The SEC tournament quarterfinal between Georgia and Ole Miss had devolved into a cavalcade of fouls, leaving it unclear whether anyone would score another basket. (Over a five-minute span that ended with 47 seconds remaining, nobody did.) But in a frenzied game that precision forgot, Mark Fox remembered something.
The Georgia coach stationed Charles Mann in the high post, old-school style, and had him feed cutters. This, however, had a twist. Mann is a point guard, not a post player. His redeployment wrong-footed the Rebels and yielded two or three — the memory is blurry, and the official play-by-play is of little help — great shots. It was inspired coaching.
Alas, Georgia missed those great shots. (It would win because Mann seized a third-chance offensive rebound and drove for the winning hoop.) Speaking of the point-guard-as-postman alignment a day later, Fox allowed that he’d tried it with Mann earlier in the season and had, years ago at Nevada-Reno, done something similar with guard Ramon Sessions.
Shrugging off a reporter’s compliment, Fox also pointed out that the Bulldogs’ misses negated the intended effect. And that, in a roundabout way, is today’s point: Does it matter how shrewd a plan is if the players can’t make it work?
Over five seasons of watching the man coach Georgia, this reporter will concede (and not at all grudgingly) that, as a tactician, Mark Fox is absolutely top-shelf. Which makes this part even harder to reconcile:
Georgia under Fox is 85-77 with two winning seasons, one NCAA appearance and one NIT bid. In the first five years under Dennis Felton, Fox’s predecessor, Georgia was 75-80 with two winning seasons, one NCAA appearance and one NIT bid.
Granted, Felton’s NCAA run was the product of the lightning-in-a-bottle SEC tournament title of 2008. Had Georgia not won that event, athletic director Damon Evans would have fired his coach. As it was, Evans waited only until 20 games of the next season had been played — the Bulldogs were 9-11 — to do the deed.
But Felton inherited a toxic program that had seen Jim Harrick resign in disgrace after the school pulled his team from postseason play in 2003. Although Fox has said that Georgia basketball was in disarray when he arrived, the Bulldogs in April 2009 weren’t the subject of national scorn or facing an NCAA investigation. And Felton did land Trey Thompkins, Travis Leslie, Dustin Ware and Jeremy Price, who would comprise 80 percent of the starting five on the only Georgia team Fox has taken to the Big Dance.
Fox is a better coach than Felton, but the season just past offers a case study as to the limits of tactics. The Bulldogs finished 12-6 in SEC play, tying Kentucky for second. They also went 7-7 against non-conference opposition and were 0-4 against Florida, Kentucky and Tennessee, the three SEC teams that made the NCAA field. (Average margin of defeat in those games was 19.5 points.) Of Georgia’s 20 victories, one came against a team — Wofford in the season opener — that would reach the NCAA.
Fox lost Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, the best player he has signed while at Georgia, to the 2013 NBA draft but was clever enough to maximize remaining resources.
“We devised a way to play,” Fox said. “With Charles and Kenny Gaines, we were going to try and drive the ball a lot and try to get to the free-throw line. Certainly with Charles that was a big emphasis because we knew the rule change (eradicating hand-checking) was coming.”
Again, great coaching. In the end, it lifted Georgia only to Round 2 of the NIT, where it was beaten at home by Louisiana Tech after trailing by 26 points 12 1/2 minutes in. If you’re Greg McGarity, an AD who emphasizes that he wants his programs to play for championships, is Round 2 of the NIT good enough?
As we watched Fox win 20 games with players of modest gifts, it was impossible not to wonder what he might do with talent of the caliber at Arkansas or LSU or Missouri. The Bulldogs went 5-1 against those mid-table teams because Fox outflanked the other guys. With just a bit more manpower, might Georgia have had an honest shot at Florida and Kentucky and Tennessee? Might it still be playing in the real tournament?
Looking ahead, we note that Rivals lists seven prospects from Georgia in its top 100 for 2015. If the Bulldogs under Fox are ever to break upward, this would seem the moment. There’s no doubt that Georgia has itself a superb coach. That, sorry to say, is but half the battle.
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