Dean Smith's True Legacy

Dean Smith is known by most people as the former coach of the University of North Carolina Tar Heels Basketball Team.  That's who he was by vocation, and he excelled at it more than just about any coach in the history of sports.

We can cite his then record-breaking 879 coaching victories, 17 ACC Titles, 11 Final Fours, 2 National Championships, and Gold Medal in the 1976 Olympics.  We can cite his monstrous streaks, and the number of players he helped get to the NBA.  But these incredible accomplishments pale in comparison to what he achieved on a human level.  Because coaching to him was a means to an end, an avenue to teach life lessons to not only his players, but to the legions of fans who were part of the Carolina family, as well being an example to society in general.

Chances are, you may have never heard of Coach Smith's civil rights victories, as he was too humble to speak about himself, let alone feel like he even deserved any credit.  To him, it simply was just the decent thing to do, the right thing to do, even against the currents of society at the time.

I created a picture montage to try to encapsulate his legacy as a "Coach," not just on the court, but in life.  In the first image on the left, there is a young Dean Smith as a member of the Topeka High Trojans basketball team.  Behind him was a member of the Ramblers, who was also a student at Topeka high, but who because of the color of his skin, was not allowed to play on the Trojans.  Dean went directly to his coach to convince him to integrate the teams, but was ultimately rebuffed.  However, with some persistence, the team eventually integrated over the next couple of years.  What is notable is that Dean pushed for this several years before the seminal decision of Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka, when the Supreme Court shut down the practice of "Separate But Equal" and formally ended segregation in public schools.

Behind the young Topeka High students, there is an image of The Pines Restaurant in Chapel Hill, NC.  Long-since closed, it was one of the more popular restaurants in the 1950's that was also proud to serve the basketball team its pregame meals.  The makeup of those teams, and the patrons in general, were all white.  On a day in 1959, Coach Smith and his pastor decided that they would go to The Pines for lunch with a black theology student, waiting patiently at the door for admittance.  When the manager finally opened the door to seat the three of them, the restaurant officially served its first black patron, thus integrating the restaurant for all patrons of any race from then on.

In front of the image of the restaurant, there is an image of Howard Lee at his swearing in ceremony as the first black Mayor of not only Chapel Hill, but of any city in the South.  Several years prior, Lee was a graduate student at UNC, and Dean helped him to become the first black resident to purchase a home in an all white neighborhood.

The next image is that of Coach Smith hugging John Thompson, the head coach of Georgetown University.  What makes it remarkable is that this is the moment right after Coach Smith won his very first national championship.  But rather than jumping and celebrating with his team, he was more concerned with the well-being of his close friend, and wanted to make sure he was okay after a devastating loss.  Perhaps nothing else proves the humanity of a person more than reaching the pinnacle of your career, and choosing to comfort another person rather than celebrate your own accomplishments.

In the center of the picture is an image of Phil Ford holding up four fingers, signaling the play call for "Four Corners," and in effect, closing out the game for another Carolina victory.  The image is symbolic in two senses.  For one, it shows one of the greatest college basketball players in Carolina history and the strategic play that helped them dominate the competition.  But it also is an enduring symbol of the impetus to change the rules of college basketball, instituting the shot clock and eliminating the era of the clock-killing Four Corners.  And even in that time of great change in the game, Dean proved himself to be able to adapt to the times.  He continued his coaching dominance on the court with a faster pace that was completely opposite of the way he previously coached, and served as a microcosm to Coach Smith's ability to stay ahead of trends in society as well.

Kneeling down next to Phil Ford is a young Coach Smith and his new prized recruit, Charlie Scott.  Until the day Scott signed on to play for the Tar Heels, the ACC had been a league that consisted solely of white players.  Once again, Coach Smith's actions had helped propel forward the notions of courage, equality, and human decency, encouraging acceptance of members of all races by not only every team in the league, but by all people in the entire region.

