Transcript
Colin Cowherd (0:00)
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Doug Gottlieb (2:40)
This is the Best of the Herd with Colin Cowher on Fox Sports Sports Radio.
Ben McCollum (2:48)
What up?
Doug Gottlieb (2:49)
Welcome in this Is the Herd. Wherever you may Be. And however you may be making this part of your day, thanks so much. I'm Doug Gottlieb in for Colin Cowherd on an absolutely spectacular Friday in Southern California. Absolutely spectacular Friday in Southern California. Welcome in. Had a great time hosting with Du Bois, being back in town for a couple of days. Full disclosure, I had a full day yesterday. Full day yesterday. I don't know if I shared this with you, Greg and Ryan, and Ryan part of the production crew. So yesterday's show, and then it's my work. It's like our celebration week for my son's 16th birthday. So we have a. We normally do it when we lived in Southern California on the Jewish holidays because he went to a small private school. And we'd go to Six Flags during, you know, one of the high holidays and ride all the roller coasters and just have a great time. We did it yesterday instead. And then all the while, right, you got your, your cell phones handy. We're watching the March Madness games, then the drive home. We're watching Kansas and Arkansas. And then you watch all the games at the end as well. Right? Great thing about west coast time is they were all wrapped up and you're, you're good. You're like, okay, I saw Michigan hold off UC San Diego and shut it down, go to bed, wake up this morning. Oh, yeah, by the way, we'll get to Bronnie James, his best offensive performance as a pro in the NBA last night. Full day. Full day. It's a good day. Good day. But I was, we were watching Arkansas and Kansas and I got, I got a text from a friend who was like, ah, Bill Self. Bill Self. This thing might have passed him by. I don't know if I was laughing or crying on the, on the inside at that text. So you mean to tell me that a coach who just four years ago won a national championship and had a run of, what was it, 12 consecutive Big 12 titles, the game has passed him by after signing a new contract with the Jayhawks over the offseason. Or there's a different way to look at it. Look, it was a, it wasn't a well played game. It was an ugly game. Self lost one of his best players to what appears to be an Achilles injury. But I was watching Kansas play and I was identifying, you know, their players and what was going right, what was going wrong. And like, look, I make no mistake about it. I have a ton to learn. Anybody can learn watching the best of the best of the best. You know, they mix and match with a 2, 3 zone, there's a little triangle in 2. It really confused Arkansas. And Arkansas just survived, really. It was because Kansas just turned the ball over so much. And the things that when you games or lose you games are, you know, turnovers, basically, defense, turnovers and rebounding. And look at that game and, and Kansas had 16 turnovers, had one less offensive rebound and, and only shot out, shot them from the free throw line. But, you know, Arkansas took 65 shots, they took 58, and they lose the game by seven points. KJ Adams hurts his Achilles tendon. But then I was, I was, I was watching their lineups and I was like, okay. Hunter Dickinson played four years at Michigan. Zeke Mayo just transferred in from South Dakota State. Rylan Griffin transferred in from Alabama. AJ Storr, who probably played his best game as a Jayhawk last night, he transfers in from Wisconsin. David Coit had transferred in from Northern Illinois. And it didn't stun me, but there was an aha moment, right? And obviously John Calperi's in his first year at Arkansas, and his team will look wildly different next year as he brought over several players, kept a couple from Arkansas last year, and then brought over players, you know, John L. Davis, who was at Florida Atlantic, D.J. wagner, who was one of the players that came over along with Big Z from Kentucky. And I thought to myself, hold on, this is a different sport than the one both of these two men have coached in before. I actually think Bill Self is like the perfect example. The guy's the best of the best of the best. And you could say the same thing, honestly, about John Calipari. Different ways of doing the same thing and same thing meaning being a Hall of Fame coach. Both are in the hall of Fame, both have won national titles, and Bill's won two of them. Two of them. And you look at how they went about their business, right? John Calipari, you know, evolved from what he was at UMass, then the NBA, and of course, when he was at Kentucky, it was one and dones. And he would go and hand pick the best five freshmen that he could get. And more often than not, it would hit. And whether they got to the Final Four or one year, one national championship, or were constantly competitive at the very top of the sport, he became the signature of the one and done era. Now, truth be told that even when they won the national championship, one of the, one of the strengths of that team was some of the veteran players. But he picked off the top of the deck. Bill Selv a little bit different at Kansas, right? They had guys that you would call program guys, guys that improved over time. A Darnell Robinson, for example, would start their career at one thing and play four or five years and evolve, become really good. All Big 12 caliber players. And he would sprinkle in one or maybe two one and dones and then have a couple that were pros and maybe take one transfer. And again, I don't think that it's just Covid or just nil or just the transfer portal or just the fact it's not just the transfer portal, it's the fact you can transfer without repercussion transfer and not sit out. But those three things have changed their business dramatically. And it's hard to adjust. Hard to adjust. My mom is, let's just say she's in her late 70s and we go out to dinner the other night and she's had a problem with her phone. She hands it to my son, she's like, I've had this problem for a month. It won't do something. My son presses two buttons, problem solved. Because he grew up, frankly, too much with a phone in his hand. My mom still has a landline. How many of you have a landline? And the point is that here's the things that have changed. It started with the G League Ignite, where players could go straight to the G league for a year, get paid, and then go presumably to the NBA. Did it all work out great? Did a bunch of guys go? No, but it was a couple of year. Then there was overtime elite, which has since expanded. But did it