Pitchin with Pritch: Big news on the college coaching front

This is being written on Saturday, April 3, about an hour and a half before the Final Four games will start. 

I think it will be a great afternoon of basketball with some outstanding teams making the last four playing. 

I, and a lot of other  people, are hoping for a Gonzaga and Baylor finish. But when you get to this part of the NCAA tournament I still think any one of the four might get it done. 

Meanwhile, there was a lot of basketball news happening in a couple of blue blood schools that caught my attention. 

One was that Roy Williams, the Head Coach at North Carolina, was retiring. The other story was that Bill Self, head coach at KU, was given a lifetime contract. Both stories were big in my opinion.

First, the retirement of Roy Williams. Coach Williams coached at KU and then North Carolina and won over 400 games at each school. He is the only coach in NCAA history that has accomplished that feat. 

He is 70 years old and that might have played a part in his retirement, but I think also things like the transfer situation in college sports played a big part in his decision. 

He has made the comment that it is time for him to step down and that he would like to have some say in who replaces him and I would bet that the University will honor that. 

I have had the honor of meeting Coach Williams at clinics that I would attend. He was the type of coach that would talk to you no matter where you coached. 

If you had questions, he would give you different ways that you might be able to get a result to improve your team.

I hated it when he left Kansas to go back to North Carolina. But going back to your alma mater is an opportunity that a lot of coaches would jump at and Coach Williams did just that.

Coach Self, on the other hand, signed a life-time contract with the University of Kansas. 

Coach Self has had great success at Kansas but also some good teams at Oral Roberts, Tulsa, and Illinois before being hired at Kansas. 

He is only the 8th head coach that KU has had in its history. KU’s first coach just happened to be Dr. James Naismith the inventor of the game. 

Believe it or not, Naismith is the only coach in KU history to have a losing career record at 55 wins and 60 losses. 

Coach Self is 264-14 at Allen Fieldhouse and a career record 708-214 won-loss record with a 501-109 record at KU. He is a nine-time conference coach of the year and was enshrined as a first-ballot honoree in the Class of 2017 Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. 

So getting him to sign a lifetime contract might have been a hard sell but then again maybe not.

 He gets a whopping $225,000 base salary at KU. That isn’t all that good but Kansas added a few incentives to help out. 

He gets a $2,750,000 Professional Service payment, then $2,435,000 annual retention bonus which ups his salary to $5.4 million. Plus, there’s a couple of extras like two courtesy automobiles and memberships in two country clubs plus a $ 4 million life insurance policy. 

All this because he has averaged 29.5 wins per season while at Kansas. 

He probably won’t qualify for a stimulus check!

Fast forward to Sunday

Moving forward to Sunday, I’ve got to say something about the first two games of the Final Four. 

Both were somewhat surprising to me. I thought that Baylor and Houston would be a closely fought game. I did think that Baylor would win, but the game wasn’t even close. 

Then there was Gonzaga and UCLA! I thought Gonzaga would win and thought it might even be a close game for a while, but that Gonzaga would win it in the end. 

I was wrong on most everything. UCLA played well, keeping Gonzaga from doing some of the things that have made Gonzaga tough to even stay close to.

UCLA did everything possible to win that game, except for letting Gonzaga get off a very deep shot and watch it bank in at the buzzer.  

It was a great game to watch but seeing that shot go in, I instantly felt sorry for UCLA. It would have been a real rag to riches for UCLA—having to play in the “Get in to the tournament” game and going to the finals.  It brings back some memories for me of some of our big games and how things can go bad at the end. 

Example: Lincoln Christian 1991. Only seen the film once!