Dr. V
PhD Student
Posts: 1537
Reg: 11-21-04
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04-25-18 12:38 PM - Post#255862
In response to TheLine
Epistemology; common sense and discretion; and shooting ourselves in the foot.
One of the indicators of a good education, which we all supposedly received, is being aware of what we know and what we don't know, more specifically, being able to distinguish between what we actually know, i.e., facts, from suspicions/opinions we may form (on the basis of SOME evidence/information, but not enough to put us in a position to know that something for a fact), and sheer speculation (as when we speculate about whom our team is going to draft).
Do I know that the current coaching staff is going to lead us to winning seasons and challenges for championships? No. Do I know that it won't? No. Why? Simply because, again, two seasons and one recruiting class does not provide enough information/evidence for me or anyone else to know. That is why, e.g., Ivy coaches get 4-5 years to prove what they can do.
Do any of the posters on this board know? No, but they seem to think that their impressions/suspicions/op inions rise to the level of knowing, which they're proud to proclaim in public.
It is near impossible to predict who will turn out to be a successful head coach. Since 1971 I've seen more Columbia football and basketball coaches come and go than I can count. In each case we all got excited by the newcomer and held high hopes, until the next one. Predicting who will be a successful head coach is next to impossible because coaching is hard. You have to be a salesman, manager, strategist, psychologist and a couple of other things, and it's next to impossible to predict who is or is not skilled in all of those areas highly enough to succeed. One of the few, if not the only, indicator of future success is past success as a head coach on the same level.
Engles was an assistant at Columbia, so knows the league and the terrain with all of its peculiarities. He was unusually successful as a D1 head coach in his previous position. That prompts me to believe that he has a better than average chance of being successful at CU now. I've explained before why I think we didn't have a better record.
Now on to common sense and exercise of discretion. If you see an acquaintance across the room with his zipper unzipped or her slip showing, do you shout across the room, "Hey Johnny/Marry, your zipper/slip. . . "? Common sense and discretion dictate that you do not. You walk across the room and tell that person in private. That is doubly so if you have a relationship with that person and/or care about person, as we all claim to care about the success of our program.
How is sharing any of our impressions/suspicions in public helpful to our program? It's fine to share them when they are positive. When they are negative, we are simply shooting ourselves in the foot, or in our case both feet as we seem to want to do it with gusto. Do we really want to engage in self-fulfilling prophesies? Do we really want to make it more difficult to recruit new players or retain and maintain leadership authority
with existing players? All for the price of deluding ourselves into thinking that we know something when in fact we don't?
The criticism cited by CUBball is lack of player development. To repeat yet again, from a year ago to this last year, the only two years of the present regime, two players improved and one regressed; several key players were hurt, so one can't make any judgments there, yet our wise men have definitively concluded that there was no player development.
I agree that Hartman was a very good and effective coach, and I was really sorry to see him leave. That said, the incident involving Meisner and Wood and the presence/absence of cohesion is not as TheLine described. The out of bounds play happened in front of the Penn bench, so it's not surprising that it was the Penn bench that reacted the way it did. The CU bench on numerous occasions during the season when an exciting or momentum shifting play reacted similarly.
Edited by Dr. V on 04-25-18 12:42 PM. Reason for edit: No reason given.
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