Hubert Davis Catch-all

[NYCBlueBlood]

You're still ignoring the fundamental problem that a school can't know who's interested and who the right choice is until it has a job opening. You are assuming much better information than ADs have, in reality, both about who is available and how good a fit that person is for the organization. The whole point of going through a job search is to do a deep and thorough evaluation of the options. You just can't do that when you don't have a job opening.

In your first post on this theory you said "The burden on the replacers is to not to show that we've been lousy. It's to show that we could do better." That just fundamentally does not make sense. We don't know who is available! We don't know who will come! We don't know how good a fit they are for UNC! That's what the coaching search and interview process is for. When firing a coach, you almost always have to make the decision with less knowledge than you seem to be assuming about who will be next. That's reality.

Now I do not claim to be an insider in how high-level coaching searches happen... but it would be shocking to me if we fired HD without first putting out feelers for interest level with our top 5 to 10 options.

 

[UNCRx85]

And WE ARE UNC, we will get the best available. And here we sit...

But we didn't even try. It was always gonna be Hubert. National perception, market forces, or whatever else never factored into anything. We didn't actually try to throw the weight of our program around. It was always gonna be Hubert.

 

[rodoheel]

Now I do not claim to be an insider in how high-level coaching searches happen... but it would be shocking to me if we fired HD without first putting out feelers for interest level with our top 5 to 10 options.

I'm not saying we wouldn't put out feelers. I'm saying the information we got from doing so would be mostly incomplete and only give us the barest sense of who's actually available and how interested they are. And also that our opinion on who the "top options" are would often change over the course of the actual job search.

 

[UNCRx85]

Now I do not claim to be an insider in how high-level coaching searches happen... but it would be shocking to me if we fired HD without first putting out feelers for interest level with our top 5 to 10 options.

I imagine you're right. But even then, it's probably coaches agents' doing most of the talking. And I don't know how much of that you can trust.

 

[rodoheel]

3. We overscheduled cream puffs? I thought we played a bunch of good opponents. Isn't the problem more that KU and UK were underwhelming in quality?

Yes. IC has reported on how UNC intentionally scheduled more easy creampuff games at home than usual, as an attempted correction from the perception that the nonconference schedule last year was "too hard" and that it negatively impacted the team.

4. I am somewhat skeptical of conference strength and here's why: unlike twenty years ago, there is almost no meaningful interconference play after December. That type of Duke Michigan game in February used to be common and is now extremely rare.

That's why the "strongest" conference almost invariably underperforms in the tourney. It was the strongest conference back in December. Things can change, but the statistical models don't know that.

This has always been a structural flaw in assessing strength across conferences. The sorts of late January/February non-conference games you are talking about have never been "common" - going back at least to 1997 we never played more than 1 non-conference game in a season after the new year, and often those games were not against good teams, and many years we didn't even have one. 0-1 extra non-conference game per team in January/February didn't have a materially more complete picture of conference strength than the current format.

But I don't really care if you don't want to talk about conference strength specifically. Look at overall SOS if you want, and you'll see that UNC's has been lower the last few years than it historically was. The bottom line is that KU and UK have been playing harder schedules, however you want to look at it. And looking at records without even making an attempt to determine SOS is foolish. What would obviously be much better to gauge overall regular season performance is looking at a team's NCAAT seed, which itself is a reflection of the committee aggregating a lot of data to determine how good a season everyone had. I surely can't imagine anyone saying that given the choice between only a team's record or only its NCAAT seed to determine how well the season went, they would choose the former over the latter.

 

[superrific]

You're still ignoring the fundamental problem that a school can't know who's interested and who the right choice is until it has a job opening. You are assuming much better information than ADs have, in reality, both about who is available and how good a fit that person is for the organization. The whole point of going through a job search is to do a deep and thorough evaluation of the options. You just can't do that when you don't have a job opening.

In your first post on this theory you said "The burden on the replacers is to not to show that we've been lousy. It's to show that we could do better." That just fundamentally does not make sense. We don't know who is available! We don't know who will come! We don't know how good a fit they are for UNC! That's what the coaching search and interview process is for. When firing a coach, you almost always have to make the decision with less knowledge than you seem to be assuming about who will be next. That's reality.

It fundamentally does make sense. You seem ornery today.

You are confusing confidence level with decision factors. We might not know who specifically is available, but we should have a general idea about overall quality. If we fire HD because we think we have a 75% chance of doing better, it's a different decision than if we think we have a 35% chance of doing better. Note that the 35% could stlil justify firing Hubert if we think the next coach would have particularly high variance, but that's largely theoretical.

I mean, didn't we just go through this with our PG? I don't know exactly what transpired with Cadeau, but if we assume it was something like HD deciding that we needed to move on from EC because he was asking for too much money (or just that he wasn't that good), well that sure looks like a bad decision. Now maybe HD assessed that there was a 90% chance of getting someone better (this could have been an explicit calculation, but more likely to be implicit), and sometimes even good decisions don't work out because of probability. I suspect, though, that we just figured we could do better and we didn't. And while EC is not a great player, I bet we're not having this discussion if we had him and not Evans.

