Let's be clear: the closest I'll ever come to running a football team is playing the Franchise mode on Madden. NBA GMs aren't swarming Wren Hall asking me to be their next coach. I'm just some schmuck who sits on his couch and thinks that he could do a better job than the guy stomping the sidelines - doesn't make it true.
But with that said, at one time or another, all these coaches have made me cock my head and say, "What on earth is that guy thinking?"
Maurice Cheeks: For those of you who don't recall, when he was coaching the Blazers, he sang a national anthem duet with a 13-year-old girl who had stage fright in front of a sold-out Rose Garden. It was one of the kindest gestures I've ever seen.
But as nice a man as Cheeks is, by all accounts, he just isn't a good basketball coach. Mo is a "players' coach," which can work in some instances, but in Portland in the early 2000s, it was akin to letting the inmates run the asylum. The players ignored instructions from the sidelines to run their own plays.
Cheeks' tenure in Philadelphia has been less than successful, as well, as he's been completely unable to integrate the talents of Allen Iverson and Chris Webber, or get Philly's highly paid role players to perform at the level that their salaries dictate.
Doc Rivers: He just seems like a bad coach. Last year, Doc had a plethora of young talent - Delonte West, Al Jefferson, Tony Allen, Kendrick Perkins - and decided that the best way to develop it was to play a 12-man rotation. Giving young players 30 minutes one night and four the next isn't a fantastic way to build their confidence or their abilities. Every team in the NBA runs an eight- or a nine-man rotation (except Boston) for a reason: the team performs better when the players know their roles.
From what I've seen, he's not the greatest game coach either. On Wednesday, in a game that Boston lost, Chris Paul was destroying the Celtics on the pick-and-roll. Even the announcers were questioning why Rivers wasn't having Paul's man slide underneath the screen, giving up the open jumper (which he hadn't been taking) to take away Paul's penetration (which was killing the Celts).
Art Shell: I feel that there is no coach more entertaining to watch throughout the course of a game than Mr. Arthur Shell. I'm fairly confident that he wears a headset because he's seen other coaches do it, not because he actually uses it for anything, like, say, play-calling, or talking to other coaches. Not only have I never seen Shell speaking on the sideline, I've never seen his expression change. Every time the cameras cut to Shell, he has a placid, vacant expression on his face, reminiscent of a wife watching some sports replay at her husband's bequest. He might not even know that there's a football game going on. It's the highest of high comedy. ESPN.com columnist (and my sportswriting hero) Bill Simmons calls it the "Art Shell Face". If you haven't caught a Raiders game yet this year, do so, just for the hilarity that will without fail ensue when you catch a glimpse of coach Shell.
Dirk Koetter: The football coach of the Arizona State Sun Devils boasts a 2-20 record against ranked teams in his tenure at ASU, and with coaching decisions like the one he made against USC several weeks ago, it's easy to see why. Down a touchdown and facing fourth-and-23 from his own 22 with 1:19 and two timeouts left, Koetter elected to punt. He needed to call one timeout as soon as the ball was spotted, called the final timeout after a USC plunge into the line, and lost the game after USC kneeled down to kill the clock. Koetter said that he thought he had a better chance of forcing a turnover than converting fourth-and-long.
Dirk, the average team in college football turns the ball over 2.1 times per game and runs about 60 plays in the course of a game. Based solely on percentages, you had approximately a 3.5 percent chance of creating a USC turnover. In real life, that number is lower, because a good team like USC is much less likely to turn the ball over with the game at stake, and a run up the middle followed by a kneel-down are significantly less likely to cause a loss of possession than the average play. I don't know what the odds are of converting fourth and that long, but even my fellow schmucks would have gone for it in Madden.
-Matthew Mertens is a sophomore who has not yet declared a major.
