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ACC QUESTION of the WEEK : Is Louisville’s Chris Mack the early front-runner for ACC Coach of the Year?
The important word in the question above is “early.” The ACC basketball season has more than a full month left, and the showdowns at the top of the conference remain ahead of us. Having acknowledged that, we can already reduce the 2019 ACC Coach of the Year race to three candidates:
Chris Mack, Tony Bennett, and Mike Krzyzewski. Those are the three leaders, and they almost certainly will remain the three leaders.
Yes, Buzz Williams is doing very well, and in other seasons, he would have a real shot at the award, but Virginia Tech’s blowout losses to Virginia and North Carolina make it extremely difficult to elevate him past fourth place, maybe third if you really wanted to press the case.
North Carolina State has cooled off. Kevin Keatts is good at what he does, but it’s not nearly good enough to be a COY contender.
Roy Williams is doing what he does, gradually getting his team to play better as January slips into February. Death. Taxes. Roy-coached teams improving. This is late January. Yet, North Carolina has gone through plenty of ups and downs, and the Tar Heels need to maintain a high standard if Roy is to make a late push for COY contention.
This is a three-horse race. It’s Mack, Tony and Coach K.
Of the three, Coach K has the best talent on the board. The Zion Williamson-R.J. Barrett combination will make it hard for Coach K to climb from third place to first. Zion will probably get ACC Player of the Year, and the trade-off is that Coach K won’t get Coach of the Year. It is a simple and familiar equation for season-long awards in any sport: If the coach is magnified, the players can’t be, and vice-versa. Either the coach is doing something uncommonly great with the resources he has at his disposal, or the players make the coach look good. It is very rarely both — not impossible, but not a regular occurrence.
This brings the race down to Mack and Bennett.
Circumstances matter, and so one must hasten to say that if Louisville was performing at this level in a “normal” season or a “normal” context, Bennett would be the easy choice for COY.
Yet, it is plain that this is no “ordinary” season. It is Chris Mack’s first one at Louisville, and plenty of people were predicting a lot more pain and a much slower trajectory of improvement for the Cardinals. What we have seen is rapid progress and development at Louisville. The Cardinals have a better points-per-possession differential than every ACC team other than Virginia. They are winning games decisively in a strong, deep league.
Going outside the ACC for a brief moment, consider the coaches who are in their second or third or fourth seasons at their current stops and still struggling: Shaka Smart at Texas, Archie Miller at Indiana, Brad Underwood at Illinois, and several others. To see Mack immediately and substantially improve Louisville is not as easy as it seemed — not given the enormous chaos and controversy which had swallowed up the UL program the previous two years.
Would you get an argument from me if you argued for Tony Bennett? No… but Chris Mack IS the front-runner at this early stage of the 2019 ACC Coach of the Year race.
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