When firing a coach, you have less information than when you hire. But you still have to assess your other options.

 

[superrific]

Yes. IC has reported on how UNC intentionally scheduled more easy creampuff games at home than usual, as an attempted correction from the perception that the nonconference schedule last year was "too hard" and that it negatively impacted the team.

This has always been a structural flaw in assessing strength across conferences. The sorts of late January/February non-conference games you are talking about have never been "common" - going back at least to 1997 we never played more than 1 non-conference game in a season after the new year, and often those games were not against good teams, and many years we didn't even have one. 0-1 extra non-conference game per team in January/February didn't have a materially more complete picture of conference strength than the current format.

But I don't really care if you don't want to talk about conference strength specifically. Look at overall SOS if you want, and you'll see that UNC's has been lower the last few years than it historically was. The bottom line is that KU and UK have been playing harder schedules, however you want to look at it. And looking at records without even making an attempt to determine SOS is foolish. What would obviously be much better to gauge overall regular season performance is looking at a team's NCAAT seed, which itself is a reflection of the committee aggregating a lot of data to determine how good a season everyone had. I surely can't imagine anyone saying that given the choice between only a team's record or only its NCAAT seed to determine how well the season went, they would choose the former over the latter.

I remember back in the 1980s and 1990s, we almost always had marquee games against top opponents in February and March. Maybe only one, but if everyone has one in a conference it makes a difference. And of course the conference schedules start earlier than they did, because conference expansion. That's been the real problem with strength of schedule recently. Too many games are in-conference so the conference sample sizes are small and passe.

As for choosing between only a team's record or only its NCAAT seed, isn't that a straw man? It's not clear to me that, if you assume relative conference stability and program stability, NCAAT seed would be better over time. My intuition is that it would but that's not logically necessary and you'd have to look at the data. For instance, haven't people studied and determined that being ranked preseason top 5 is more predictive of getting to the Final Four than NCAAT seed? I might be forgetting the research, but NCAAT seeds are far from exact, and anyway, performance is noisy. You can get a road win over a big team because someone gets hot from 3, and that will make the metrics good, but is that actually reflective of the team's ability?

 

[HandsonFire]

But how many up and down seasons do you wait to see if he is going to put together good to great seasons consistently?

Sounds like you keep your eye out and if the coach you want is available you approach, make the deal and fire HD. If not you keep HD. It could take my guess 1-5 years to make a hire like this.

 

[rodoheel]

I remember back in the 1980s and 1990s, we almost always had marquee games against top opponents in February and March. Maybe only one, but if everyone has one in a conference it makes a difference. And of course the conference schedules start earlier than they did, because conference expansion. That's been the real problem with strength of schedule recently. Too many games are in-conference so the conference sample sizes are small and passe.

As for choosing between only a team's record or only its NCAAT seed, isn't that a straw man? It's not clear to me that, if you assume relative conference stability and program stability, NCAAT seed would be better over time. My intuition is that it would but that's not logically necessary and you'd have to look at the data. For instance, haven't people studied and determined that being ranked preseason top 5 is more predictive of getting to the Final Four than NCAAT seed? I might be forgetting the research, but NCAAT seeds are far from exact, and anyway, performance is noisy. You can get a road win over a big team because someone gets hot from 3, and that will make the metrics good, but is that actually reflective of the team's ability?

Personally I would choose to look at lots of things when evaluating a team's overall season performance: overall record, conference record and standings, efficiency metrics, NCAAT seed, NCAAT performance, etc. But I would never, ever rank record alone as a more comprehensive indicator of regular season performance than NCAAT seed. An NCAAT seed reflects a broad, fairly neutral perception of how good a team was in the regular season that itself is reached by looking at a lot of different data. Record alone does not do that. And does not come close to doing that. When I see someone conveniently focusing on our overall record to justify being happy about where we are as a program, I see that as largely trying to ignore evidence to the contrary. Because lots of those other things (NCAAT seed, efficiency metrics, etc) obviously paint a less rosy picture.

I don't really follow the point about "performance is noisy." Yeah, performance from game to game is noisy, but that's why you look at the season as a whole to assess the overall performance.

 

[superrific]

I promise you, with the qualifications I mentioned, it is not ridiculous for record to be a better indicator than NCAAT seed. I'm not saying that it is, but it's not obviously wrong. It might seem obviously wrong, but it's not. Not obviously.

Performance being noisy matters if some games are more important for seeding purposes than others. Like road wins, certain games (Q1 for instance), etc. This is why baseball games can be so random. Getting 2 hits per inning is really good performance but it might only get you three runs. The other team might have four hits total but if they come in the same inning and punctuated by a HR, well that's how it goes.

 

[rodoheel]

Here's a thought experiment for folks.

I will offer you two options for the next five years of UNC bball, Door A and Door B.

Behind Door A is a guarantee that these things will happen in the next five seasons:

• UNC will miss the tourney once
• UNC will get higher than a 6 seed in the NCAAT only once
• UNC will make exactly one Final Four and one other S16
• UNC will win one ACC regular season title
• UNC will win zero ACCT titles

Behind Door B is complete uncertainty. No idea what will happen. A total dice roll. No promises of anything, good or bad.

