sorry....this is the working link...my bad
this made me throw up in my mouth a little bit...
"One POSSIBLE future. From your point of view... I don't know tech stuff.".... Kyle Reese
sorry....this is the working link...my bad
"One POSSIBLE future. From your point of view... I don't know tech stuff.".... Kyle Reese
Jay Wright gets my vote.
Well that brings to mind the question of whether the decade ends after this year or next. I believe year 1 of a decade ends in “1” and year 10 ends in “0”. In that case I think any fan would trade their school’s decade with Nova. I know that I would. However if you think this decade began in 2010 and ends in 2019 then Coach K is the winner.
Since moving my company’s books to a June 30 fiscal year end, I’ve also decided to do my decades ending in “5.” So this thing is far from decided.
Otherwise, I would go with Jay Wright.
Coach K gets my vote. He won a championship in a third decade and did a few Olympic things. Nobody else compares. Shocking position on a Duke board, I know.
I mean, it's your choice, but then the 1980s start January 1981 and end December 1990.
As for John Calipari being named Coach of the Decade by exactly one guy, I can't even fake any outrage. Who cares? If you were a sportswriter out of story ideas, this is probably the way to go.
Calipari's tenure at Kentucky does seem to line up with the 2010s (defined for these purposes as 2010-2019), giving him a narrative that Jay Wright (who made the Final Four in 2009) and Coach K (easily Coach of the 1990s, and probably a Top 5 choice in the 1980s, 2000s, and 2010s) lack. Tony Bennett's time at Virginia also aligns nicely, and has the benefit of him ending the decade on top, but no one thinks of his Virginia teams reflecting the changing state of college basketball.
If you're wondering...
1980s: Bobby Knight (unless you felt strongly that Knight owned the 1970s, and then I'd suggest John Thompson)
1990s: Coach K
2000s: Open to suggestions, because I fear it may be Roy Williams, whose job switch (loss in 2003 to wins in 2005 and 2009) kind of defined that decade. Billy Donovan has the benefit of breaking out in 2000 and winning in 2006-2007.
Dean Smith's best shot is probably the 1970s, but he didn't win any titles then and there's no compelling reason to put him above the end of the John Wooden era and the beginning of the Bobby Knight era. Similarly, Jim Boeheim has a long steady career that doesn't shine in any particular decade. I haven't mentioned Denny Crum, the only coach besides Knight to win twice in the 1980s.
To me, coach Cal is the whiner of the decade. His constant is the sour expression on his face as he walks on the court and often gets away with it. I prefer coach K, Tony Bennett and the like who coach the kids and don't try to be the story.
The confusion arounds the decades is because there is no "year zero." The "anno domani" system was devised by Dionysius Exiguus of Scythia Minor in 525. It was not in widespread use until about 800, per Wikipedia.
Therefore, the first decade was 1-10 A.D. Therefore, by this logic, current decades should be 2011-2020 -- ending next December 31. This is a total pain, most of us would agree; therefore, we use the designation of the next to the last numeral -- the "ten spot." The "Roaring Twenties" are 1920-1929.
I believe the end of the decade is next week.
Sage Grouse
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'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013
I had no problem with Mike DeCourcy picking Coach Cal as "Coach of the Decade." The numbers speak for themselves.
7 Elite 8's
6 SEC Tournament Championships
5 SEC Regular Season Titles/Co-Titles
4 Final 4's
1 National Championship
Coach K and Duke had the next most Elite 8 appearances with 5 and Coach K is tied with Jay Wright with 2 National Championships. Tom Izzo and Roy Williams tied for the second most Final Four appearances with 3 each. If you stack it up, the numbers are incredibly impressive for Coach Cal. Other schools, including Duke, Arizona, Kansas, Memphis, and even UNC more recently, have adopted the multiple one-and-done recruiting philosophy. He has had a huge influence on college basketball. Say what you will about his in-game coaching abilities and the theatrics off the court. But there is no denying that he has been an incredibly successful coach in the past decade. The results speak.
If someone were to give you twenty one dollar bills, one by one, and you were to count them out loud to make sure you got them all, wouldn't you say "one" after he put the first bill into your hand? And wouldn't you say "ten" after he placed the tenth one in your hand?
And wouldn't everybody agree that he couldn't start giving you the second ten bills until after he had given you all of the first ten?
Last edited by rsvman; 12-24-2019 at 10:08 AM.
1. Your cash-in-hand analogy is a little more Eddie Sutton than John Calipari, but still appropriate for what is basically a Kentucky thread.
2. I would agree with all this historical logic if we were labeling decades ordinally (the 201st decade) the way we do with centuries and millennia. But (as sagegrouse later points out) we discuss decades in cardinal terms (the 2010s), as whole numbers. So the year zero/dollar zero argument doesn't apply.
By the way, we use the 20th century and the 1900s interchangeably, but there are differences in where they start and end. I imagine there would have been quite a strenuous discussion had this version of DBR been around at the turn of the decade, century, and millennium in 2000 and 2001.