Perfect Symmetry

Hmmm, interesting commentary with the KU slant. This made sense to me too; 'However, Smith's own coaching resume is filled with enough evidence to convince Williams that he should remain at Kansas.

Smith is a Kansas native who found coaching greatness in North Carolina. Williams is a Carolina native who found coaching greatness in Kansas.

It's perfect symmetry."


Unfinished business for Williams at Kansas
By Bob Lutz, Wichita Eagle

NEW ORLEANS - Roy Williams is going to do what Roy Williams wants to do. He might want to go to North Carolina and finish his coaching career. If that's what he wants to do, Kansas fans should wish him well.

But there is this feeling I have always had about Williams. It's that he belongs at KU. It's that when he does finally win a national championship, it should be at KU.

Williams didn't win a championship this season. His Jayhawks fell short Monday night, losing 81-78 to Syracuse at the Louisiana Superdome.

That's four Final Fours without a ring.

But Williams maintained his grace and dignity after the game, except for a brief exchange with CBS reporter Bonnie Bernstein as he was walking to the locker room.

Bernstein asked the question. By now, we all know the question.

Williams shot back angrily: "I could give a flip about what other people want right now," he said. "I know as a journalist that question needs to be asked, but as a human being, all those people that want that answer right now aren't very sensitive."

Williams later said he regretted using a bad word, and he hopes his mentor, North Carolina coach Dean Smith, wasn't watching.

"Coach Smith will be disappointed in my blankety-blank, but he understands," Williams said.

The North Carolina subject is tiresome, but it's not going away until Williams makes a decision. It could be a day, a week or a month.

Logic tells us that Smith, North Carolina's legendary ex-coach who will have a major say in picking the Tar Heels' new coach, will probably not take no for an answer this time.

He will plead with Williams to come home and fix what is definitely broken in Chapel Hill.

Smith has a right to go after Williams with as much energy as he can muster.

However, Smith's own coaching resume is filled with enough evidence to convince Williams that he should remain at Kansas.

Smith is a Kansas native who found coaching greatness in North Carolina. Williams is a Carolina native who found coaching greatness in Kansas.

It's perfect symmetry.

Williams was again asked about the North Carolina job in the postgame interview room, where he struggled with his emotions.

"I said (Sunday), I haven't spent one second thinking about that, and I haven't spent one second thinking about that yet," Williams said. "I made the statement I made on the air because I thought the question was pursued deeper than I thought it should have been. I said, 'I don't give a blankety-blank about North Carolina, I care about those 13 kids in the locker room.' "

Williams has been criticized for being emotional, but it's ridiculous criticism.

He does care. He does bond with his players.

All coaches -- at least the successful ones -- do. But with Williams, it's deeper.

Nick Collison, KU's senior center who finished his career with 19 points and 21 rebounds against Syracuse, took the time to praise his coach even as he felt such disappointment with losing.

"I think any high school kid in the country needs to take a serious look at Kansas if they're recruiting them," Collison said. "Because you're not going to play for a better man. You know, I wouldn't trade it for anything. I wouldn't give a million dollars to be on Syracuse right now."

Williams became teary-eyed as he listened to Collison, who continued to give an endorsement to his school, his team and his coach.

"You're playing for the best man in college basketball at Kansas," Collison went on. "Regardless of whether we lost or whatever. I swear, we could have made the NIT and I would still have felt the same way. It's a great place to be."

It was as if Collison was sending a not-so-subtle message to his coach: that Kansas is where he belongs.

Williams will be in Lawrence today for a celebration at Allen Fieldhouse.

It's a scaled-down celebration. Had the Jayhawks won, they would have partied inside Memorial Stadium.

It will be a strange scene, filled with conflicting emotions.

But Monday night's loss will not stop thousands of KU fans from gathering tonight, and they will want to celebrate. It will be subdued at first, perhaps. But then it will break loose, especially if Williams uses the occasion to announce he's staying at Kansas.

Williams has been at Kansas for 15 years. There is lots of business still to be done. He should stay and be the one to get it done.

North Carolina might need him, but he doesn't need North Carolina.

 

poor ABCers doing everything they can to HOPE Roy doesn't come to Carolina... funny... I'm not saying he will, but dang why do they all have to bring it up?? I can post 5 more why he WILL go to UNC

 

http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/sports/special_packages/marchmania/5582795.htm
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Williams not a clone of Smith
SCOTT FOWLER

NEW ORLEANS - Now that the Final Four has ended, now that Kansas coach Roy Williams can take a deep breath and think, let's think right along with him.

For a moment, though, let's just skip the part about whether or not Williams is going to take the North Carolina job. Let's assume he does.

I certainly believe he will, based on watching him closely over the past four days.

So what would the North Carolina program become with Williams as the new coach?

First of all, here's what it won't be: absolute clone of the Dean Smith years. Yes, Williams still can't bring himself to say "Dean" -- it's always coach Smith. Yes, Williams continues to copy hundreds of Smith's habits.

But not all of them. Here's a small example.

"Coach Smith goes to every player's wedding everywhere," Williams said this weekend. "He'll fly to Los Angeles. Fly to Phoenix. Fly to New York for a third marriage or something like that."

Williams?

You better live in-state.

"I only go to weddings if I can get in the car and drive an hour," he said.

There are small basketball things, too. Williams and Smith love man-to-man defense. But while Smith advocated switching on screens, Williams prefers to make his players fight through them. Don't give the players an easy way out, Williams believes. If you let them know they have to scramble through the screen, they are more likely to get into a defensive crouch when they are supposed to.