Would you choose Door A or Door B? Personally I would choose Door B and it would not be a difficult decision.

 

[SnoopRob]

Sounds like you keep your eye out and if the coach you want is available you approach, make the deal and fire HD. If not you keep HD. It could take my guess 1-5 years to make a hire like this.

I don't think in the real world you can do it this way. For 2 main reasons (in reverse order)...

Second, it's not going to stay a secret that you're back-channeling other coaches. You might get lucky once or twice that someone doesn't tell anyone, but that's about the most you could even hope for. If you're reaching out to any number of realistic coaches, it's going to get out there that you're doing so.

First, that's a really, really terrible way to treat the current coach. He's just going through life being the coach and preparing for the next season and you walk in and fire him with no warning. Unless you are just a cold-hearted bastard, that's a terrible way to treat any employee, much less one with the long-term connections to the program HD has.

In reality, you're going to have to make the decision to move on from the current coach before you do much more than very broadly survey the options. Once a school starts back-channeling coaches, it will be public in no time and you've got a huge headache on your hands.

 

[rodoheel]

I promise you, with the qualifications I mentioned, it is not ridiculous for record to be a better indicator than NCAAT seed. I'm not saying that it is, but it's not obviously wrong. It might seem obviously wrong, but it's not. Not obviously.

Performance being noisy matters if some games are more important for seeding purposes than others. Like road wins, certain games (Q1 for instance), etc. This is why baseball games can be so random. Getting 2 hits per inning is really good performance but it might only get you three runs. The other team might have four hits total but if they come in the same inning and punctuated by a HR, well that's how it goes.

You're not making any sense. NCAAT seed factors in record too. They're not independent of each other. The NCAAT seed is, by definition, a more comprehensive analysis. You're losing yourself in hypotheticals and not focusing on what we're actually talking about.

Leaving aside NCAAT performance, because I'm only talking about the pre-NCAAT aspect of team performance, can you find me any example of a season where UNC got a 3 seed or worse that you would consider more successful than any season where we got a 1 seed?

 

[SnoopRob]

I promise you, with the qualifications I mentioned, it is not ridiculous for record to be a better indicator than NCAAT seed. I'm not saying that it is, but it's not obviously wrong. It might seem obviously wrong, but it's not. Not obviously.

Performance being noisy matters if some games are more important for seeding purposes than others. Like road wins, certain games (Q1 for instance), etc. This is why baseball games can be so random. Getting 2 hits per inning is really good performance but it might only get you three runs. The other team might have four hits total but if they come in the same inning and punctuated by a HR, well that's how it goes.

NCAAT seed is going to be a better indicator of team performance/quality than record in nearly every case because the committee considers a whole wealth of information and record considers only the binary outcome of 30ish separate games. In essence, the NCAAT seeding process is a holistic judgment (that includes team record) and team record is only one data point.

 

[SnoopRob]

Here's a thought experiment for folks.

I will offer you two options for the next five years of UNC bball, Door A and Door B.

Behind Door A is a guarantee that these things will happen in the next five seasons:

• UNC will miss the tourney once
• UNC will get higher than a 6 seed in the NCAAT only once
• UNC will make exactly one Final Four and one other S16
• UNC will win one ACC regular season title
• UNC will win zero ACCT titles

Behind Door B is complete uncertainty. No idea what will happen. A total dice roll. No promises of anything, good or bad.

Would you choose Door A or Door B? Personally I would choose Door B and it would not be a difficult decision.

Yeah, I'm going Door B.

Carolina's position within the greater CBB world makes it a better than 50/50 proposition that we'd beat Door A (as long as we're trying our best).

 

[Batt Boy]

Door B is never going to be uncertainty. No guarantees, but we should be able to attract a keen basketball mind, a talented recruiter and a great person.

In 18 years, Roy only won the ACC 3x. Schyerface as already matched that. We need to make a move.

 

[Bigs23]

Door B is never going to be uncertainty. No guarantees, but we should be able to attract a keen basketball mind, a talented recruiter and a great person.

In 18 years, Roy only won the ACC 3x. Schyerface as already matched that. We need to make a move.

You mean the ACC tournament?

 

[4thgenheel]

Door B is never going to be uncertainty. No guarantees, but we should be able to attract a keen basketball mind, a talented recruiter and a great person.

In 18 years, Roy only won the ACC 3x. Schyerface as already matched that. We need to make a move.

Roy won the ACC 9 times. Roy won the ACCT 3 times.

 

[Bigs23]

Door B is never going to be uncertainty. No guarantees, but we should be able to attract a keen basketball mind, a talented recruiter and a great person.

In 18 years, Roy only won the ACC 3x. Schyerface as already matched that. We need to make a move.

People shouldn't compare UNC to IU and UCLA while also saying it can't get any worse.

 

[mpaer]

I love this thread I am tired of threads about our shitty president
Its March Basketball chatter time
Keep it up boys