Acc Champs!

luxlibertas
Mon, 26 Mar 2007 17:18:35 +0000

I’m not at all wrong about that. In huge blowouts, it is almost always the winning coach who pulls his starters first. In fact, a losing coach pulling his starters would seem to go against the very values which sports are supposed to teach (keep fighting no matter how long the odds, etc.). Whereas, the winning coach removes his starters as a gesture of class and sportsmanship. It makes no sense for a losing coach to be expected to remove his starters when the other team’s are still in the game, as this would only make the blow out worse.

To put it simply, no coach will ever be criticized (outside of K’s petty fantasy world) for leaving his starters in and playing hard even when he’s getting blown out. Winning coaches, on the other hand, WILL be criticized for leaving starters in til the end when they are winning a game by 40.

You saying that no winning coach is obligated to pull his starters when the losing coach still has his in the game is silly for two reasons: 1) The same argument sounds just as good for the losing coach 2) If for example, Roy tried to use that excuse to rationalize keeping starters in til the end against, say, Pfeiffer, people would laugh at him, since the Pfeiffer starters probably aren’t even as good as the worst players on UNC. The losing team certainly is justified in trying to make the game as competitive as possible, the winning team isn’t justified in running up the score as much as possible.

I’m not saying that the losing coach never removes his players first (In fact, it probably happens a fair amount). The point is that there isn’t nearly as much of an understood “policy” on this as you imply, and if one exists at all, the “onus” definitely falls more on the winning coach than the losing one.

Also, don’t interpret this as any kind of defense of Rat K, because as I’ve said, none of this even applied to the Duke-UNC situation. His comments were just him being petty and bitter.