pennsive
Junior
Posts: 200
Reg: 11-21-04
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02-14-21 11:34 AM - Post#320749
I needed some escapism after watching the impeachment trial, so I went on the Penn Athletics website to view a Mark Zoller-led Penn team narrowly defeat Yale at Payne Whitney to capture the Ivy championship. What struck me about Fran Dunphy's squad, in comparison to Steve's teams, is my unproven assumption (based, however, on many years of watching and reading) that you didn't get court time with Fran unless you played rugged defense, keeping your legs moving, filling the passing lanes, and grabbing more rebounds than our players' limited athleticism might otherwise predict. If you were inclined to pick up reach-in fouls, and not beat your man to the spot, you could enjoy a front row seat on the bench. On offense, what may have ben complicated fact, seemed, fairly seamless and simple, and therein lay its beauty. Certainly it was a winning formula, generally, as we fondly remember
To play on Steve's teams, driven by analytics, my hunch (also based on watching many, many games on computer TV and some in person watching) is that toughness and gritty defense have taken a back seat to more offensive elegance, more spread the court offensive play, and fun to watch offensive sets. Although Steve, like all coaches, will preach the importance of defense, the players who play for him, by and large, seem to lack the the back alley toughness of Fran's teams.
The similarity between the coaches appears that neither would tolerate free-lancing, at the expense od pattered play. Bottom line for me is that Steve's teams are more fun to watch, but Fran's teams, even during the three point era, a didn't depend as much on hitting threes the way Steve's do, and were more likely to win. Stated differently, you are always in the game if you can play defense, and defense does not depend on a home court advantage. While the rest of the Ivy League (possibly ex Princeton which always was pretty much our equal and more athletic that we credited them for being), are much better athletically than the teams used to be, so Fran's winning formula was more easily achieved; and although I remain a huge fan of Steve's, I am betting that Fran's way, even in today's game, would do better against current Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Brown squads, and about the same as Steve's would do against against Harvard, Columbia, and Cornell. Do you agree?
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Silver Maple
Postdoc
Posts: 3775
Loc: Westfield, New Jersey
Reg: 11-23-04
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02-14-21 12:08 PM - Post#320750
In response to pennsive
I think these are fair points. However, it's important to remember that Fran Dunphy was coaching in a very different competitive environment. It always seemed to me that he built his teams to win the conference, with a much lower priority given to winning outside the league and in the postseason (hence his noticeable lack of success in those games). In truth, the IL wasn't all that difficult to win in those days, as only Penn and Princeton were really trying. Now quite a few programs are taking basketball pretty seriously, and things are way more competitive. I bet that if Dunphy were coaching Penn today, if he wanted to keep his job, he'd be taking a different approach.
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mrjames
Professor
Posts: 6062
Loc: Montclair, NJ
Reg: 11-21-04
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Contrast
02-14-21 12:47 PM - Post#320751
In response to Silver Maple
Silver Maple is right. The game is quite different these days, and the league itself is quite different. Steve would be doing quite well in the 1990s and 2000s (as he did when he got decent talent at Cornell in the latter part of the 2000s). Similarly, Fran would struggle more in today’s Ivy than he did in the 1990s and 2000s. And Steve’s style of play is certainly more in line with the style of today than Fran’s would be.
Would be interesting to see how Fran would recruit in today’s environment.
Edited by mrjames on 02-14-21 12:49 PM. Reason for edit: No reason given.
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palestra38
Professor
Posts: 32809
Reg: 11-21-04
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Re: Contrast
02-14-21 01:58 PM - Post#320752
In response to mrjames
There's one major and critical difference. Had Fran never left, we likely would not have suffered the disappearance of the program from its historical greatness and thus have to rebuild after Amaker was on the scene and had a major recruiting advantage. I've said many times that Amaker has a big recruiting advantage to be selling that Harvard degree but without the history of winning that he put together before Penn got its act together, he might not have gotten to the point where it is tough to compete. We helped make Amaker's success possible by losing the large recruiting advantage he used to have before he first came on the scene. So it's a big "what if" when you try to compare Steve and Fran---when Fran rebuilt the program in the early '90s, he had no real competition in the Ivies for the best Ivy recruits. Steve had established coaches and better Ivy programs to compete with.
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SomeGuy
Professor
Posts: 6412
Reg: 11-22-04
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Re: Contrast
02-14-21 10:09 PM - Post#320756
In response to pennsive
I agree there are stylistic differences between Dunphy and Donahue, including on the defensive end. However, I think one thing that has remained the same is that, more or less, both coaches play the guys who defend the best. Steve’s teams at Cornell and BC led to the assumption he would focus on offense at Penn. Howver, the opposite has been true — we’ve generally been better on defense than offense under Steve. That could be personnel— it could just be that AJ, Foreman, Woods, and Dev were all exceptional defenders. But they all became such under Steve.
I do agree that rebounding is less of an emphasis than it was with Fran. But I think some of that is that the way we defend under Steve gives up rebounding position for other things.
As to who/what would be more competitive, I think the game and the League have changed so much that it isn’t really comparable. We have matched up really well with Yale recently, and ok with Harvard, in part because Steve’s approach works better against teams that play their styles. We match up less well with Princeton type teams. What that seems to mean is that we do ok head to head with the top teams (at least if the Harvard games only lasted 35 minutes, and the Yale games 39), but we have been far more likely to lose games to the rest of the league than they are. Would Dunphy’s approach work better? I doubt it, and I doubt Dunphy would be using his old approach if we hired him tomorrow.
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