Keeping up with the times

Krzyzewski adapts to become the best

By Pat Forde, Yahoo! Sports 
When Army beat Lehigh 56-29 in November 1975, nobody knew it would lead to this.

Mike Krzyzewski was only 27 years old then, a rookie head coach nobody was talking about or paying attention to. The first season would end 11-14, not exactly auguring greatness.

But 36 years and 901 victories after beating Lehigh, Coach K will become the winningest coach in college basketball history this week. Victory No. 903 may happen Tuesday night in the Champions Classic against Michigan State in Madison Square Garden. If not, it will happen Friday against Davidson in Cameron Indoor Stadium.

And from there, Krzyzewski will proceed to put the record out of reach.
Unless something unforeseen happens – and after watching the unceremonious end for another iconic college coach last week in State College, take nothing for granted anymore – he will keep coaching until he has more than 1,000 victories.

Records like these are always testaments to longevity. But in K’s case, it’s also a testament to adaptability. That he has thrived over time in a sport that has massively evolved is an object lesson in flexible thinking.
Krzyzewski’s first 10 years as a college head coach came before the 3-point shot was put into nationwide implementation. The advent of the 3 was a demarcation for some coaches who wouldn’t embrace it or defend it – Louisville’s Denny Crum went to six Final Fours from 1971-86, none thereafter. Coach K adapted, and most of his teams in the past 25 years have used the 3 with deadly efficiency.

His second national championship came in 1992 against Michigan’s Fab Five team – a group that would help permanently alter the mindset of when players were ready to leave college for the NBA. Krzyzewski loves his seniors to an almost maudlin degree – but when the landscape shifted and elite programs had to recruit short-term collegians who would never see a senior day, K made the transition and kept winning.
He’s always recruited players who actually liked being in college – guys such as Shane Battier and Jay Williams and J.J. Redick, who would stay in school longer – but Krzyzewski knew he had to take some studs who would only be in Durham a year or two. It worked.

As dominant big men have become increasingly more rare commodities in college hoops – nobody wants to be a low-post center, and the best of the few who do stick around college for about 15 minutes – Krzyzewski put his offensive emphasis on skill. He’d always had frontcourt players who could shoot (from Mark Alarie to Danny Ferry to Christian Laettner to Battier), but K spread the floor and opened his offense even more to players who could drive, pass and shoot.

At a time when a collegiate emperor-coach seemed like the last guy who should coach the United States in the Olympics, Krzyzewski took on the no-reward job. If America won the gold medal in 2008 in Beijing, it was due to the players putting aside their egos and playing together. If America somehow lost, everyone would point at the coach who screwed up a sure thing with overpowering talent.

Onetime mentor Bob Knight, whose record he will break this week, won an Olympic gold medal in 1984 – but that was a different time. The players were still collegians, not multimillionaires as concerned about maximizing their own brand as representing their country. A guy who built a program based on floor burns and taking charges was going to tell Kobe Bryant and LeBron James what to do?

Krzyzewski adapted his coaching style. Learned what would work with pros and what would not. He won the gold medal, and the respect of the players in the process.

And in 2010, with a team that probably didn’t rank among his 10 most talented at Duke, Krzyzewski recognized the Blue Devils’ offensive limitations and made them a bunch of defensive zealots. A program that has always been offensively pretty got defensively gritty, grinding out low-scoring victories on the way to K’s fourth national title.


You have to admire a guy who can win it all with LeBron and with Brian Zoubek. (Hey, who else has won it all with LeBron?)

That adaptability has led to a seemingly endless run at the top of the sport. The span from Krzyzewski’s first national title (1991) to his most recent (2010) is the longest in college basketball history. The span from his first Final Four (1986) to his most recent (2010) is the third-longest on the books, behind only Dean Smith (1967-97) and Eddie Sutton (1978-2004).

John Wooden’s 10 national titles will never be equaled – but it was a concentrated era of dominance, from 1964-75. Then Wooden retired.

Adolph Rupp is the only other coach to have won four or more national titles – but they came in a relatively condensed time frame as well, from 1948-58. Rupp had some very good teams thereafter, but no titles.
I believe there will be a fifth national championship for Mike Krzyzewski before he retires. Maybe a sixth, too.

