The Wizard Of Ours

It had to be, what?, the fall of 1995 or maybe the winter of 1996, the day that Bill Carmody excitedly peaked his head into TigerBlog's office at said these words:

"The greatest college basketball player of all-time is using one of the urinals in our men's room."

TigerBlog knew in an instant what player Carmody was talking about. Sure enough, TB ventured into the bathroom, and there stood Bill Walton, whose son Nate would be a freshman at Princeton for the 1996-97 season.

As an aside, Nate Walton would miss one season due to injury and then become a first-team All-Ivy center in 2000-01, when John Thompson led an underdog Princeton team to the Ivy League title in his first season as head coach. It is TB's belief that Walton was robbed of the Ivy League Player of the Year award that year.

For anyone who is TB's age or older, the list of the greatest college basketball players of all-time begins with Bill Walton - or possibly David Thompson, the North Carolina State star whose team beat Walton's UCLA team 80-77 in two overtimes in the 1974 NCAA semifinals in what would be considered the greatest college basketball game ever had ESPN existed back then.

Walton - Bill, not Nate - was part of a UCLA dynasty that saw the Bruins win 10 NCAA championships in 12 years. Walton was part of an 88-game UCLA winning streak, one that ended with a loss at Notre Dame.

TigerBlog, like most kids in his age-group who were into sports, watched many of those great UCLA games on TV (which wasn't oversaturated with college basketball back then) and thinks back at them as being among the first sporting events he can remember seeing. TB clearly remembers watching the UCLA-N.C. State game at the house of his Aunt Regina and Uncle Larry, and he remembers seeing UCLA as it desperately tried to get a shot to fall in the final seconds of its loss to Notre Dame to end its long streak.

UCLA's coach through those years was of course John Wooden, the "Wizard of Westwood" who passed away last weekend at the age of 99. Wooden's history is familiar: the Indiana roots, the 10 national championships, the great teams, the attention to detail, the intensity, the persona, all of it. And, in the interest of full disclosure, the questions that might not have been asked about a UCLA booster's involvement in recruiting those great players.

When Wooden passed away, ESPN Classic immediately went to a Wooden marathon, and TB remembered watching many of those games when they were originally on.

But none of that was what TB thought about when the news about Wooden hit. Nope, TB's first thought was actually a question:

Was John Wooden a better coach than Pete Carril.

Wooden spent 27 years at UCLA, going 620-147 with the aforementioned 10 NCAA championships. Wooden, for those who don't know, also coached for two years at what was then called Indiana Teachers' College and is today known as Indiana State; Wooden was 44-15 in those two years before taking over at UCLA for the 1948-49 season.

Carril spent 29 years as the Princeton head coach, going 514-261 with no NCAA titles. He did win 13 Ivy League championships and take his team to 11 NCAA tournaments, and Princeton under Carril won the 1975 NIT.

So how is this even a debate? Well, TB thinks it's actually a great question. Does the coach make the program, or does the program make the coach?

UCLA back then had all kinds of advantages, beyond just whatever shady dealings there were to bring by far the best players to Westwood. Wooden won five of his 10 championships with either Walton or Lew Alcindor (who became Kareem Abdul Jabbar, for those who don't know) as his big man, for instance.

Back then, the Bruins needed to win only four games to win the NCAA title. The field was also truly regionalized, and the West was by far the weakest area. As such UCLA basically had an easy path to the Final Four each year.

And yes, for much of that time, only one team per league could make the NCAA field, so UCLA could have been derailed in its conference. But the Pacific Coast League (later the Pac 8, now the Pac 10, and soon the Pac 25) wasn't nearly as tough as the ACC, which routinely had two or three of the top five teams in the country.

Carril, on the other hand, had almost no shot of a national championship here at Princeton. And yet he endured for 29 seasons; only one other Princeton men's basketball coach (Cappy Cappon) lasted here for more than eight, and Cappon 1) coached five years, took off for three and then came back for 15 more and 2) died in the middle of his 20th season.

It seems almost ludicrous to suggest that Carril could be a better coach than Wooden based on their resumes, but that's not what TB is talking about here. No, he's talking about basketball coaching ability only.

In other words, had they switched places, what would their teams have looked like?

And this isn't limited to Carril and Wooden. Look at any number of Princeton's successful coaches versus their counterparts who routinely win national championships. Susan Teeter. Rob Orr. Peter Farrell and Fred Samara. Would they win national championships if they had the advantages of some of the top national programs? Of course they would.

Look at women's soccer. Anson Dorrance, the head coach at North Carolina, has won 20 of the 28 NCAA women's soccer championships awarded and has won nearly 95% of his games in 31 years. What if he switched places with Princeton coach Julie Shackford? Would anything be different for the two programs? If anything, Shackford would be more successful at UNC then Dorrance would be here.

So getting back to Wooden and Carril, the two went head-to-head twice, with two UCLA wins, both in years that the Bruins won national titles. The first was a 16-point UCLA win in the 1968 Holiday Festival.

The second was a year later, when the teams played at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion. Sidney Wicks hit a jump shot in the final seconds to give the Bruins a 76-75 win, despite 28 points from Geoff Petrie and 25 from John Hummer.

So who was better, Pete Carril or John Wooden? The fact that the question can even be asked says a lot about Carril.

"One day, I'll be dead," Carril once said. "Two guys will walk by my grave, and one will say to the other 'poor guy never won a national championship,' and I won't hear a word they say."

His point? Coaching is coaching, and stats don't necessarily tell you who is the best at it.