Originally Posted by
91_92_01_10
Another way to evaluate this would be to identify how many games we have lost over the years when using the "stall ball" technique vs. how many times it has been used.
I am having trouble recalling times when we have lost while using "stall ball." It seems like it might have cost us the game when Michigan and Robert "Tractor" Traylor beat us at home, but I really can't remember others.
Admittedly, however, I am old and crusty. Can some of you that have better brains recall times when it has cost us wins?
Not sure that I have a better brain or not, but it has definitely cost us some games. The first one that pops into my mind is the ACC championship game against Maryland back in....here's where my brain is proven to be no better than yours...um...I'm gonna guess 2004? Maybe 2003? or 2005? Anyway, we pretty famously lost that game to a furious comeback that, at least, happened when we were attempting stall ball.
I don't remember whether we were in full stall ball mode in 1998 when we lost to Kentucky in the NCAA Tournament. There was a tornado watch during the game; my wife and children were huddling in the downstairs bathroom, and I was sneaking out to watch the game. We blew a 17-point lead, though, to lose that one.
I'm sure there were others. Did we use stall ball in the 2004 Final Four against UConn? If not, we probably should have. We didn't have any defenders left to cover Okafor.
For the record, I'm a fan of stall ball. I explained a bit about why in the UNC post-game thread. Ultimately, the answer to your question is that it succeeds WAY more often than it fails. When it fails, it can fail spectacularly, and those failures can be very, very memorable. I think the people that despise stall ball do so because the spectacular failures are much more memorable than the ho-hum successes. That and the fact that it can be aesthetically displeasing when a lead shrinks from 15 or so and the game ends with a 4- or 5-point win.
I like stall ball because I focus more on the part of the sentence that says "ends with a win." I like winning.
"We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world." --M. Proust