I've written here and here about how I think major league baseball managers pretty routinely follow bad in-game strategies with respect to bunting and relief pitching, and I've written here about how in my view NFL coaches punt way too much. I might as well go for the trifecta by describing how college basketball coaches screw up. After all, it's their season!
The substitution pattern followed by almost all college coaches when fouls begin to mount suggests to me that protecting players from fouling out is for them a higher priority than winning the game. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but has it not occurred to them that when you take a good player out of the game, not because he's winded or playing poorly but because he just picked up his second foul eight minutes before halftime, he's not playing and contributing for the next eight minutes in just the same way that he can't play or contribute after fouling out? You are in effect fouling him out of the game yourself in order to diminish the possibility that the rules will disqualify him later. It's as if a healthy person should commit suicide in order never to get a bad diagnosis.
The illogic seems to me the cousin of major league baseball managers determining never to use their best relief pitcher except to get the last three outs of the game, a practice so common that this best relief pitcher is always referred to as "the closer." But it's a mistake to suppose that the outcome of the last at-bats of the game will have the greatest impact on who wins. Bottom of the seventh, visitors ahead 4 to 2, bases loaded, one out, home team's three-hole hitter at the bat. Bring in your best relief pitcher, now. It doesn't make sense to save him for the ninth inning, because it's much more likely that who wins the game will be determined by what happens in the rest of the seventh inning than by what happens in the bottom of the ninth. If the three-hole hitter drives one into the gap, or over the fence, there likely won't even be a bottom of the ninth.
In a similar way, it doesn't make sense to deprive yourself of the services of a good basketball player for long stretches of the game in order to preserve his eligibility for "crunch time." It's not "crunch time" if the score is 62 to 50. Everything that happens from the start of the game onward contributes to the final tally. Consequently, your substitution pattern shouldn't be dictated by considerations about fouls. No need to go overboard. Like, if you're playing defense at the end of the first half, and one of your guys kicks a loose ball with twenty seconds left, make use of the dead clock to take out of the game your star point guard who has two fouls (or one foul, or zero fouls, or three fouls). I think it's crazy, however, if you don't have to do this because he's been sitting next to you since he got his second foul six minutes ago. The goal isn't to preserve anyone's eligibility. The goal is to win the game.
For some reason, there's a mythology about the end of games. It's fans in addition to coaches. For example, if a player who makes 80% of his foul shots misses one in the middle of the first half, it's just one of the 20% that he misses, though his team has one less point than if he'd made it. But supposing he goes to the line for a one-and-one with 30 seconds left in a tie game. Now if he misses it's because he "choked." Suddenly, it's a moral thing: he missed because he's a bad, unreliable person. It goes the other direction, too--if he makes the free throw he's a hero with "ice water in his veins." This reminds me that I also think it's a waste to burn timeouts in order to "ice the shooter." Almost all coaches do it but is there any evidence it works? I have a modest example about this one, from a game I was in--didn't happen to be in the Final Four but still. I can't remember the exact details, but the score was close, there wasn't much time left, and a guy on our team, Steve Strand by name, had just been fouled. The other team called time out. In the huddle, Coach Margo says, "Steve, they're just trying to make you nervous." Steve replies, "Well, it's working." Everyone laughs, and a minute later Steve makes two foul shots and we win the big jayvee game by a point or two. Maybe this doesn't prove my point, but if Steve had missed, it wouldn't prove that innumerable college coaches with 7-digit incomes are right. Some you make, some you miss, and sometimes, with five seconds left, you better not have burned all your timeouts.
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