CBS article on Hurley

[champs99and04]

The reversing resumes idea makes no sense. Reverse OJ's resume and he goes from a murderer to someone who totally redeems himself by having a successful football and acting career, and then, oddly, playing college football for a while.

It was clear to anyone paying attention that 2014 was a fluke. A fluke KO was, IMO, fully responsible for. He earned that title. But he was another Craig Esherick or, more accurately, Mike Davis. Hell, in Mike Davis's six years at Indiana he went to the NCAAs 4 times and only had 1 sub-.500 record.

In other words, the fact that KO was fired has no bearing on Hurley. If, in six years, Hurley has a similar resume--trend included!--he won't be extended. If he goes to the tournament with a lot of high seeds but can't make the Final Four, than yeah, we'll start to question if he can win the big one. That makes sense.

But the team was never making a Final Four run again with KO. Next year would have been only marginally better than this one, and then we'd lose JA and replace him with... ? Akinjo's nice and all, but there's little chance he'll have the individual talent of JA.

It makes plenty of sense because it demonstrates how emotion and recency bias are woven into the narratives we develop. It's kind of like absolute truth in that all of our observations are colored by the perceived outcome. Our opinions on Ollie as a coach can exist independently of this phenomenon, but it cannot be denied outright by anyone who has read this board this season alone.

I'm unclear on how 2014 could have been both a fluke and KO's responsibility. I think I know what you mean when you say that, but you're simply regurgitating a popular fallacy amongst sports fans (i.e. Eli's two Super Bowl runs were flukes). The bulk of existing evidence indicates that it's more likely than not that KO is closer to the coach he has been recently than the one he was originally, but that's different than discarding it entirely. The first two years are just as much a part of his resume as the last two. If people think that something changed, fine. That's part of the evaluation. But determining whether the circumstances that led to that success is replicable is going to be more involved than most people here will admit, and the uncomfortable reality will remain that KO has accomplished things in the profession that Hurley has not.

I don't want to diminish what was originally intended as a preemptive defense of Hurley by continuing to argue Ollie's case, though. My proposed hypothetical - where Hurley is basically Jamie Dixon for a while - essentially represents the inverse of Ollie's resume: commendable consistency followed by the inability to string wins together in the tournament. I don't want to hear people suggesting that there is something innate about Hurley's inevitable shortcomings when we never applied the opposite in cases where it would have kept somebody employed. My instinct is that you'll be smart enough to not fall into this trip if and when the time comes, but your assertment that "we'll start to question if he can win the big one" if he goes to the tournament with high seeds and can't make the final four has me concerned that you've been sequestered by the mob.

 

[champs99and04]

We didn't run out a coach.... KO is/was a horrible coach and not ready to coach at this level. Sticking with him made no sense. He wasn't going through some low... he was a bad coach. Before you mention but what about 2014, 2014 clearly given his coaching was an anomaly... If we want to live life on the outlier wouldn't be where we are today.

What happened was the very definition of running somebody out. There is no argument on that. If you want to argue that you were justified in doing so, that's a different discussion.

Regarding your second point, I think you're being overly simplistic. He did a bad job over his last four years, but coaches can perform poorly for a variety of reasons. We need a larger sample size to determine whether his problems are fixable and whether the things he does well will ever be illuminated like they were before. That's not going to happen at UConn and I understand that, I just think people are being extremely narrow-minded on this topic.

 

[tzznandrew]

It makes plenty of sense because it demonstrates how emotion and recency bias are woven into the narratives we develop. It's kind of like absolute truth in that all of our observations are colored by the perceived outcome. Our opinions on Ollie as a coach can exist independently of this phenomenon, but it cannot be denied outright by anyone who has read this board this season alone.

I'm unclear on how 2014 could have been both a fluke and KO's responsibility. I think I know what you mean when you say that, but you're simply regurgitating a popular fallacy amongst sports fans (i.e. Eli's two Super Bowl runs were flukes). The bulk of existing evidence indicates that it's more likely than not that KO is closer to the coach he has been recently than the one he was originally, but that's different than discarding it entirely. The first two years are just as much a part of his resume as the last two. If people think that something changed, fine. That's part of the evaluation. But determining whether the circumstances that led to that success is replicable is going to be more involved than most people here will admit, and the uncomfortable reality will remain that KO has accomplished things in the profession that Hurley has not.

I don't want to diminish what was originally intended as a preemptive defense of Hurley by continuing to argue Ollie's case, though. My proposed hypothetical - where Hurley is basically Jamie Dixon for a while - essentially represents the inverse of Ollie's resume: commendable consistency followed by the inability to string wins together in the tournament. I don't want to hear people suggesting that there is something innate about Hurley's inevitable shortcomings when we never applied the opposite in cases where it would have kept somebody employed. My instinct is that you'll be smart enough to not fall into this trip if and when the time comes, but your assertment that "we'll start to question if he can win the big one" if he goes to the tournament with high seeds and can't make the final four has me concerned that you've been sequestered by the mob.

