LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- If you’re losing, it doesn’t matter what you say. It doesn’t matter what you do. If you’re losing, whatever people see or hear, it is wrong. We talk about a lot of things in sports. Character. Perseverance. Resilience. Strength.
All that really matters is winning. Victory is the ultimate character trait. It is penance. It is intelligence. It is strength. Win, and you can do anything. They’ll say you’re eccentric. They’ll laugh and nod their heads.
Lose, and you can do nothing. You don’t walk right. You don’t scream enough. You scream too much. You’re too hard on players, or too soft.
Win, and your stories at press conferences are priceless. Lose, and they’re worthless. The same truth, uttered by a coach with a winning record, can be hailed as wisdom, but denounced as pablum if it comes from the mouth of a losing coach.
Hug your players as a winning coach and Tom Rinaldi is there with guitar music and buttery prose. Let the cameras catch you doing it as a losing coach and you’re embracing defeat and What’s Wrong With America.
And on it goes. This isn’t true for all people. But it is true for a great many.
Two videos made the social media rounds over the weekend. One was of Louisville men’s coach Kenny Payne speaking to a despondent El Ellis on the sidelines of a lopsided loss at Florida State. The other was of Jeff Walz speaking to point guard Chrislyn Carter on the sidelines of a double-digit win at Kentucky.
Payne had sensed Ellis’ frustration, taken him out of the game, and tried to take some of the weight off his shoulders. Payne has been on Ellis all season. You could just as easily pull video of him screaming at the guard. I’ve got still photos. It happens. A coach is both good cop and bad.
Walz, at Kentucky, played both roles in the same conversation with Carr. You could see him yelling in her ear, fists clenched, in Rupp Arena. But by the end of the clip, he pats her on the backside and they are both laughing. I’ve seen him do the same thing when his team is behind.
Payne, if you listen to social media, is coddling players and accepting defeat. Walz is a brilliant coach. (Walz, by the way, really is a brilliant coach.)
But the big difference in the two videos is the score.
This is the price of losing. And this is Kenny Payne’s problem as the Cardinals and their 0-9 record limp into a 9 p.m. start against WKU in the KFC Yum! Center on Wednesday night.
The only way out for this team and its first-year coach is winning. If I wanted to, I could rail about everything Payne and his players said at their pregame news conference on Tuesday – and it was all perfectly reasonable stuff. But write it against the backdrop of 0-9 and it’s all too easy to fan people into a furious frenzy.
That’s not my thing.
People are forgetting a couple things about this team. First, this car was dead when Kenny Payne climbed behind the wheel. It went 3-15 over its final 18 games last season – then lost most of its production to transfers. Payne thought he might be able to leverage relationships he built into some transfer portal and other recruiting success. Turns out, nobody wanted to roll the dice on transferring to a program that everyone assumed would miss out on the NCAA Tournament, either by ban or by desertion, or both.
Fans, even Dick Vitale, have asked why Payne didn’t get more in the portal. He tried and failed, and that’s on him. When you’re a coach, you have to own things. But you also have to own things as a program. People who want to say, “We’re Louisville, this doesn’t happen here,” need to understand, it is happening here. It has happened.
There’s no point lingering over it. The car has crashed. It’s going to take more than jumper cables to get it going. And it’s going to take time, no matter who is doing it.
It's a mess. It was a mess at the end of last season. Top-level, established coaches were not interested. I hear the names people were throwing out. They weren’t coming.
The Kenny Payne hire was a hire based upon Payne’s potential upside, not based upon an immediate reversal of fortune. Payne brought the prospect of luring top-level talent. He also brought a Louisville pedigree.
However, and I put that word in bold print because I don’t want this statement ignored – the Payne hire also wasn’t done in anticipation of going 0-9, looking completely disorganized in general and displaying an almost total failure to compete against any team of quality (and even some that aren’t).
A highly intelligent seeming guy called me last week to take me to task for not being empathetic enough to Payne’s plight in a video I did for the WDRB Now app. He acknowledged that I pointed out that Payne took over a sinking ship, but then disagreed with my statement that the status quo for the team is untenable.
I thought that was a fairly unassailable statement. You can’t keep losing. You can’t survive with 5,000-6,000 fans per game watching a program that used to be the highest earning in college basketball.
I’m not good at math, but I’m good enough to know that losing at home to App State doesn’t pay the bills.
Last Thursday, I was in a room with a good many former Louisville basketball players paying tribute to Denny Crum, with several hundred fans having paid to be a part of a night of memories.
Unlike social media, that was a Kenny Payne crowd. They acknowledged how bad it looks now, but stopped short of blaming Payne for a situation that was not of his making.
Give him time, was the prevailing sentiment.
And I expect that’s the sentiment that will carry the day at the university, and it should. You can’t give somebody a clunker and expect it to be purring like a kitten right away.
But you also can’t have the car sitting in the driveway and rusting over.
And that’s the danger of losing, and it’s the problem Payne has now.
“The one good thing that I feel about this whole situation is that I know it's going to get fixed,” Payne said. “I feel more bad about the kids because they deserve to have some success. But you've got to earn it. So, for me, I try to take myself out of the equation. I try to do whatever I have to do to help them understand. Look, I've never lost as much, so you know, it's hard. But then the flip side of that, it's a part of the process. That's just a reality of it. It's a part of the process. Some of this was done before I walked in the doors and I have to look at it -- and not to blame anybody -- find a way to fix it. To get the kids to think different, to get the kids to believe that they can win. And that's what we're trying to do. That's what we are going to do.”
Ellis, asked what he would say to frustrated fans, said simply: “Just stick with us. I know things are rough. It's rough for us too. We didn’t expect to be 0-9. We’re the ones out there playing, so I feel like fans got to see another way to think about how we’re feeling. . . . I feel like people just got to calm down, stick with us because we’re still learning, every single one of us.”
It's a nice thought. But if Payne and his players don’t know it by now (and they do), the only correct answer is winning.
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