On Knuckleheadedness

[Acorn]

The lowlights of Duke’s Kyle Filipowski tripping UNC player Harrison Ingram in last night’s UNC–Duke game got me thinking about knuckleheadedness.

My sense is that Matt (like Bob before him) puts more weight on knuckleheadedness than the vast majority of coaches. To be clear, I believe he puts such a great weight on it in order to avoid having it in his players and on his teams. That’s a good thing if you care about more than wins and losses, and it can even help on the court.

But even if avoiding “knuckleheadedness” is a good idea (for Davidson College men’s basketball, at least), it’s important to carefully define the concept and calibrate one’s evaluation of a player’s knuckleheadedness. An underinclusive definition or insufficiently sensitive evaluation will, of course, admit knuckleheads and the problems they can bring. But there are also problems with having too broad a definition or being too quick to identify the trait—you risk losing contributions that could help the team.

I worry a bit that Davidson basketball has a problem with knuckleheadedness—not that there are too many knuckleheads (posters on this board, excluded), but that the program’s test for knuckleheadedness generates a lot of false positives and thus missed opportunities.

There are two trends I’ve observed that contribute to this concern. First, there seems to be a bit of a “my way or the highway” authoritarianism in the in-game coaching. Players get rewarded with playing time for doing as they’re told. Productivity matters too, of course, but maybe not as much as at other places. But basketball isn’t choreography. The point of the systems and plays is to score baskets and stop the other team from scoring. I worry that I’ve seen talented players who aren’t as quick to follow all instructions get assessed as knuckleheads and sent to the bench.

Second, the team’s makeup has, for years, not reflected the diversity of Davidson College, let alone D1 men’s basketball or the national college population—even of highly selective institutions. The roster skews very heavily away from public schools. There are plenty of successful students at Davidson (and in other Davidson athletic programs) from public schools. The basketball team’s roster looks like our coaches and have similar schooling backgrounds. I worry that the sensitivity to knuckleheadedness has our coaches identifying attributes and attitudes that are different from theirs (which are ultimately cultural differences, though I know that’s a sensitive term—I mean it in a broad, sociological sense) as problematic knuckleheadedness.

I definitely don’t want Davidson players out there tripping opponents. And I certainly am proud of the players Davidson has put on the court (notwithstanding the occasional stolen laptop or Honor Code violation). But I think there are other young men out there who could make us similarly proud and help the team win. And I think there have been players on the roster who could have given more than they were given the chance to.

[slowcat95]

+1

[El Gato Bizco]

Bet.

[GoCats]

I do not agree with this argument.

[stevelee]

I recall hearing complaints about lack of diversity back when we had a serious Roman Catholic, a Jew, and a Muslim on the team. I doubt there were that many teams at the time with that makeup.

I choose to ignore the dog-whistle racism of the term.

[Splinter Faction]

Re the second point, to use a term I learned from graveline, it sort of made me squirm to see how many of our games this year looked like chess matches.