No I get you. And I respect your opinion. I just think you're wrong.

Part of the problem is that the way you're describing things, these two coaches are the same...
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They aren't.

Things can be flukes. KO clearly connected with a group of kids and led them to a championship. The stars aligned, if you will. But he's not that coach. Four years should be enough to show that he can't do all the things necessary to run a high level D1 program, at least not yet.

You, of all people, who wrote a very good series of posts 4 years ago (Daniel Hamilton King of the Castle) about why the 2016 team was underrated should know. The talent on that team was Final Four caliber. If it weren't for a miracle 3, they're a 10-11 seed, and regardless they were pantzed in round 2 by a very good, but not great, Kansas team.

Hurley hasn't proven he can win the big one. He has proven he can resuscitate programs on life support. I have no qualms criticizing him in a few years if he can't get the program turned around, and in 5-10 years if he can't prove he can coach in the tournament. The two are about as unrelated as I can imagine.

 

[Hans Sprungfeld]

It makes plenty of sense because it demonstrates how emotion and recency bias are woven into the narratives we develop. It's kind of like absolute truth in that all of our observations are colored by the perceived outcome. Our opinions on Ollie as a coach can exist independently of this phenomenon, but it cannot be denied outright by anyone who has read this board this season alone.

I'm unclear on how 2014 could have been both a fluke and KO's responsibility. I think I know what you mean when you say that, but you're simply regurgitating a popular fallacy amongst sports fans (i.e. Eli's two Super Bowl runs were flukes). The bulk of existing evidence indicates that it's more likely than not that KO is closer to the coach he has been recently than the one he was originally, but that's different than discarding it entirely. The first two years are just as much a part of his resume as the last two. If people think that something changed, fine. That's part of the evaluation. But determining whether the circumstances that led to that success is replicable is going to be more involved than most people here will admit, and the uncomfortable reality will remain that KO has accomplished things in the profession that Hurley has not.

I don't want to diminish what was originally intended as a preemptive defense of Hurley by continuing to argue Ollie's case, though. My proposed hypothetical - where Hurley is basically Jamie Dixon for a while - essentially represents the inverse of Ollie's resume: commendable consistency followed by the inability to string wins together in the tournament. I don't want to hear people suggesting that there is something innate about Hurley's inevitable shortcomings when we never applied the opposite in cases where it would have kept somebody employed. My instinct is that you'll be smart enough to not fall into this trip if and when the time comes, but your assertment that "we'll start to question if he can win the big one" if he goes to the tournament with high seeds and can't make the final four has me concerned that you've been sequestered by the mob.

It has been quite some time since UConn has been a high seed. The college basketball landscape has changed tremendously during the same time period. As fans we may have made assumptions based on the past that we have come to see as flawed. That might reasonably account for shifting perceptions of KO and more measured expectations for Dan Hurley. I'd be interested in your thoughts about this.

 

[champs99and04]

No I get you. And I respect your opinion. I just think you're wrong.

Part of the problem is that the way you're describing things, these two coaches are the same...
eView attachment 29985

They aren't.

Things can be flukes. KO clearly connected with a group of kids and led them to a championship. The stars aligned, if you will. But he's not that coach. Four years should be enough to show that he can't do all the things necessary to run a high level D1 program, at least not yet.

You, of all people, who wrote a very good series of posts 4 years ago (Daniel Hamilton King of the Castle) about why the 2016 team was underrated should know. The talent on that team was Final Four caliber. If it weren't for a miracle 3, they're a 10-11 seed, and regardless they were pantzed in round 2 by a very good, but not great, Kansas team.

Hurley hasn't proven he can win the big one. He has proven he can resuscitate programs on life support. I have no qualms criticizing him in a few years if he can't get the program turned around, and in 5-10 years if he can't prove he can coach in the tournament. The two are about as unrelated as I can imagine.

That's fair. And I completely agree with your assessment of KO's last four years here. The last two, especially, have been an unmitigated disaster, and I certainly don't fault the school for deciding to move in a different direction. As a fan, I would have preferred retaining him, but I understand my priorities aren't the same as most. The responsible thing to do on the part of somebody running a business was to move on. KO's descent has not been your run-of-the-mill fall from grace. They finished the season ranked 178th on KenPom. That's astounding and as far as I know has no real precedent. He completely lost control of the program, and we needed somebody with his ducks in a row - that's Hurley. Great hire, even if I wonder whether his work of late has been somewhat overstated.

With regards to Hurley and winning the big game, I'm not trying to go all Nate Silver on you. There are an abundance of variables - from team building, to coaching style, to temperament - that make postseason success more conducive to some coaches than others. My theory all along, after all, has been that UConn's March success could be attributed in part to the central tenets of the program and replicated in a way that certain numbers may be slow to react to. If Hurley struggles in March, that's not necessarily entirely a product of variance. But I also think it's safe to say that most of the time it's just luck. You try to recruit good players, you develop them, and then they either reveal themselves as guys who transcend coaching or they don't. Sometimes, becoming a great coach is just getting lucky with a group of players and then riding that momentum as far as it takes you. Jay Wright is living proof of that (which isn't to say he didn't also figure stuff out on his own - there's a fine line between staying with something and being stubborn).

