Survival skills will help coach in new season
By DAVE SITTLER World Sports Writer
4/13/2006
So Oklahoma finally found its point guard.
It was a month late, and he doesn't have any eligibility left, but Jeff Capel's point-guard background might be the best asset he has going for him as Oklahoma's basketball coach.
The lack of a quality point guard haunted coach Kelvin Sampson throughout his 12th and final OU season, which ended last month in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. He desperately needed someone like Capel, who was good enough to start at Duke as a freshman.
More importantly, Capel was good enough to play the point for a taskmaster in Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski. That player-coach experience is why the 31-year-old Capel believes he acts a whole lot older than the date on his birth certificate.
"The point guard position is the most difficult position in basketball. Period. And the most important position," Capel said. "Coach K puts a lot of demands on his point guard, so I had to grow up very quick. There was a lot expected of me as a freshman."
There is also going to be a lot expected of Capel in his rookie season at OU. If he thought trying to please Krzyzewski was difficult, wait until he gets a load of the wine-and-cheese OU crowd.
Billy Tubbs and Sampson can both tell Capel that
no matter what style he plays or how many games he wins, Sooner fans will show up in sold out numbers when they feel like it. Which is two or three times a season, depending on if Kansas is on the schedule that season along with Oklahoma State and Texas.
Capel will soon discover that OU's Lloyd Noble Center will never be confused with Duke's Cameron Indoor Stadium. But overcoming fan apathy is the easy part of what awaits him.
One thing that will remind Capel of his days playing for the Blue Devils will be the high quality of Big 12 Conference coaching talent sitting on the opponents' bench.
The Big 12 doesn't have to take a backdoor cut to any league when it comes to coaches, including Duke's league, the Atlantic Coast Conference. After all, it was ACC member North Carolina State that last week attempted to hire away Texas coach Rick Barnes by offering him a reported $2 million per season.
And ACC member North Carolina couldn't restore its national championship tradition until it hired Kansas coach Roy Williams (Yes, Williams was a Tar Heels assistant, but he cut his coaching chops in the Big 12).
Barnes' decision to stay at UT was great for the Big 12's reputation but bad news for Capel and every other coach in the league.
As impressive and mature as Capel came off Tuesday when OU introduced him as Sampson's replacement, you have to wonder if he really understands what he's getting into in this league.
A conference already loaded with coaches on par with Barnes, got a whole lot better when Kansas State replaced Jim Wooldridge with Bob Huggins and Missouri hired Mike Anderson to take over for Capel's fellow Dookie, Quin Snyder.
Sure, the league will take a hit if legendary Oklahoma State coach Eddie Sutton goes ahead and does the expected by retiring soon. But his replacement has more than the same last name. And many of us believe Sean Sutton will prove his father was correct when Eddie predicted, "Sean's going to be a better coach than I was."
Toss in Texas Tech legend Bob Knight, Kansas' Bill Self and Texas A&M's Billy Gillispie, and Capel will soon learn he's no longer coaching Virginia Commonwealth in the Colonial Athletic Association.
The CAA has some excellent coaches. We all discovered that when Jim Larranaga took George Mason to the Final Four. But nobody in the CAA recruits like the aforementioned Big 12 coaches.
I haven't even mentioned Baylor's Scott Drew, whose recruiting skills are starting to scare the bejesus out of the rest of the conference. And Iowa State believes it upgraded significantly when it replaced Wayne Morgan with Greg McDermott.
Oh, and then there's this: Most of the so-called experts are predicting that the Big 12 will be college basketball's best conference next season.
"One of the things that makes this job attractive," Capel said, "is that coach Sampson didn't leave the cupboard bare."
He didn't? Those so-called experts apparently don't agree; OU wasn't predicted by any of them to be in the Top 25 when the preseason polls are released next fall. That's because Sampson's three best players last season were seniors. And it's uncertain how many of the top-flight recruits he signed last fall will qualify academically.
The only thing Capel knows for certain is that he has a core of role players coming back. And, more than likely, he will have to depend heavily on them to fill Lloyd Noble Center and help him compete against a Big 12 coaching lineup that's starting to resemble Murderers Row.
If he succeeds, Capel can thank a demanding Coach K for teaching him how to survive as a Duke point guard. He's going to need every one of those survival skills for the journey he's about to take.
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Dave Sittler 581-8312
[email protected].