Ever since John Wooden retired, playing in the NCAA tournament on a consistent basis has meant, without exception, that you will lose tournament games on a consistent basis. To pile up the appearances is to pile up defeats in March. It is a post-1975 structural given of the sport.
Take Bill Self. This weekend Oregon defeated Kansas in the Midwest regional final, bringing the Jayhawks head coach's career record in the Elite Eight down to 2-7 (including one loss each from his time at Tulsa and at Illinois). For KU fans to be disappointed or even devastated that their top-seeded team didn't make the Final Four is natural and unavoidable.
Still, there are two things to keep in mind when speaking of a coach who's been to the Elite Eight nine times and won just two games.
KU's coach is in very good company
Part of the criticism of Self is that he's had no fewer than seven No. 1 seeds in his tenure in Lawrence, and just one of those teams -- the national champions in 2007-08 -- made the Final Four. That is indeed an unusual ratio.
Self's Final Four hit rate with top seeds at KU has been just 14 percent. Conversely, 41 percent of all No. 1 seeds that have entered the brackets in the tournament's modern era (since 1985) have at least reached a national semifinal.
So Self is under-performing at getting to the Final Four. What about other tournament benchmarks?
Self's won one national title in his 19 NCAA tournaments (including bids received with Tulsa and Illinois). Certainly that's not as good as what Coach K (five titles in 32 career trips), Roy Williams (two titles out of 26 bids prior to this tournament) or Rick Pitino (two titles in 21 tournaments) can show. If those three guys want to regard Self as an unproven newcomer, they have my permission. Otherwise, the KU head coach rates out pretty well among active coaches in terms of national championships.
If you go to the tournament every year for the better part of two decades and win just one (ha) national title, all of those annual losses have to have occurred somewhere between the round of 64 and the national championship game. Why does it seem like so many of Self's losses happen in the Elite Eight?
That's easy. Self's seven No. 1 seeds at Kansas have under-performed when it comes to reaching the Final Four, but they've actually over-performed in terms of getting to the Elite Eight. Since 1985, 70 percent of top seeds have reached a regional semifinal. For Self's No. 1 seeds at Kansas, that number has been 75 percent.
Maybe being good at reaching the Elite Eight isn't particularly scintillating. Fair enough. Imagine an alternate history for KU where the Jayhawks made each of the last four Final Fours yet went 0-for-4 on winning it all. Surely that would be preferable, right? After all, a perennial Final Four team can't possibly be faulted for underperformance.
Yeah, good luck telling that to Krzyzewski. From 1986 to 1990, Duke reached five consecutive Elite Eights including four Final Fours -- and won zero national titles. Coach K was widely portrayed as a coach who choked every March and couldn't "win the big one." If anything, the scrutiny and skepticism were even more intense because the Blue Devils kept arriving at the Final Four every year. (Incredibly, Krzyzewski heard some of this same talk two decades and, yes, three national titles later, when his teams went 2-6 in the Sweet 16 between 2001 and 2009.)
This clustering of losses in spots like the Sweet 16, Elite Eight or even Final Four is an affliction that can only touch the likes of Self, Coach K and their ilk, guys who bring No. 1 seeds to the tournament with regularity. After all, top seeds have never lost an opening game and they're rarely beaten in the round of 32. That leaves just four remaining locations for a tournament loss: Sweet 16, Elite Eight, Final Four or the national title game. As Coach K can attest, it's no more comforting for the coach or the fans if the loss happens somewhere in the third weekend instead of the second. A loss is a loss.
We love March Madness but we don't love randomness
To be sure, Self's no Tom Izzo when it comes to March success. (Actually, Tom Izzo isn't looking much like Tom Izzo anymore, but I digress.) Compared to the number of wins a team would be expected to record based on their seed, Self's 33 tournament victories during his tenure as coach at KU is actually about four wins shy of the average.
Given that Self has taken 14 separate KU teams to the tournament, we would, on average, expect to see each Jayhawks team win 0.29 games more than they have. In other words, attaining that average would yield one additional tournament win every three years. That's measurable, but I'm not sure it's commensurate with the perception of Self as somehow uniquely benighted in March.
Besides, what precisely do we mean when we say a coach that's won 13 consecutive major-conference regular-season titles is hapless in March? What are the chances that Self is a dominant coach in the regular season and then suddenly a bad coach in the NCAA tournament and/or in the Elite Eight?
Whatever they are, those chances are likely a good deal smaller than the probability a team that shot 41 percent on its 3s in Big 12 play will shoot 20 percent in the Elite Eight, the way Kansas did against Oregon. Things like that happen all the time in the NCAA tournament: Villanova fails to get out of the first weekend as the overall No. 1 seed, South Carolina makes the Final Four and Luke Maye becomes the subject of his own photo montage.
Is Kansas losing to a team that went 16-2 in major-conference play really so shocking compared to all of the above? Or is it that we see a not-very-unusual number of losses clustered in an unusual way around the Elite Eight and seek a more satisfying explanation than shots not falling?
Maybe there is such an explanation, but I doubt it's "Bill Self suddenly becomes a much worse coach annually in late March." Who knows, maybe coaches stay about as good at what they do from game to game and see unexpected things happen to their teams anyway. Maybe that's why we watch.