In the foreground next to Charlie Scott is an image of Antawn Jamison pointing down the court to a teammate.  This symbolic gesture is now ubiquitous across all sports leagues, pro and recreational, but was an innovation cultivated from Smith's principles and beliefs.  The quick explanation is that when one of his players scored a basket, Coach Smith required them to point to the player who passed the ball to him.  A simple acknowledgment it may be, it carries the deeper meaning of realizing that your own success is often the product of another person assisting you along the way, and showing your appreciation in a direct, understated manner.

Behind Jamison is a touching embrace from the greatest basketball player of all time showing his affection for the man he calls his second father, who he credits for teaching him about life.  Michael Jordan is as big and towering a figure as there is - an ultra competitive, cutthroat player who never exposed his inner feelings for fear of showing weakness.  To disarm such an intimidating figure into showing a public moment of tenderness may actually reveal more about the kind of person Coach Smith was, his enormous effect on people and his sheer strength of spirit.

Last in the row of images is a plaque dedicated to Coach Smith in honor of receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.  The award is the highest civilian honor given to those who serve the country for the better, and is a fitting tribute to a man that strove to help his fellow man over himself.  It should be safe to say that while the people he served off the basketball court may not have their jerseys in the rafters like all his great players, they truly mean every bit as much to him on a personal level.  And that is the true legacy of the great man known as Dean Edwards Smith.

The True Carolina Way

If you're an alum of the University of North Carolina, these past couple days may have been the coup de grâce after several years of gut punches from the ongoing academic scandal, having our alma mater's name tarnished and dragged through the mud on national media outlets and through the bowels of fan message boards of the ABC'ers.

It's hard to put in words how to feel.  Is it shame, embarrassment, defiance, denial?  Some are saying our degrees are devalued, the entire sports program should be shut down, and the school itself needs to lose its grants and funding for the fraud it perpetrated.  I don't think thats the proper remedy, but when the media gets a juicy story, when the frothing public has their new target of outrage, the waters won't stop churning until a proper sacrifice is made.

Lets get this out there first.  This academic impropriety is shameful, and we should be embarrassed.  There is no proper defense for the scheme, no amount of bargaining or reasoning to make it acceptable.  It just isn't.  But there have been a couple points that keep jabbing at my side every time an outsider wants to throw stones and look down at my education, my hard earned degrees.

First, two wrongs don't make a right, so I am not trying to justify the actions of an academic department's secret school system.  But before all these alum's of other schools, with their own high powered "student athletes," get on their pedestals with a holier than thou demeanor, I'd just caution that you may not have as strong a foundation to stand on as you think.

Lets be honest with ourselves - athletes have been getting perks and benefits in high schools and colleges all across the country since the first dollar was earned showcasing a sporting event.  Just as beautiful women may find it easier to get out of traffic tickets, or that the spawn of the rich and powerful may escape serious legal troubles with nothing more than a timeout (and maybe no dessert), with a lucrative job awaiting them after graduation, so too have athletes been given an easy academic ride.

They get into easier classes, with more sympathetic teachers.  They get graded lighter.  Tutors can help them "write" papers, or get answer keys from old exams, or any other numerous ways to keep their grades eligible.  Admit it, you know of special classes at your school that were easy A's, with a majority of athletes enrolled in them.  You know of the easy majors that don't require much work.  This is nothing groundbreaking.

Don't get me wrong, not all athletes are dumb, and many have become very successful in jobs outside of sports.  But are we really going to pretend that all of Alabama's football scholars are able to put in their work on the field to win national titles, and then crank out their Calculus, Econ, Biology, History, and World Literature homework?  How about the new darlings at Mississippi and Mississippi State, or LSU, or Florida State, or at the one and done factory in Kentucky? And we all know of some athletes who have slid by under the radar, having been able to get by without even a high school equivalent writing and reading comprehension level.  How do they stay eligible at these big time programs without any extra help?

In fact, the acceptance standards for athletes at many of these schools would be considered academic fraud at Carolina.   Many athletes deemed ineligible for acceptance into Carolina's program somehow found a way to be eligible at another school, without changing a thing.  How is this an equitable principle, where some schools can get certain athletes who have tons of brawn  power  solely based on lowering their academic standards?  So we can just turn a blind eye and say, "hey, they didn't cheat because they weren't required to achieve the same level grades?"

