March 29th, 2011
It’s always been useful for certain camps to render Tennessee women’s coach Pat Summitt into a bizarro version of John Wooden: indomitable, brilliant, yet unfairly relegated to second-class status. After getting shellacked by Notre Dame, here’s what Summitt had to say after the game:
“I’m very disappointed in our basketball team,’’ said UT coach Pat Summitt, who referred to her group as “soft” in the locker room afterward. “I don’t think we came here with a focus. Don’t ask me why. I look at the junior class and Angie as a senior and I’m kind of lost for words why they wouldn’t come in and already know what they were going to do.”
That’s right: Her team loses and she blames . . . her team. To underscore the point, she even singles a player out by name. What a brilliant leader of women!
I can’t think of a coach in the men’s game–or actually any men’s game–who would throw their team under the bus like that after a loss.
Bonus: Over at the other March Madness there’s all sorts of insane, “If I had told you two weeks ago that . . .” lines. But the craziest has to be this: If, at the start of the tournament, I had told you that Butler would be a 2-point favorite in the national semi-final . . .
Jason O. March 30, 2011 at 11:34 am
The reason that UT women’s basketball has been slipping is that rather than becoming Wooden, she’s morphing into a female version of late career Bobby Knight…hard to recruit players when the coach is borderline unstable.
Couldn’t happen to a more deserving program, Bruce Pearl gone, men’s program in tatters, women’s team on the decline.