Caught in the April coach shuffle

Every year March Madness fades away and gives way to April Madness. March Madness is about which team is the best on the court. April Madness is about teams trying to get deep into the next year's March Madness. While March Madness is won by the top team, April Madness is often won by the team with the deepest pocketbook.\nApril Madness is the annual scrabble for coaches in college basketball. 2003 has had the largest high profile openings in recent years. Coaches from other universities have filled all three of the nation's premier jobs (UCLA, North Carolina and Kansas). The two biggest names to move have been Roy Williams, who left national runner-up Kansas to go to Carolina (where he played and began his career as an assistant coach), and Bill Self, who left Illinois to succeed Williams at Kansas, where Self was a graduate assistant under Larry Brown.\nThese moves have inspired a firestorm of criticism around the country, criticism that has largely revolved around the question of whether coaches should leave their players and recruits behind and go off to a new job.\nBut why is this such a big deal? These attacks are largely hypocritical for three main reasons. Critics never seem to care if a coach leaves a small school. When, for example, Self left Oral Roberts to go to Tulsa, and then abandoned the Golden Hurricane for Illinois, no one batted an eye. Yet his players at his last two stops were left out in the cold as much as those at Illinois were.\nIn addition, when the coach is fired because of lack of on-court performance, no one bemoans the players' loss. Most of the time the players and their coach are close, even when they are mired in a losing season. I do not remember anyone asking for consideration for Texas Tech's players when former coach James Dickey was let go to clear the way for Bobby Knight.\nFinally, college basketball has drastically changed in the last 10 years. Star players often leave for the NBA after one or two years. Commentators rarely ask how these players can abandon their coaches for fame and fortune. Does anyone ask how the player could abandon his teammates and his coaches simply to go for the big payoff? Yet coaches get attacked for the same thing.\nIf this process of changing school was so wrong, schools wouldn't lure each other's coaches away and wouldn't insert buy-out clauses in a coach's contract. Schools fuel this mobility when they fire coaches for doing things like not making the tournament for two consecutive years. If there were no openings and no recruitment of coaches, then this wouldn't be an issue. \nCoaches have emotions. They have ties to their alma mater and to their hometown. They have ambitions. In short, they are human. If they want to pick up and move to a different school that offers a better opportunity or a better experience, they should be allowed to without having their motives and procedures second-guessed. We do not bemoan professors changing schools and leaving behind students. Nor should we do so with coaches.