The point with the resumes I was posting makes sense in my head but I can see how it might not to anybody else. To make it work you kind of have to completely isolate the results of a particular season as indelible without assuming any relationship between one season and the next. I don't rule out the possibility that KO's first two years were unique or anomalous, but I saw too many translatable skills to dismiss the idea that he simply needed to experience growing pains. If he stays in basketball (and maybe it would be better for him to take a couple years off and see the game from a different angle in TV or something) for long enough, I think he'll get back to the top. Maybe not as high as he once was, but high enough to be relevant.

 

[champs99and04]

It has been quite some time since UConn has been a high seed. The college basketball landscape has changed tremendously during the same time period. As fans we may have made assumptions based on the past that we have come to see as flawed. That might reasonably account for shifting perceptions of KO and more measured expectations for Dan Hurley. I'd be interested in your thoughts about this.

You bring up a great topic, no doubt. I'm not necessarily sure the expectations for Hurley are more measured, but I could be misreading the board. With regards to our shifting perception of KO, I am no different. I thought he was God, and now he's just...some guy trying to find his way. I'm rooting for him, and I'm not sure I'll ever get to the point where I don't think he's a genius for 2014, but certainly it's human nature to accumulate doubt the further removed you get from any sort of positive reinforcement. It doesn't matter if you're his biggest fan or his mother or Kevin Ollie himself. There's doubt right now.

Gun to my head, I still think the guy we saw in 2013 and 2014 is the real Kevin Ollie. It's important to qualify that, though, by saying that doesn't mean he's ever going to be as successful. Even if this went according to plan, and KO takes us to three tournaments and two sweet sixteens in the last four years, we're still sitting here today wondering if that run was a fluke. A lot has to go right to get to the top and that's one of the curses - in sports or otherwise - of getting there so early. There can never be that narrative arch that we aspire to in the movies. You don't start from nothing and build, you start with everything and lose it all. Our own perceptions about things like that are literally built into the obstacles they face in rising again, because now all of your interactions - with fans or boosters or recruits or administration - are colored by doubt. Let me say something and then let fishy say the same thing and the responses are different. You know how it goes. Clout matters.

Now, there is a major difference between "not getting back to the top" and "completely destroying a program." KO was veering towards the latter, hence the urgency to cut the chord. I tend to believe, though, that when there is a sudden drop of this magnitude, there is more at play than just the gradual exposure of one person being less than we thought. And I think, over time, we'll re-calibrate our perception to a more reasonable equilibrium. Kevin Ollie can be part of something great and he can be part of something bad. The margin for error with him might not be the same as it is with Bill Self, but there's no way there won't be hundreds of D-1 schools who would love to say "let's start with what went well at UConn and build from there."

 

[Hans Sprungfeld]

You bring up a great topic, no doubt. I'm not necessarily sure the expectations for Hurley are more measured, but I could be misreading the board. With regards to our shifting perception of KO, I am no different. I thought he was God, and now he's just...some guy trying to find his way. I'm rooting for him, and I'm not sure I'll ever get to the point where I don't think he's a genius for 2014, but certainly it's human nature to accumulate doubt the further removed you get from any sort of positive reinforcement. It doesn't matter if you're his biggest fan or his mother or Kevin Ollie himself. There's doubt right now.

Gun to my head, I still think the guy we saw in 2013 and 2014 is the real Kevin Ollie. It's important to qualify that, though, by saying that doesn't mean he's ever going to be as successful. Even if this went according to plan, and KO takes us to three tournaments and two sweet sixteens in the last four years, we're still sitting here today wondering if that run was a fluke. A lot has to go right to get to the top and that's one of the curses - in sports or otherwise - of getting there so early. There can never be that narrative arch that we aspire to in the movies. You don't start from nothing and build, you start with everything and lose it all. Our own perceptions about things like that are literally built into the obstacles they face in rising again, because now all of your interactions - with fans or boosters or recruits or administration - are colored by doubt. Let me say something and then let fishy say the same thing and the responses are different. You know how it goes. Clout matters.

Now, there is a major difference between "not getting back to the top" and "completely destroying a program." KO was veering towards the latter, hence the urgency to cut the chord. I tend to believe, though, that when there is a sudden drop of this magnitude, there is more at play than just the gradual exposure of one person being less than we thought. And I think, over time, we'll re-calibrate our perception to a more reasonable equilibrium. Kevin Ollie can be part of something great and he can be part of something bad. The margin for error with him might not be the same as it is with Bill Self, but there's no way there won't be hundreds of D-1 schools who would love to say "let's start with what went well at UConn and build from there."

Thanks for responding.