Williams will love Raymond Felton, of course. Williams has won more than 80 percent of his games at Kansas -- easily the best winning percentage among active coaches -- by pushing the ball constantly. All of Williams' players have to be able to run. He likes the psychological blow another team sustains when it scores but then gives up an immediate fast-break basket.

"If we can score on them while they are still feeling pretty good about themselves, that can wear on a team," Williams said.

Practices? Tougher than you might expect. Williams shucks that aw-shucks Western North Carolina persona quickly away from the cameras. Kansas center Nick Collison, who played three summers under Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim for an all-star team, said Williams is actually much more intense than Boeheim.

So the Tar Heels players, who helped force Doherty's resignation, won't suddenly inherit a coach who never screams. But Williams does have a better hold on his temper; his former Kansas players love him much like the former Tar Heels love Smith.

As for personnel, don't expect Williams to suddenly hire back all of Bill Guthridge's assistant coaches Doherty fired in his first big mistake as Tar Heels coach. Williams will be loyal to his own assistants, too. But expect him to find a place for Phil Ford back under the basketball umbrella (Larry Brown would also do this if he gets the job).

And expect Williams to be the first Tar Heels basketball coach who often cries.

"I may be too emotional, but I can live with that," he said. Williams cries at the end of every season, or when he talks about his saintly mother, or when one of his former Kansas players tells him to "meet one of your grandchildren" and introduces his own son.

That's Williams -- the new Tar Heels basketball coach.

Or so we assume.

 

http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/sports/special_packages/marchmania/5582568.htm
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Time for Williams to look toward North Carolina
STEVE WILSTEIN
Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS - Roy Williams was right: He owed Final Four week to his players.

That meant no "junk," as he put it, about the North Carolina job.

Now he owes it to himself to think seriously about following his heart.

Williams looked as if he lost 10 pounds Monday night. His face was drained, his eyes were rimmed red.

He marched miles on the sideline, jumping and flailing his arms, crouching and barking at his players, snapping at the refs, pumping his fists, smiling and snarling, and always straightening his tie. He was coming apart on the inside but didn't want to show it.

Williams coached his heart out and left a piece of it in the Superdome when Syracuse beat Kansas 81-78. He wanted this game for his players, for seniors Nick Collison and Kirk Hinrich and all the rest. He wanted it for the heritage he had built at Kansas, for the legacy he wanted to leave behind - if he does move on to North Carolina.

Maybe, unselfishly, he wanted this game least of all for himself, but he'd be lying if he said that wasn't immensely important, too.

The emotionally churning moments after the loss were not the time for him to talk about leaving or even to think about it. Anyone who wanted an answer about his intentions would have to wait.

"I could give a flip about what those people want," Williams sneered, adding that "it's not very sensitive" for anyone even to ask right now.

"I haven't thought about that for one second. ... I've got 13 people in that locker room that I love."

It was too soon to ask about it and too soon for him to think about it. North Carolina hasn't even approached him yet about taking the job that Matt Doherty gave up last week under pressure.

But the time will come soon and when it does, Williams should take the job that he turned down at the last moment three years ago.

Williams could go on coaching Kansas forever. He could stay until he finally wins an NCAA championship, completes his mission and satisfies all those Jayhawks fans who have been waiting for him to deliver on a promise he never made but certainly set up.

Williams is too good a coach, too decent a man, for any school to want to lose.

He stayed three years ago when he thought it was the right thing to do. He had young players and he had the extended family of players who had come and gone and were counting on him.

But the time is right now, at age 52, for a change.

Maybe not this week. Maybe not next week. But soon.

And Williams may make the move this time because it's the right one for him, for Kansas and, most assuredly, for North Carolina.

In his heart, Williams is a Carolina man. He played at Chapel Hill and worked as an assistant under Dean Smith. His son, Scott, played guard for the Tar Heels. His daughter, Kimberly, graduated from North Carolina last year.

Williams is exactly the kind of coach North Carolina wants and needs. A coach who has Smith's respect and, more important, a coach who won't alienate Smith, as Doherty did. Williams has that blend of toughness and love and civility that North Carolina's chancellor and athletic director said they want when they pressed the volatile Doherty to quit.

The challenge for Williams at North Carolina is to rebuild a program that has gone adrift, but he is not one to shy from that kind of task.

Winning or losing a championship game shouldn't define a coach's talent or reputation, yet in the minds of many that's exactly what it does.

Syracuse's Jim Boeheim is no better because he won his first national title, but his victory will validate for many what every other coach and all of his players over the past 27 years already knew: The man can flat-out coach.

"I don't feel any smarter yet," he said. "Maybe tomorrow."

Boeheim took his young players, harnessed their raw skills and molded them into a tight, efficient team. The Madness of March sang out in their exquisite harmony. In their zone defense and in their sweet shooting they were joyous to watch.

On the other side, it would be stupid to suggest Williams' second championship loss somehow tarnishes him, as if he is any less a coach because his team missed a few free throws near the end or because a game-tying shot by Michael Lee in the final second was blocked by Hakim Warrick, or because the Jayhawks came up three points short.

Boeheim argued that Williams actually did the better coaching job, bringing his team back from 53-42 at halftime after Syracuse had played almost perfectly for the first 20 minutes - hitting 10 of 13 3-pointers. Maybe Boeheim was simply being gracious, but he wasn't too far off.

When they embraced after the game, Boeheim said, "I told him the same thing Bob Knight told me in 1987 - you'll be back someday."

Boeheim is right about that. The only question is where.

 

I stopped reading after that... Scott Fowler should not be allowed to write about sports...

 

Boo hooo! I'm all choked up inside.

The Hornets will NOT move to New Orleans either! The NBA will not allow that to happen.

Predictions anyone?