Culture
The Final Four coaches, scored and ranked: It’s Boomers vs. Millennials
One of the four head coaches left working in the men’s NCAA Tournament will win his first national championship Monday night. It could be Houston’s Kelvin Sampson in his 36th season of running a program at age 69. It could be Duke’s Jon Scheyer in his third at age 37.
Auburn’s Bruce Pearl is on the Sampson side of things — 30th year as a head coach, 65 years old. Florida’s Todd Golden is just getting going, like Scheyer — sixth year as a head coach, 39 years old. It’s difficult to compare the quality of work of careers that are decades apart in length, but that is our charge in advance of Sampson-Scheyer and Pearl-Golden matchups in Saturday’s national semifinals at the Alamodome in San Antonio.
After scoring the coaches in a variety of categories on a four-point scale and ranking them, we may have a hint at which one of them will end up winning it all. Or at least that coach will have this victory as consolation while watching one of the others cut the nets.
Longevity
It’s a worthwhile category of its own, especially considering the way Sampson and Pearl have been able to hang in and thrive in the era of (out-in-the-open) player compensation and player movement.
4: Sampson
3: Pearl
2: Golden
1: Scheyer
Achievement
Sampson is 798-353 — what a way this could be to reach 800. Like Pearl (706-267), Sampson started at a lower level (Montana Tech, Pearl at Southern Indiana) and has done nothing but win at every stop. Sampson is one of 16 coaches to lead two different schools to the Final Four. That and his run of recent dominance at Houston give him the edge. Golden has won at San Francisco and Florida, two programs that aren’t advantaged like Duke. Still, Scheyer is winning more than 80 percent of his games.
4: Sampson
3: Pearl
2: Scheyer
1: Golden
Will Kelvin Sampson pick up win No. 800 in San Antonio? (Jamie Squire / Getty Images)
Mentors
No one is topping the top reference on Scheyer’s resume, Mike Krzyzewski. Sampson learned from a good coach at Washington State, Len Stevens, and then took that program to another level. But he also credited his graduate year under Jud Heathcote at Michigan State — 1979-80, the year after the Magic Johnson-led national championship — as being formative. Pearl was a Tom Davis guy all the way, assisting him at Stanford and Iowa before striking out on his own. Golden played for Randy Bennett at Saint Mary’s and then for Pearl at the Maccabiah Games in Israel in 2009. He later joined Pearl’s staff at Auburn. So yeah, having Pearl as a mentor gives Golden the edge over Pearl.
4: Scheyer
3: Golden
2: Sampson
1: Pearl
Resources and other supporting factors
Who’s doing the most with what they’ve got? Pearl ($5.96 million in pay, by the way) is the one coach here doing unprecedented things at a place that never cared for basketball the way it does now. His is a football school all the way. Yes, that means Pearl and Golden ($3.6 million) both have that sweet SEC football money, but that also means fierce competition for NIL dollars.
Sampson ($4.6 million) has reversed a tradition-rich but moribund program, elevating to the Big 12 and continuing to thrive. Scheyer (reportedly more than $7 million, but Duke is a private school and not subject to open records laws) has a ton of pressure succeeding Krzyzewski, but also every advantage. For the record, none of these programs is believed to be at the very top of the NIL pay scale this season. Cooper Flagg, it should be noted, came in with the national marketability to make a ton of money this season off “actual NIL.”
4: Pearl
3: Sampson
2: Golden
1: Scheyer
NCAA rule following
The fact that no one cares about NCAA rules anymore does not mean no one ever cared — in particular, other coaches who actually followed said rules. Sampson got a five-year show-cause from the NCAA in 2008 for making impermissible phone calls to recruits while at Indiana, the NCAA saying he lied to investigators. That was also the crux of the Pearl case — which started with a recruit at a cookout at his house — that got him fired from Tennessee and given a three-year show cause. Auburn also got four years of probation, and Pearl a two-game suspension, in 2021 after an investigation that involved the FBI.
4: Scheyer
4: Golden
1: Sampson
0: Pearl
Basketball identity
Sampson’s is the clearest and easiest to identify. The Cougars are going to grab your offense, squeeze it, put it in a box and stomp on it, just like his Oklahoma Sooners Final Four team of 23 years ago did. He’s also developed many great point guards. Does he have enough shooters this year to finish the deal for the first time?
Pearl has always been a pressing, high-tempo, self-described “gambling” coach, but to his credit, he listened to son and associate head coach Steven Pearl this season and slowed it way down to maximize his team’s strengths.
Florida and Duke play aesthetically pleasing basketball with size and length as bullying traits. Many of Duke’s best teams over the years have leaned on ferocious man defense, but the prevailing identity is having better players and fitting scheme to their strengths. Which is what smart coaches do.
4: Sampson
3: Pearl
2: Scheyer
1: Golden
Recruiting and development
Take it all together, high school recruiting and portal adds. Golden and Scheyer have been effective in both areas. Scheyer has done a masterful job of building the right team around Flagg — which is actually more impressive than getting Flagg. Duke is going to land superstars until further notice and until whoever’s in charge screws it up.
Golden’s star, Walter Clayton Jr., was the original find of Rick Pitino. Several of his returnees from last season improved significantly. But the two Baby Boomers have long track records of excellence. Big recruits, no-name recruits into stars and portal wins. Johni Broome, the Morehead State transfer who has developed into a national player of the year candidate, tilts it slightly toward Pearl. Recency bias for the win.
4: Pearl
3: Sampson
2: Scheyer
1: Golden
Playing career
Scheyer played four years under Krzyzewski, winning the national championship in 2010 as a senior and second team All-American. Golden was a solid guard at Saint Mary’s. Sampson played for his father, John W. “Ned” Sampson, at Division II Pembroke State (now UNC Pembroke). Pearl didn’t play for Davis at Boston College. He was a student manager and got into coaching from there. Managers work hard, too.
Scheyer: 4
Golden: 3
Sampson: 2
Pearl: 1
Media darlingness
Hey, don’t laugh, this matters! It’s not about whether we like you — it’s about whether you can use us to better your cause. We’re actually very easy to use. Smart coaches know how much this can help with recruits and fans (read: potential donors) as well. Everyone here is good — these are basketball coaches, not football coaches — but Pearl is must see/must listen. You never know what may come out of his mouth. Scheyer seems genuinely interested in giving insightful and revealing answers, which means he understands that media are simply conduits to the people.
Pearl: 4
Scheyer: 3
Golden: 2
Sampson: 1
Final results
Sampson: 24
Pearl: 23
Scheyer: 23
Golden: 19
If these scores apply to the games, we’ll be talking about Houston and Auburn on Monday night, a rematch of the Tigers’ 74-69 win in November at the Toyota Center in Houston. Advantage Sampson? Maybe. But Pearl remains the only known coach in NCAA history to beat a top-five team away from home after two of his players got in a fight on the plane and forced the pilot to turn the plane around.
(Top photo of Todd Golden and Bruce Pearl: John Reed / Imagn Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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