I believe that because he’s the best basketball coach ever when it comes to staying current. It’s been a long road from beating Lehigh in 1975 to now, but Coach K seems to have plenty of tread left on his tires. The record will not just be broken, but put out of reach.

Pacquiao definitely did not win the fight!

Did the judges see the same fight?  Even Pac-man is a crook!

Facebook or Fakebook

Great Article:

By NED POTTER | ABC News – Mon, Nov 7, 2011

We may "friend" more people on Facebook, but we have fewer real friends -- the kind who would help us out in tough times, listen sympathetically no matter what, lend us money or give us a place to stay if we needed it, keep a secret if we shared one.

That's the conclusion made by Matthew Brashears, a Cornell University sociologist who surveyed more than 2,000 adults from a national database and found that from 1985 to 2010, the number of truly close friends people cited has dropped -- even though we're socializing as much as ever.

On average, participants listed 2.03 close friends in Brashears' survey. That number was down from about three in a 1985 study.

"These are the people you think of as your real confidants, your go-to people if you need something," Brashears said.

Brashears asked people online from a database called TESS -- Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences -- to list the names of people with whom they had discussed "important matters" over the previous six months. He reports the results in a forthcoming issue of the journal Social Networks.

Forty-eight percent of participants listed one close friend when asked, 18 percent listed two and 29 percent listed more. A little more than 4 percent didn't list anyone.

What's going on? Brashears said his survey can't tell us conclusively, but his guess is that while we meet just as many people as we used to, we categorize them differently.

Does that mean we're more isolated in these times when we seem to meet more people online than in person? (How many of your Facebook "friends" are really friends of yours?) Defying some of the stereotypes of the digital age, social scientists say Facebook may actually be healthy for us. Keith Hampton at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania wrote a report for the Pew Research Center in which he found that "Internet users in general, but Facebook users even more so, have more close relationships than other people."

"Facebook users get more overall social support, and in particular they report more emotional support and companionship than other people," wrote Hampton in a blog post. "And, it is not a trivial amount of support. Compared to other things that matter for support -- like being married or living with a partner -- it really matters. Frequent Facebook use is equivalent to about half the boost in support you get from being married."

But online contact and personal contact are different. While Hampton reports we know more people because of Facebook and similar sites, Brashears reports there are fewer whom we choose to trust with our most intimate worries.

"We're not becoming asocial," said Brashears, "but these people give us social support, and they give us advice."

A case of being too full of himself

Hue Jackson, coach of the Raiders:

"We're going to create something that's great," Jackson said in July. "I'm not interested in being good. I'm interested in being great."  10/17

While others retreated from any definitive call on whether Carson Palmer would be behind center on Sunday, Raiders coach Hue Jackson continued to have fun with the game of NFL cat and mouse.
"I know who the starting quarterback is," he told the media gathering with a wink after Friday's practice in Alameda.  10/21


Coach Hue Jackson wanted to set the record straight about the signing of free-agent wide receiver T.J. Houshmandzadeh.  Houshmandzadeh is a Raider because Jackson, and not quarterback Carson Palmer, made it so. He said he wanted Houshmandzadeh in July but was overruled by owner Al Davis.
"Carson Palmer had nothing to do with this," Jackson said Wednesday. "I tried to get T.J. during training camp."  11/02


Only a few days ago, right after Jason Campbell's serious injury, Jackson acquired Carson Palmer and bragged that it was the "greatest trade in football."  Then Jackson spent all week teasing with the possibility of Palmer starting this game over semi-incumbent Kyle Boller. 10/23

"I've (Hue Jackson talking) sat at this man's (reference to Al Davis) knee for two years and I've been involved in that draft," he said. "I've helped shape this team over the last couple of years, as far as draft picks are concerned on this football team. So, I know what they look like, run like, act like, sound like ... the whole nine yards. Now, it's just a matter of making sure that all the T's are crossed and the I's are dotted as we move forward." 10/10

"We're chasing a championship," coach Hue Jackson said with Palmer flanked beside him at an introductory news conference Tuesday afternoon. "I'm very excited about this football team and where it has a chance to go." 10/18

"This is a new beginning for this football team," Jackson said. "We don't care if they're ugly, we don't care if they're pretty. We just don't care. Our No. 1 purpose when we play is to win. 10/09

 

The key ingredient

Raiders cornerback Stanford Routt describing Tom Brady:

"He's real good at improvising," Raiders cornerback Stanford Routt said. "A play breaks down, don't panic. He won't even throw it away, he'll slide in the pocket, tell his receiver move this way, move that way and he'll make the throw. So yeah, he's definitely one of the best in the game if not the best."

