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Self tries to avoid becoming one of best coaches never in Final Four
By KENT BABB | The Kansas City StarJohn Chaney slipped away and closed a door behind him. It was 2000, and Temple had blown a late lead and lost to Seton Hall in overtime.
Temple was a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament, and Seton Hall was a No. 10. Chaney says now that the 2000 Owls were his most talented team. He says that year’s tournament was his best chance in his 25 years as Temple’s coach to reach the Final Four. Instead, Seton Hall surprised Temple in the second round.
It wasn’t going to happen for Chaney, and he knew it. He closed the door and cried.
“That was the most crushing deal that I can remember,” says the 76-year-old Chaney, who retired in 2006. “You can imagine the pit of my stomach dropping down to my shoes. That’s a horrible feeling.
“I sort of felt that I failed them in some ways, even when I look at it over and over.”
Chaney took Temple to the Elite Eight five times and won 23 NCAA Tournament games, the most without reaching the Final Four. Chaney is the patriarch of an exclusive but dubious club, one whose members have won the most tournament games without a Final Four appearance. The other members are former Purdue coach Gene Keady (19 wins) and former Drake and Iowa coach Tom Davis (18).
Another member will solidify his place in the club if his team does not advance past today’s Elite Eight game. Kansas coach Bill Self has won 19 times in the NCAA Tournament but has yet to take a team to basketball’s promised land.
Keady and Davis each say the emptiness they feel from not reaching a Final Four is intense, but they do not think it defines their careers. Chaney knows the feeling, and he plans to send Self a card if the KU coach falls short, in part to express sympathy — and also to welcome Self to the group.
But not Keady.
“I’m not going to welcome anybody to that club,” says Keady, now an analyst for the Big Ten Network. “I’m sorry you brought it up. That’s what I like about this TV gig: I don’t go home and beat myself up anymore.”
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It’s not that Keady hopes Self joins the club and, heck, surpasses Chaney. It’s not that he roots against Self. But Self is the coach at KU, and Keady is a Kansas State guy. The longer KU goes without reaching the Final Four, well, Keady won’t mind.
“You don’t hate them; you just don’t like the uniform,” says Keady, a native of Larned, Kan. “I’ve always had Kansas crammed down my throat.”
Keady says he thinks Self will reach the Final Four because he has time and prestige on his side. At 45 years old, Self would be far younger than the other club members, whose average age is 72.
Keady was 42 when he was hired at Western Kentucky, his first Division I job. Self, though, has been a Division I coach since he took over at Oral Roberts at age 30. He has since taken Tulsa, Illinois and KU to the Elite Eight. Today will be Self’s third Elite Eight appearance in five seasons with the Jayhawks. It is where the road ended for Self four previous times.
“He’ll get there if he stays at Kansas long enough,” Keady says.
Davis agrees, saying Self coaches at one of several schools — KU, North Carolina, Duke, UCLA and a handful of others — often favored to reach the Final Four. There is pressure for those schools’ coaches, but there also are advantages. Self coaches a team that attracts some of the top players each year.
But other schools, including the ones where Chaney, Keady and Davis coached, have lower expectations because they do not attract the same caliber of players.
Davis was a coach with a doctoral degree, a rare thing by today’s standards. He uses words like “trends” and “correlation” and “chart” when talking about some schools’ ability to reach the Final Four every few years. He says schools such as Temple, Drake and Purdue are not among them.
“The schools that can get that kind of talent, year in and year out, decade in and decade out, your chances go up,” says Davis, who also coached at Lafayette, Boston College and Stanford. “If you can take a Drake team to a Final Four, that’s a heck of an accomplishment.”
Chaney uses a different phrase when describing what Temple needed each year to reach the Final Four.
“An act of God,” Chaney says.
But what about George Mason, which reached the Final Four in 2006? It is a Colonial Athletic Association team with five NCAA Tournament appearances in its 40-year history.
“I didn’t say it wasn’t possible,” Davis says. “There’s some luck involved, too.”
Davis understands if critics think his career fell short because he did not reach a Final Four. He says they may be right.
“To get to the NCAA Tournament is a tremendous accomplishment,” he says. “It’s getting harder every year. To win a game is pretty good. Or to win two. Or to win three. To get to the Final Four is a terrific accomplishment, and it’s got to be really exciting to do.”
But Keady disagrees with the notion the three members’ careers are defined by their failure to reach the Final Four. In fact, he calls that belief “ridiculous,” though not winning big has kept some coaches, such as former Houston coach Guy Lewis and former Kansas State coach Jack Hartman, out of serious consideration for the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass. Chaney is in the Hall, but Keady and Davis are not.
“I know a lot of great coaches who got to the Final Four, and I know a lot of coaches who got to the Final Four who weren’t as good as the ones who didn’t,” says Keady, who sits on the Hall of Fame committee. “I don’t think that’s a measure of how good a coach you are. Of course, I’ve got to say that because I never went.
“If being in the Final Four is a great measuring stick of my coaching, then I was a failure.”
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Chaney filled out two NCAA Tournament brackets. In one, he picked Kansas to reach the Final Four. But Chaney knows how difficult it is for a coach to make that final step, a step he never made in five trips to the Elite Eight. So to be safe, he filled out another bracket, that one with Wisconsin winning the Midwest regional.
That would have added a new member to the club. Chaney says he would welcome Self into the group, even though he does not expect him to be a lifetime member.
“All of us guys,” Chaney says, “we have the same DNA.”
As of now, the club’s members have combined for 60 NCAA Tournament victories without a trip to the Final Four. Self’s addition would push that number to 79, and the KU coach would trail only Chaney on the all-time list; Self would be tied for second with Keady.
For now, Chaney remains at the top. He says such an honor — or dishonor, depending on how you look at it — draws certain responsibility. Chaney says if KU loses today, he will write a note to Self and explain that it isn’t so bad to be in that club and that time remains for Self to make it out. Most of all, Chaney would write to Self that there are three men out there who know how Self feels.
“It’s a lonely moment at times,” says Chaney, whose 1988 Elite Eight team entered the NCAA Tournament as the top seed overall. “If he doesn’t make it, I’ll say what I always say: ‘Hey, think about how fortunate it’s been to have kids who can take you on that train.’ The only thing about it is, we have a tendency of being on the right track; we’re sitting on that track — and the train runs over us.
“But you take a step back and know that there are a lot of teams — my God, how many teams would have liked to be in your shoes?”