Statistical Glance of Under/OverPerforming Coaches

mr.pringles

mr.pringles

100+ Posts
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Take the validity with a grain of salt as the formula can be tweaked for anyone's taste. Additionally, this is assuming seeding is accurate.

I'd be more interested if they could separate Barnes' tenure with Texas.
 
Two flaws that I can see:

(1) He does this cumulatively. Part of the reason Barnes looks so bad by this measure is that he's had the most tournament appearances. Compare, for example, to Norm Stewart (listed 2nd):

Rick Barnes, in 39 games, has won 4.3 fewer than he should have. Is that really worse than Stewart, who lost 3.6 more games in just 17 total games? No. Someone should have divided that total # of extra games lost by total games played.

(2) This part is inane: "I should note that Penders’ departure from UT had more to do with allegations of leaked player grades and verbal abuse of players than Texas’ 14-17 record that season, but it still has to be a bitter pill to see Penders rank among the most overachieving coaches, while his successor, Barnes, ranks among the biggest underachievers"

Really? Why would anyone cringe? Would we rather be a 10 seed and win 1 game than a 2 seed and win 2 games? The goal is absolute, not relative, performance. A coach that never gets a top 8 seed can never underachieve by his metrics since they are never supposed to win a game, so of course Penders will look good.
 
I agree that the cumulative part of it all makes it a little one-sided, however, when you look at the "overachieve" side of the table, there's no denying a reasonably-sized gap exists between the haves and have-nots of college basketball.

Even in our Final Four run, we probably had the easiest path that anyone ever took to get there. Saying that we "overachieved" with our 4 wins that year is like saying we shouldn't have won that many, which is obviously stupid as we played some pretty mediocre teams.

Barnes only gets highlight reel wins during the regular season. Maybe the Stanford game from 3 years ago was a "big one" in terms of stepping up for a competitive opponent in the tournament, but I have yet to see a Barnes postseason win in which I feel confident that we defeated a worthy foe.
 
That 03 team beat the NC from year before and the NC from the next year, so looking just at seeds that year is false logic.
 
I'm not necessarily referring to the seeding of a #1 (whose opponents are 16, 8, 4, 2 at best). I'm referring to the quality of Purdue, UConn, and Michigan State when we went to the Final Four. None of them were anything special, except for maybe a budding Emeka Okafor.

Regardless, I tend to agree with the notion that Barnes underperforms in the tournament. We hired him with the idea that his ACC ties would lead to a new breed of basketball, but we only got half of the deal. We watched his undersized Clemson squad nearly knock of Minnesota in the 1997 tournament, and thought "man, even if we're a lower seed in the tournament, we can play up to our competition!" I haven't experienced that sentiment yet.
 
Just to note how inane this list is.

The top 2 coaches get consistent grief from their respective message boards (I'm a Duke alum as well).

Coach K, back in 2009, was considered the coach who did the least with the most from 2005-2009--1st rd, 2nd, and 2 Sweet 16 bounces.

Roy Williams "led" his team to the NIT last year and was NIT bound this year until the ruckus on Inside Carolina about having Drew as a starter finally got to him.

Please note that these coaches (plus Calipari and Self) consistently get better classes than any of the other schools. Barnes doesn't recruit at that level (very few do).
 
PS Rick Barnes has been to the tournament every year since 1995.

Coach K can say that, Roy Williams can't. Calipari was NIT in 2000, 2004, Izzo's streak started in 1997.
 
I'd also point out that in 12 years at Kansas, Roy Williams made:

The tournament 11 times; missed it once
2 Final Fours
3 Elite Eights
6 Sweet 16s

That's not all that different than Barnes.
 
And his two national championships at UNC. I think it's kind of weird that no one here compared our 2011 turnaround to UNC's 2011 turnaround. I guess the big difference is that they're still alive and kicking.
 
Not to overtly blow my own Horn but as Bob from Houston will attest, I have made numerous posts indicating that while Rick Barnes has beat only one team with a higher seed in the NCAA tournament while at Texas (6 Seed Texas beat 3 Seed Mississippi State in Dallas in 2002), Tom Penders pulled first round upsets damn near every year. There is not one way to look at this but Rick Barnes has done less with more talent than most coaches. Still he has Texas in the Top 20 and in the dance, do Texas fans really even care if we whould be doing more? I honestly don't think so. But Tom Penders would have had a ball coaching this year's Texas team, and we'd still be playing for absolute certain. Texas is a great job, and eventually we will see what can be achieved in the 40 acres hoopswise. Barnes=Kelvin Sampson without the cheating
 
every year since whenever. simply means a very very good regular season b-ball coach. postseason is a slight dropoff, at least it appears.
 
@el squared.

What the **** are you talking about and when did you graduate from UT? Do you know what happened at UNC when they went NIT last year after winning it all the year before. Going to the tourney is a big deal.

Do you even remember barely making the tourney as 10, 11 seeds under Penders (or not going at all)?
 
That is the most stupid metric ever. Of course Penders "overachieved" by this metric; for the most part, we were never the favorite because of our lower seeds. He could only overachieve.

In the last 10 years, Barnes has played to seed or better 6 times, and "underperformed" by falling short of the projected round 4 times. In those 4 losses, we were twice an 8 seed that lost to a 9 in the first round and twice a 4 that lost to a 5 in the second round --- all 4 toss-up matchups.

There are a lot of coaches at schools with bigger names and better talent that lost a lot more disparate seeding matchups than Barnes has.
 
By and large, what cbs said. I always thought Penders's teams were underseeded. It may have been a Southwest Conference thing, and it's also true that he never scheduled the kinds of teams that would have made them look better to a committee.

Indy: It would be hard for me to disagree more with the statement that a Penders team would still be playing. Penders won more than one tournament game twice in 10 years. In the last 10 years, Barnes has done that five times.

Everybody talks about Penders's first-round record. Barnes is 8-0 against double-digit seeds in the last 10 years.

At Texas, Barnes has been seeded as low as eight twice. Penders had a seed better than eight twice.

The only thing we don't know about Penders is whether he could have recruited better with more time in the B12. But we do know that Penders never changed his approach to the game, and at UH, constantly recruited second- or third-level guys, and JCs, as he had done at Texas. Better-coached teams with better players always took him out.

Barnes is far from perfect -- IMO, he's the one to blame for losing on Sunday -- but he's still way ahead of Penders.
 
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