Now, I realize not every school resorts to such methods of athlete "assistance," and the program within UNC's AFAM department may very well be the most deplorable of all.  It could never happen to your school, or at "so-and-so" school, right?  But, hey, it never could have happened at Carolina either, until it was actually uncovered after years of investigation.  Who's to say that Stanford's and Notre Dame's highly successful football programs are solely because they found the perfect formula for finding brilliant scholar athletes, without their own shadow program?  I bet none of their AD's are willing to look too deep to find out.  As they say, ignorance is bliss.

My second issue of contention is how I should suddenly question the degree I attained, that anything earned at Carolina now has no worth or meaning, and should be lit on fire.

Nonsense.

For the rest of us regular students, Chapel Hill offers a very tough curriculum in a variety of fields, and they excel in the majority of them on a nationwide level.  UNC's journalism school is world-renowned, its Public Health school ranked at the top, its medical and law schools highly regarded across the country, as well as its business, education, social work, and pharmacy schools.  Even getting into the school is highly competitive, with no tutoring or special classes to help you get in.

Sure, 3,100 students over a period of 2 decades took a no show class, which is a high number.  But a bigger number is the 30,000 total students and 20,000 undergraduates who attend on a yearly basis. Lets say there are 5,000 new students per year; thats close to 100,000 students (minus the 3,100) who busted their asses everyday over 2 decades who never took, or even heard of these independent study classes.  While there may have been a dozen or so faculty members who were involved in the miseducation of Chapel Hill, there are 8,000 other staff members who comprise the award winning and highly respected institution, who did uphold the core values of the University.

So no, the actions of a small group people who I didn't even know existed while I was on campus does not degrade my accomplishments in the slightest.  After all, if one of your family members committed a crime, does that suddenly taint your own accomplishments?  Of course not.  What you did stands on its own.  You still love your misguided brethren, and understand that there will be a backlash.  But I will never be sorry for what I achieved on my own, and I value my education just as much now as I did when I graduated all those years back.

How to Fix the NBA Draft Lottery Once and For All

The NBA Draft Lottery, for all its noble intentions, is as scrutinized and denigrated an entity as any person who dares sit in the Oval Office. It does not prevent tanking, and in drafts with multiple potential superstars, it creates an atmosphere of suckage not unlike the testing rooms at Dirt Devil Inc.

However, I still am a sucker for the pageantry of the lottery, with all the giant envelopes, the lucky charms, the uncomfortable team representatives randomly chosen to sit in front of the cameras, and those cursed ping-pong balls. (Unless you're Cleveland)

(Damn you Cleveland!)

The only way to attack the problem of tanking is to incentivize winning at all costs, no matter your current record. The best teams want homecourt advantage, the middling teams want to make the playoffs, and now we can get the dregs of the league to compete at the highest level as well. It could actually make an end of season game between Milwaukee and Philadelphia must-see TV, an exciting contest where the losers would be heartbroken instead of slyly patting themselves on the back for out-tanking their "rival."

And with this fiercely competitive race for either the top of the league or the top of the bowels of the league, we can in fact still keep the grand spectacle of the lottery alive, with all the intrigue and mystery of where a team will pick. Except this mystery could be more inclusive of all the lottery teams, instead of just the top 3 picks.

In my proposal, there will still be a lottery drawing for the top 3 positions, except instead of basing it on pure luck, it shall instead be based on the hard work and success of the teams who don't make the playoffs.

How does a team qualify for a top 3 chance in the draft? On the day that a team is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, they are then officially on the lottery clock to win as many games as possible until the end of the season. At the end of the year, you just tally up all the wins of the non-playoff teams, with the 3 winningest teams put in a lottery drawing with even, 33% odds to determine the 1st pick. Then there will be a draw between the remaining two teams for the 2nd pick, with the last team getting the 3rd.