all was. Did it take 20, 30 guys? No, but there were two or three that mattered. A couple of went to Australia. One a year maybe would go to Australia and for John Calipari, the pool and frankly for Bill Self, the pool of those one and dones on a given year that can really impact a program was between 5 and 15 and 15 is probably too much. Really. It's 2 or 3 and 10. And when you take just a couple of them out there out of it and then you factor in that, you know, one would go to ote, one would, one would go overseas, one or two would go the G league night. Now all of a sudden that pool started to shrink. Then you factor in that there are players. Kevin Durant, D'Angelo Russell are perfect examples of guys that, you know, could have gone to Kentucky and been a part of that one and done era, but instead chose to have their own path. And you're fighting Duke for these one and dones and now all of a sudden, instead of getting the best five players in the country, you might get one of the five best or one of the. And then you strike up a lean year and it's hard. Then you go to Covid. And how did Covid affect college basketball, by the way? Bill Self had a team that during COVID could have won a national championship. They were dominant. Covid canceled that tournament. But if, if you go to Covid, that extended to where now you're playing against guys that have a Covid year. I don't know how many people are listening to the Herd know this, but if you. Not only do you have a Covid year, that given that's the super seniors you're seeing play college basketball this year, fifth and sixth year seniors, sometimes seventh years. But now there's a recent ruling that if you play junior college basketball or any NAIA basketball during any of those last four years, this is after the COVID year, that year doesn't count and you get another year. So I don't care how good you are. With the exception maybe of Cooper Flagg, like he's a unicorn. He's a generational player. Outside of that, all of these other freshmen, you're 18, 19, and look, a lot of freshmen are 20 years old. A lot of seniors are 23, 24, 25 years old. Stephen Ashworth is played they Creighton beat Louisville last night. Now again, part of it is he's a Mormon. He went on a mission. But part of it is he also existed during the COVID year. He's 25 years old with a wife and a kid playing college basketball. So if you're somebody who's always played freshman, what am I going to. This is a completely different landscape, a completely different sport. Then post Covid you have the transfer portal and no. And you can transfer without ramification. You don't have to sit out. So everything you built in terms of your culture and that's what Kansas always built on their culture come in. You're part of KU's program. They've had transfers before, but they've never played four transfers at once. And again, it doesn't mean that transfers bad. How is it transferred? And I didn't sit out at my school. I went sat out at a junior college. But when you have a team full of them and that's not how you've always coached and coaching a transfer that's played multiple years at another school, that's. Here's the easiest analogy I give you. Go over to a Get ready to Watch the games today, Go over to a buddy's house, have him hand you the remote and say, how about it? And you're a Spectrum guy and he's got DirecTV. And you're like, whoa, wait, what? He's got Sonos and DirecTV and he's got one universal remote. And you would look at that thing and it's not your same universal remote you got. That's what it's like to coach somebody who's, who's played college basketball has succeeded in college basketball at a different level, a different school. David Coit was at Northern Illinois and a star. Zeke Mayo was a star at South Dakota State. But now you have to completely change roles and you've played for somebody else and there's different verbiage and different ways of doing things. And again, you have a coach who's used to coaching people a certain way, and now he's coaching you that same way, only you've been coached and programmed by somebody else. And then you factor in nil into the whole thing where, if we're honest with ourselves, there were schools that were compensating student athletes above that of, of, of. Of your normal grant Nate room, board, tuition and fees. Now everybody can. So everybody can go and find players and pay them to stay or pay them to transfer, or you can go get an overseas player whose older experience played professional basketball and can go and compete against your college player. I don't know if you want to use this as if this is an appropriate analogy, but Monday I took my son to see Black Bag. Black Bag is a new Stephen Sudden height movie. And Black Bag, by the way, if you like short movies, it's like 80, 85 minutes long. It's great and it's really good. We're sitting in the movie theater. It's like a private showing. It's me and my son, nobody else. And I'm thinking to myself, this is a. Is a really good movie. It was short, it was interesting. It's kind of a spy flick. It's, it's, it's good. I would. Rotten Tomatoes. It was like in the 90, like 97% rotten tomatoes. But who goes to movies anymore? Here's a guy who's made some of the best, most clever movies in the last 25 years. And I have no idea what it made opening box. And of course it opens in March, which means they didn't think that it was going to do. Do huge numbers. But I guarantee you've seen Landman more than you've ever heard of. Black back right, because the same people that are making the same shows in the same movies, they're getting left behind because their business, their industry has changed. And whether it's changed because of COVID or changed because of our viewing habits, which were only sped up by Covid, whatever it is, it's a different sport than it ever used to be. I'm watching John Calipari come from behind and take down Kansas. Two hall of Fame coaches, two well invested programs, and two guys who are coaching similarly, if not the same, to how they've always coached. And it has worked and it will work. But the business of the sport has changed. Yes, Arkansas won. Yes, Kansas mix. It just. I don't know what happened within the chemistry of that squad that caused them to look so dysfunctional, but the game has passed anybody by. It's just changed so quickly that you have to level up or level over or otherwise you're leveling home. Doug Gottlieb in for Colin this is the hurt fox Sports Radio iHeartradio app. We talked Bronnie a little bit at the end of the show yesterday. You see what he did last night? We'll discuss next in the Herd.