March Madness Gone Bad

Great players can sometimes make good coaches, but they seldom make great coaches. You could see this last night as number 4 seed Arizona, a team loaded with enormous talent badly used, got run over by 13 seed Buffalo.

Sean Miller, the Arizona head coach, is surely a good coach, but it is looking more and more like he just doesn’t have what it takes to be one of the all time greats. In his college days, Miller was a terrific point guard with Pitt, a real natural talent. And therein often lies the problem. In sports it’s almost a cliché that it is the second string players that go on to make the best coaches.

This year’s Arizona team overflowed with talent, a team that many before the start of the season believed was a lock to make the final four. It has a veteran point guard; a high scoring shooting guard and two gifted seven footers. One seven foot freshman was, indeed, voted players of the year in the PAC 12 and probably was the best college player in the country who will more than likely soon end up being the number one or two NBA draft pick.

But things never really have gone as expected this season with Arizona, even though the team did win both the PAC 12 league title and the tournament championship. In fact a frustrated coach Miller complained that for some reason he just couldn’t seem to connect with this super talented group. He couldn’t make them play good defense.

For a second let’s move over to a different sport. The Philadelphia Eagles won the Super bowl under second year head coach Doug Pederson. In the pros Doug spent most of his playing time as a backup QB. Unlike when Sean was a star player, Doug had plenty of time to observe how teams won and lost games. Apparently he leaned that there were many ways to skin a cat according to the nature of the talent available. This is something that great players who become head coaches seem to miss out on. They lack flexibility.

In winning the Super Bowl this year, Doug showed enormous flexibility and creativity as one key player after the other, including his star QB, fell to injury. But, still, by adjusting his game plan to the strength of his players, he keep on finding ways to win with whatever talent remained available.

The great player that Sean Miller was, as is often the case with star players, lacks this sort of flexibility. He has a certain way he expects his teams to play regardless of the type of talent available. In the hands of the right sort of coach, I have little doubt that Arizona would have been no less that a final four contender.

This year’s wildcats were a power team, with a crushing inside offensive game. But on defense it was slow. And when Miller was determined to play both big men together it became super slow on defense — at least in regard to a man-to-man type of defense. Unfortunately, as stated, Miller has one way of playing that does not included playing zone defense, even though this year’s talent was a perfect fit for such a defense.

And so it was not surprising that a super quick Buffalo team ran circles around Arizona’s slow-footed bigs who struggled to keep up when playing man to man against them. Bottom line, this first round March Madness lose of Arizona was entirely due to a lack of imagination on the part of head coach Sean Miller.