As for the rest of the non-playoff teams, their wins still count to determine the draft positions. The team with the next most wins will get the 4th position, and then 5th position, and so on until all 14 positions are filled. Where this can get exciting and mysterious is when there is a tie between teams. To keep this process as simple as possible, whenever there is a tie in the amount of wins (whether it is 2, 3, 4, or more teams), each of the tied teams are put in their own small drawing with even odds to determine the next picks, until all of those tied teams are placed. After the last tied team is placed, the process will then continue with the placement of the next winningest team, and for every tie, there will be another mini drawing.

(If there is a tie amongst the top 3 winningest teams - such as 4 teams tying for the most wins, or perhaps 3 teams tied for 3rd place - then we would include each of these teams in the drawing for the top 3 picks, with the remainder of the teams being placed as described above.)

This system will completely change the competitiveness of the league from top to bottom, from mid season to the end. If you're eliminated early and don't win, then you will end up with a much lower pick. This is also the most fair system to every team, as the worse teams will be eliminated first and have more chances and opportunities to collect wins, while the better teams who compete for the playoffs until the last day will not be able to get many wins, and thus placed near the bottom of the lottery (where they were likely to end up in the old system anyway).

To best illustrate this new lottery system, lets just look at this past season to see how the teams would rank. Here are each of the lottery teams, with their date of elimination and how many wins they achieved afterwards. (If a team is eliminated for any reason on a particular day, but still wins their game that day, then this counts for their final total.)

Lakers (3/14): 5
Milwaukee (3/15): 2
Utah (3/15): 3
Sacramento (3/16): 5
Philadelphia (3/18): 4
Orlando (3/25): 4
Denver (3/26): 4
New Orleans (3/24): 5
Boston (3/31): 2
Minnesota (4/4): 3
Detroit (4/6): 1
Cleveland (4/9): 2
New York (4/12): 3
Phoenix (4/14): 1

5 win teams: Lakers, Sacramento, New Orleans
4 win teams: Philadelphia, Orlando, Denver
3 win teams: Utah, Minnesota, New York
2 win teams: Milwaukee, Boston, Cleveland
1 win teams: Detroit, Phoenix

Because the Lakers, Sacramento, and New Orleans won the most games after elimination, then only these 3 teams are eligible for the top 3 picks. The first drawing will involve an even, 33% chance of getting the first pick. If Sacramento wins the drawing for #1, then there will be another drawing for the second pick. If New Orleans gets drawn next, then the Lakers will automatically be awarded the #3 pick. This justly rewards the teams that actually tried to win the most games at the end of the year, instead of trying to pile up losses to get the most ping pong balls. If you want to join this 1st Drawing Club, just win baby!

The 4th pick will then be determined by the team that won the next most games. However, there is a tie between Philadelphia, Orlando, and Denver for this honor. Thus, there will be another drawing between these 3 teams, again with even, 33% odds. If Denver is pulled 1st, they will get the #4 pick, and the drawing for #5 will be between Orlando and Philadelphia. If Orlando is drawn, then the #6 pick will go to Philadelphia.

Picks #7, #8, and #9 will be determined by another 3 team drawing between Utah, Minnesota and New York. Likewise, picks #10, #11, and #12 will be determined by a 3 team drawing between Milwaukee, Boston, and Cleveland (who finally won't be able to pay luck their way to another #1 pick).

As for pick #13, since there is yet another tie, then there will be one last drawing with even, 50% odds between Detroit and Phoenix.

I assume going forward that there will be much more winning amongst the non playoff teams, and there likely will be less ties as well. However, the new lottery system will be able to place teams appropriately into their draft slot based on pure, competitive wins, and nothing more. There still is a little luck involved with the top 3 winning teams and any other tie breakers, and this will still create a lot of fun on lottery night in seeing who falls where.

And while I'm sure there are probably a few flaws that may be pointed out in the future, it will never be as flawed as the current system (or the crazy wheel system, or a straight NFL style draft). Tanking will finally end, conspiracy theories will end, competitiveness will be raised, winning will be rewarded, cats and dogs will play together, the Middle East will be peaceful at last, and eternal youth will finally be achieved. Why wouldn't the NBA want eternal youth?