Recession???? Why do we give the doomsayers so much attention when reality says otherwise??

In Plague-Filled August, American Consumers Shopped Like Champs

By Daniel Gross, economics editor at Yahoo! Finance

(Abridged version)
August was a plague month for the American economy. It started with the U.S. debt-ceiling crisis, continued with nausea-inducing market volatility, and closed with a small earthquake and a massive hurricane — all with a steady drumbeat of European instability in the background.

But when the going got tough, the tough went shopping. Or at least that's what the data that has poured in on Thursday indicates.
First, news from the nation's single largest retail sector: automobile. Sales were generally up sharply from a year ago, and up from July. GM sold 218,479 cars in August, up 18 percent from August 2010 (and up 1.7 percent from July 2011). (Interesting note: the Cruze alone accounts for about 10 percent of GM's sales). Ford's sales in August, at 175,220, were up 11 percent from August 2010 (though down a bit from July 2011). Rounding out what used to be known as the Big Three, Chrysler reported August sales of 130,119 vehicles, up 31 percent from the year-before, but also up 16 percent, from July sales. Want more? Nissan North America, up 19.2 percent from August 2010. Volkswagen, up 10 percent from last August. Toyota and Honda, which report later in the day on Thursday, are likely to report sharp declines, due to lingering inventory problems related to the earthquake/tsunami in those companies' home country.

Next, look at the news on non-automotive retailing. As Reuters reported: "Many top U.S. retailers reported better-than-expected August sales, withstanding Hurricane Irene and sagging consumer confidence." Among the trains tracked by Retail Metrics, same-store sales rose 5.5 percent in August from last year, as the Financial Times reported. The International Council of Shopping Centers said same-store sales in the chains it tracks rose 4.6 percent in August 2011 from August 2010. Check out some of the individual chains: Macy's, same-store sales up 5 percent from August 2010; Target, same-store sales up 5.4 percent from the year before; Limited Brands, same-store sales up 11 percent; Saks, up 6.1 percent. At Costco, U.S. comparable sales were up 9 percent from the year before; excluding the higher price of gasoline from a year ago, same-store sales were up 6 percent.

Despite the rising chorus of doomsayers and double-dippers, the third quarter is looking like it will be stronger than the second quarter. Macroeconomic Advisers, which updates its projections in real time, pegs growth in the current quarter at about 2 percent. While that's nothing to write home about, it's twice the rate of second quarter growth. What's more, payroll jobs, which help drive spending, continue to grow at the (anemic) pace of about 25,000 per week. The savings rate remains high, and many signs of stress — credit card delinquencies — continue to trend down. On aggregate, Americans are in a better position today than they were a year ago to do what they like to do: buy stuff.

The overwhelming majority of people in the U.S. aren't watching CNBC, reading Politico.com, harrumphing about the latest outrage from the European Central Bank, or digging out from the ravages of Hurricane Irene. As New Yorkers and beltway types were in full freak-out mode over the S&P downgrade, the locals were generally going about their business — going to work in their Priuses, eating natural foods, and shopping.

World Number 1 player Novak Djokovic on having fun

“It is all in good spirit and trying to have a good time and enjoy myself. Tennis is a difficult game and we have a long year and a lot of traveling and matches so it is nice to keep things relaxed sometimes.

“When you are relaxed you have more energy and it is good for your mentality. If you are happy and having fun then you have a chance to play your best tennis. People shouldn’t think that having fun and laughing mean I am not serious about tennis, if they underestimate me like that it is a mistake.”

 “I am playing the best tennis of my life,” Djokovic said. “I think everything in general just came together. Progress can be a slow process and it takes a while to really understand the game, understand the life that I’m having, and you learn from your mistakes obviously.

“You try to get better as a person and as a player each day you wake up. I think it’s really important as well to carry yourself off the court in a good way. I am aware of the responsibility that I have as a present No. 1 to represent the sport as well in some ways off the court. So I need to do that in the best possible way.”