TylerDurden wrote:rlh04d wrote:Wufan wrote:And Marty Simmons was better than Marshall in two games last year…Matta is pretty bad ass!
Winning a game doesn't say that the coach that wins is better by any means. But Marshall was clearly the better coach in that tournament game.
We had Ohio State scouted and we were very well prepared. We knew what distances to play guys like Craft at. We knew what pressure to put onto people. We shifted lineups to compensate for any move they made. Ohio State, from my perception, didn't scout us at all, and simply tried to out-talent us.
I guess you can argue how much of that was on our assistant coaches as well. But I was very unimpressed with Ohio State's preparation for an Elite 8 game. Maybe that's on the players for not taking the coach's game plan seriously -- but that's also on the coach to make his players buy in.
Let's pump the breaks just a bit here.
I understand you're a WSU and Marshall fan and this is an MVC forum, but to suggest that OSU and Matta didn't scout WSU and relied on its talent to win the game is silly. We're talking about a four-point game in the Elite 8. 70-66.
WSU just happened to outplay OSU in the first half more than OSU outplayed WSU in the second. Four points worth, to be exact. If Marshall clearly out-coached Matta in preparation/first-half, then Matta clearly out-coached Marshall from halftime on.
But really, there isn't anything clear about a four-point game.
I don't think anyone is denying that Marshall is a good coach and a lot of things point to him being in the top XX% of DI coaches. In fact, the points you make about WSU's preparation for games is very valid. They seem to be ready to go for just about every game. Credit where it's due there.
But just like you can't draw a lot of conclusions about a coach based on a couple of games against Evansville, you can't draw a conclusion about who you would take because of a four-point Elite 8 game.
Marshall did make terrible coaching decisions by not playing his injured starters against Evansville.
In fact, this is something that the whole league needs to get their heads around. There have been a ridiculous number of posts about "the Valley must have been pretty good last year, because WSU only went 12-6 against those teams." It's fools gold. The WSU team that played the league schedule and the WSU team that played the NCAA tournament schedule weren't even close to on the same level. Watch and compare some of the games. The level of play is just incredibly different.
I'm not bitter. Injuries are part of the season. Other teams had injuries, too.The 12-6 league record is accurate to what the team was throughout that stretch. But given the drastic impact of team play from players that weren't available during all or parts of that 12-6 stretch, it's a terrible idea to compare any league team to the F4 team and assume similar results.
The bad news is that a lot of the Valley teams and fan bases are doing that this off-season.
The "potentially" good news for them is that they still don't have to face that team next year.
Before this year, I viewed Marshall as an above average D1 coach, with a personality that matched perfectly with WSU and the Wichita community. He's an excellent recruiter. He's very good at building/teaching a winning system with his guys and his style. He was decent at creating a gameplan. He was ok at in-game management. I think the gameplanning and in-game management took a major step forward last season, even from the first tip against VCU, but very much in NCAA play.