Dennis Kennedy

It's so agonizing when you watch a football game when your team plays a "prevent defense." As they say, the only thing it prevents is your team from winning.

I enjoy college basketball much less these days than I used to because the coaches have become the stars instead of the players. I saw that Coach K American Express commercial so many times during the NCAA tournament that I could recite it word for word.

The attention-getting move of any star coach is to pull out the clipboard and design the perfect play, especially at the end of a game. If the winning shot is made, the coach is a genius. If the shot is missed, well, someone must not have executed.

Lately, I've come to the conclusion that calling timeout with little time remaining in a college game and pulling out the clipboard is the equivalent of the prevent defense. I've seen games where I can't even believe what happens after a play is "drawn up."

So, I felt sorry for my friend Matt "Mr. Illinois" Homann as his beloved Illini made up the big deficit tonight and then used a series of timeouts and clipboarded plays to remove every once of momentum they had. I would have rather seen them win or lose by pushing the action on the floor.

One other note on this game: what's the difference between a "moving pick" and a "solid screen"?

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]