is.
You and I know that the most logical way, probably the only way, for this team to win a ring is to play outside in all season long, master it, and hope to get hot and stay hot six games in March.
I suspect Bill Self understands this too.
But I suspect Bill Self, as @REHawk has eloquently and without sugar coating stated, understands the logic of what we are both saying, and has other obligations to discharge as well.
He has to think of more than one great daring enterprise.
He has to think of what is the best he can do for these players now this season and for the continuity of KU basketball within the context of SHOEWARS.
Perhaps a conference title IS the only lasting accomplishment that seems probably within these young men's talents to grasp and achieve and so attribute the accomplishment to more than just lady luck.
And if they win the conference title, then their chance of lady luck smiling on them just grew significantly greater due to the tournament seeding process.
And winning a conference title would be at least some kind of accomplishment supporting the bridging of the program into the coming transition into the OAD/TAD recruiting waters.
But damn, I sure would like to see this team play outside in for this season.
But damn, I'm not the coach.
