I wonder if this is the end for Temple's John Chaney. I hope it isn't.
Chaney is one of the real good-guys of college basketball. He cares about teaching and parenting. He takes in troubled kids, on purpose, and churns out well-adjusted young men. He's like a one-man military academy. He also is not a glory hound, nor a self-promoter, nor a win-at-all-costs maniac. He understands that basketball is a metaphor for life, not life itself.
So what to make of his decision to send forward Nehemiah Ingram into the game against St. Joe's with the express purpose of roughing people up?
For starters, this type of thing happens all the time, in almost all sports. And what's more, it should happen. This is how players police a sport when referees either can't or won't. In the perfect game-theory version of events, you retaliate for a wrong, sending a message to the opposing team, and then pay a stiff penalty from the officials (usually an ejection). This is what keeps everyone honest. The system breaks down when (1) the refs don't sufficiently penalize the retaliation and (2) the retaliating player refuses to stop sending messages.
In other words, you can regret that the system broke down, and that St. Joe's John Bryant got his arm broken, while still understanding why it exists.
But what does bother me--a lot--is Chaney referring to two of his own players as "goons."
"Goons" should always play for the other team. Your team should have "enforcers," or "high-energy players," or "guys who aren't afraid to give up their body" or are "physical." There are a hundred euphemisms.
(1) By referring to his own guys as goons, Chaney is doing exactly the opposite of what he's always been known for: He's abusing his kids for his own benefit. We expect this from Bob Huggins or Jon Calipari. Not from Chaney.
(2) He's presenting a level of foresight about the need for retaliation that suggests he might be more preoccupied with it than is normal, or healthy.
If anyone deserves a chance to make things right, it's Chaney. By taking himself out of the Atlantic 10 tournament, he's off to a good start. Let's hope he's allowed to fix this thing.
32 minutes ago
5 comments:
Most of what you say about John Chaney is on point; he deserves praise for his approach to coaching in the big picture.
However, you err badly in characterizing his decision as rational and even expected, with a touch of the moral "ought". If he was offended that St. Joe's was running illegal screens that were not being called by the refs, he had many more sportsmanlike ways of retaliating than by sending a goon in to do physical harm. He could have his own team run illegal screens. He could have told his "goon" to foul hard a player taking advantage of an illegal screen (this can be done without maiming the guy). He could have ranted until he got himself ejected.
He did NOT have to send in a player to physically abuse opponents. The foul on John Bryant was nothing more than a cheap shot delivered after the play was effectively over. The result was that a good team player in his senior year missed his final trip to his hometown as a college player and missed his senior appreciation game at home. For what? So John Chaney could exorcise his personal demons over what he perceived as sub-par refereeing? GIve me a break!
For all the good that Chaney has done, he is still the whacko who castigated people in Ohio for electing George Bush. He is now the whacko who used his position to abuse young men: his own (as you correctly note, by labeling him a goon) and the other team's (by breaking his arm). There are some things that can't be fixed, and ruining the end of John Bryant's college career is one of them. Chaney should resign and cite his poor judgment as the basis. It would be the one final lesson that the kids he has tried to mentor could take as a lasting one: there are some lines you don't cross, and if you do, you pay the ultimate penalty.
The best measure of what kind of person a college basketball coach is is how many of his players graduate. Temple graduates 13% of its basketball athletes. That's Bob Higgins territory.
I agree with pablo and Hei Lun. I myself was a fifth/sixth man hustle-type player on my high school basketball team, and I appreciate the role of the physical player as part of the sport. Sometimes being that player means setting a tone or making a statement, but that should always be done within the context of the game. Setting good screens, boxing out, diving on loose (or not quite loose) balls, committing a hard offensive or defensive foul are ways to do what Cheney felt needed to be done without violating the spirit and sanctity of the game. I now coach grammar school basketball, and I constantly remind my players that there is a difference between an aggresive play and a dirty play. An attempt to play the game hard and physical in a manner that leads to a foul is acceptable, thuggishness and roughhousing are not. In addition, all coaches constantly distinguish between mental mistakes and physical mistakes, physical mistakes being an acceptable part of the game which can never be eliminated and should not be dwelled on too long, mental mistakes being lapses in concentration and judgment which we must address each and every time they occur and seek to elimnate altogether. Chaney always struck me as a coach who would find mental mistakes unacceptable as a coach, and for his stunning lack of judgement, I agree with pablo that a great lesson for his players would be for him to demonstrate that such a mistake is indeed unacceptable, and resign accordingly.
Finally, one of the issues I deal with most often in the course of a game is my players complaining about the unfairness of this or that call by a referee. My respone, whether I agree with their assessment or not is that life is unfair, you will be treated unfairly in life by future professors, bosses, co-workers, evaluaters, etc... for the rest of your life, so the solution is not to complain or become distracted by it, or to retailiate, the solution is to control what you can control and move on with it. I realize that the stakes are a bit higher in Div I hoops, but I am still disgusted by the example Chaney (and all habitually complaining coaches) set in feeding a victimization culture. Life is often hard and arbitrary, and as a teacher, a coach should be getting his players to deal with this fact, not encouraging them to be complainers.
You cannot measure a coach by graduation rates. Anyone that knows ncaa basketball knows that the way graduation rate is calculated is a joke, and don't compare Bob Huggins to Chaney or Knight. Just because he recruits tough, physical players doesn't mean he is insane like the other two. Name one on the court incident that he has had like the chair throwing incident or the Chaney incidents. Bob Huggins is misunderstood and wrongly portrayed by the media and ignorant people that don't do any research.
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