Originally Posted by
Mudge
For inexplicable reasons, DBR seems to have certain whipping boys (and correspondingly, certain anointed ones) among the ACC basketball coaches:
1) They are always making excuses for Sidney Lowe, who has never won, let alone been any good, anywhere he has coached... they are always talking about "he doesn't have much talent, but he has a few good pieces, and when he gets a true ACC-caliber squad, they should be very good"... yeah, right... how many years has he been there now, and how long is it going to take to get that talent-- and who is supposed to be responsible for getting the talent in the door anyway?
2) DBR is always running down the current coaches at BC, FSU, and Miami despite the fact that Leonard Hamilton built Miami (a basketball wasteland then) into an NCAA-tourney regular when they were in the Big East, did a creditable job at Ok. State, and has done wonderfully well at FSU-- just as his predecessor Pat Kennedy did a great job there, but could never get a fair assessment, let alone a decent compliment, from DBR... but just let Steve Robinson (for some unknown reason, another of DBR's anointed ones) show a faint glimmer of maybe recovering FSU's past basketball success-- but never getting anything worth talking about actually accomplished, and DBR was ready and waiting with Lowe-like compliments about what a "comer" Robinson was, even though his entire tenure was an abysmal failure.
Similarly, Al Skinner has done an excellent job at BC, but somehow, DBR has been deluded into the belief that BC has experienced a "steady decline" since they joined the ACC-- something not supported by DBR's own data on BC's W/L record-- is it just that BC plays Duke hard-nosed and tough every time Duke sees them? Somehow, DBR is as deluded as Jim Sumner, in saying that Virginia is going to be a tougher game for Duke today than BC would have been-- Hello? Did either of you even watch the two games that Duke played against these two teams this year-- did you even notice which team battled Duke hard for the majority of the game, and which team was out of it from the opening tip? I expect Duke to literally bury Virginia again today-- but not according to Jim Sumner and DBR ('cause they love Tony Bennett and his dad, as much as they love Scott Drew and his dad).
And Frank Haith has done an excellent job in restoring Miami's competitiveness, lost in the period after Hamilton left... but once again, DBR can barely see a single good thing about him, despite his team battling Duke hard (and beating them last year) in nearly every matchup, and Haith making Miami into a viable post-season tournament team. If Steve Robinson or Sidney Lowe had done half of what Haith or Hamilton did at Miami, you wouldn't be able to get DBR to stop singing their praises today.
3) Plenty of guys have had success in this league but DBR was blind to it-- they completely failed to acknowledge anything that Cliff Ellis and Rick Barnes accomplished at Clemson, and the same with with Kennedy at FSU, but let Oliver Pernell do essentially no more than Barnes or Ellis at Clemson, and suddenly Pernell is the second coming; similarly, Steve Robinson had an unlimited honeymoon with the DBR, despite year after year of disappointing results until he was fired (and has hardly resurfaced as a big success anywhere else). DBR loves Pernell the way they loved John Thompson (both of them), and is completely blind to all of the huge faults of Thompson senior-- I would have been embarassed to claim Georgetown as my alma mater, with the kind of player and team representation that the first Thompson put on the floor, when he was at Georgetown-- I still would be embarassed to have once had that antagonistic bunch of non-scholars and dirty players as representatives of my university-- every bit as much as I would have been embarassed to claim the 1980's-- 2000's Miami Hurricane football players as representatives of my university... but DBR could find a way to forgive the John Thompsons' and the John Cheney's of the world, despite their excursions over the line of decency, while Cliff Ellis, Pat Kennedy, and Rick Barnes are irredeemable, apparently-- is there a double standard at work in DBR's assessment of coaches-- I think so.
4) This doesn't even touch on DBR's admittedly biased assessment of Quin Snyder's coaching career, and their lack of candor about the bulk of Coach K's proteges' success in coaching (or lack thereof). You don't hear a lot from DBR this year about Oklahoma and Jeff Capel-- because there is not much good to say. You also don't hear much about some of the other guys (Henderson, Dawkins, O'Toole, etc.) because there is not much to say-- but you did hear a lot about Harvard and Amaker early-- and not much lately. Brey is doing OK-- but Brey isn't doing anything that Seth Greenberg hasn't done at Va. Tech-- and Greenberg is lucky if/when he can catch a small break from DBR, in their assessment of him.