Roy Williams and A Changing of the Guard
Let’s do the Mount Rushmore gimmick for college basketball coaches, shall we? John Wooden is a given, the George Washington of the exercise. Dean Smith’s an automatic, as well, both for his record-setting career and the use of his platform to promote racial equality.
Mike Krzyzewski winning the second-most national championships behind only Wooden, matching Wooden’s total for Final Four appearances, and surpassing Wooden with titles won in three different decades lands Coach K. one of three spots.
So that leaves only one vacancy.
Jim Boeheim, Tom Izzo, Lute Olson, Nolan Richardson, John Thompson Jr. and Jerry Tarkanian are all worthy candidates but have just one the national title. For evidence on just how difficult winning it all truly is, consider Lefty Driesell, Lou Henson, John Beilein, Norm Stewart and Eddie Sutton all belong to the 700-win club and have none between them.
But, in that context, it makes Denny Crum and Rick Pitino* having multiple all the more impressive. Bob Knight owns three, but there’s a complicated element to his legacy and how he ran his programs that makes his candidacy a tough sell. And to that end, allow me to stop you if you’re thinking of replying But what about Adolph Rupp? because that suggestion can pound sand for a variety of reasons.
For me, the fourth spot on this hypothetical monument belongs to one of either Jim Calhoun or Roy Williams. Calhoun has an edge from for building up through a mid-major, where he enjoyed unprecedented success, before turning the struggling UConn program into a national power.
If not for Hakim Warrick making an unforgettable and improbable block that denied Kansas the elusive first Roy spent almost two decades chasing…
…or the elation of Marcus Paige’s off-balance 3-pointer at the 2016 Final Four…
…turning into the heartbreak of being on the wrong end of the greatest finish in Fina Four history…
…Williams could have four or five. This is an exercise you could get into for any number of coaches, of course — maybe if Ronnie Lester doesn’t get injured, Iowa wins the 1980 Final Four and Lute Olson gets his first 17 years earlier.
Rather than going down the rabbit hole of what could have been, what is in Roy Williams’ career is damn impressive. While he only coached at two blue-blood programs in Kansas and North Carolina, one can argue that’s more difficult (in certain key ways) than building a winner.
Standards and patient are considerably higher and thinner at places like Kansas and North Carolina. In 1988 when Williams replaced Larry Brown at KU, the Jayhawks were coming off their first national championship in 36 years.
That Kansas basketball faithful had to wait almost four decades for a title did little to temper expectations. I remember the loaded 1996-97 team losing in the Sweet 16 to Arizona, one year after an Elite Eight loss to Syracuse, stirring chatter about Roy’s abilities in March.
The infamous blow-up on Bonnie Bernstein following the 2003 National Championship Game may not have been, and probably wasn’t, the culmination of 15 years of frustration extended by the length of Warrick’s fingertips. Still, that moment feels like a fitting reflection of all the near-misses Williams faced in Lawrence.
Winning three national championships at North Carolina put an end to the tired Can’t Win The Big One narrative, but the last in 2017 came with the unseemly academic fraud allegations. Like Knight (but albeit for different reasons), the academic scandal complicates how Williams should and will be evaluated historically.
Until then, his retirement announced on April 1 — really great bit, by the way, not at all annoying to news-dump on April Fool’s Day — seems like a particularly major milestone in the transformation of college basketball.
Because of the constant change inherent in college sports, with rosters refreshing every year and no individual staying more than four (playing) seasons, coaches become synonymous with programs.
Thinking of coaches in a generational context, it’s probably not coincidence that several of the names mentioned here come from two, overlapping generations that encompass the 1980s and 1990s. College basketball became a truly national sport in these decades, and commensurate with the boom of March Madness, the coaches synonymous with their programs became the game’s stars.
Time is undefeated, and Roy Williams’ retirement rings like church bells on the impending end for the most star-studded coaching generation. Calhoun leaving to work in the Div. III ranks and the perennially underrated Lon Kruger’s retirement last week resonate in association with Roy stepping down.
Izzo and Rick Barnes are both just four years younger than Roy; Coach K. is four years older. The landscape is in for a seismic shift in the very near future.
One change arguably already afoot is that their generation is the last of the coaching superstars. Billy Donovan could have been that guy, but opted for the NBA; perhaps the same can be said of Brad Stevens.
Jay Wright may be the best positioned with two national championships at Villanova, but he’s something of an outlier as a top-tier winner associated with a single program. Tony Bennett has planted his flag at Virginia, but it’s difficult to envision with the Cavaliers style of play that Bennett ever attains a similar level of stardom as Krzyzewski or Williams.
Chris Beard, who just five years ago was coaching Arkansas-Little Rock to an NCAA Tournament upset of Purdue, is on his fourth program in a half-decade with today’s revelation he took the Texas job (he was briefly with UNLV before taking the Texas Tech job, but never coached a game).
Beard, like Bennett, has also primarily coached a defensive-oriented style with methodical offense. Such is the hallmark for most of the current generation, as is the case for Sean Miller and Shaka Smart.
Williams’ departure leaves college basketball down another mind responsible for cultivating the more uptempo, offensively dynamic style that grew the game in the ‘80s. He came into a game shaped by Tarkanian, Richardson, Olson, with emphasis on scoring points.
To his credit, Williams went out with the same philosophy, his Tar Heel teams having some of the nation’s shortest average possession-length in college basketball most years.
This weekend’s Final Four is an implicit referendum on the importance that brand of basketball, with Gonzaga coming in undefeated and playing at a frenetic pace that would have been at home in the late ‘80s. Baylor has long emphasized a more uptempo style, and even UCLA — with a fanbase that collectively sighed at the hiring of defensive-minded Mick Cronin — has gone further in the Tournament than any previous Cronin-coached team with a more open offensive approach.
The generation of coaches that includes Roy Williams leaving creates a void in that style, which the half-court, defensive rock-fight approach was devised specifically to counter. The next generation could be well-served filling that offensive void.