Coach Weisse

Pat Murphy says he still wasn’t a good coach even after winning at Notre Dame and going to the College World Series at Arizona State because he was still making it about him instead of the players “You know, when you get to a spot in life when you’re a little bit older, you start to make it not about you. When I dropped my ego, which took a while, I wasn’t a good coach at Notre Dame. Even though we were winning games, I still wasn’t good. I didn’t know baseball, for one, and it was about me a little bit at the end.” “I started the right way. I loved Notre Dame, and I didn’t want to embarrass the university. I was working for $7,000 a year. I just wanted to be good and not embarrass them. We had a lot of success, but then it became about me.” “And then I got to ASU, and it became about me again. We won a lot and went to the World Series a lot, but I just wasn’t good. It took getting knocked on my ass a little bit. I had that NCAA thing, which was total bull, but it woke me up. My kids made a difference in my life, and you start to realize it ain’t about you. Honestly, it’s not about me.” “And whenever I started focusing on that, we came into last year and everything wrong happens. We trade Corbin. Woody’s out for the year. Devin’s out. We cut the budget $30 million. We’re going to suck. And again, I just kept saying, ‘It’s not about me. Make it about that young energy.’ And we had these young guys go out and make me look good. Hungry players, you remember when you guys were hungry in your career? Hungry players make the manager look good.” “And that’s exactly what happened. Now I got the credit for it. I’m still under construction. I’m not great. There are so many areas I suck in. But then you’re trying to find staff members to help you, trying to realize what you suck at.” “But the most important thing is love the player. When you really find the good in that dude, that’s it. The guy that’s hardest to love needs love the most. I’m at a point in life where it’s about them. And if you keep it about them…”

Phil Jackson says he told Michael Jordan he needed to score less if he wanted to win a championship because scoring titles and championships don’t go together “When I was given the job as the head coach of the Chicago Bulls, I brought Michael Jordan in to speak with me, and I said, ‘You know, you’ve averaged 37, 38, 36 points a game the last three years. You know, you’ve been the scoring champion, but if you look back at the history of the NBA, there hasn’t been a scoring champion for almost 15 years who’s won the championship. They don’t go together.’” “‘And we need to take the focus off you, which is what teams now tilt their whole defense towards, stopping Michael Jordan, and open it up for the rest of our team. And it means you taking less shots a game. That’s important.’ And he stopped me and he said, ‘Are you going to run an equal-opportunity offense like Tex Winter’s been talking about?’” “I said, ‘Yeah, I guess you could call it an equal-opportunity offense, but I’m not going to be calling the plays from the sideline. You guys are going to be reading it on the floor. So if the 24-second clock is running down and it becomes red, which is the call everybody makes when it’s under five seconds, we’ll teach the team how to get the ball to you at the end of that clock because then you can score.’” “He said, ‘Well, I don’t think that I have to give up a scoring championship. I could score 32 points a game and still win a scoring championship. That’s only eight points a quarter.’ I said, ‘Michael, I had trouble scoring eight points a game when I was a player.’” “‘But rather than scoring eight points a quarter, why don’t you save that for the fourth quarter and score 14 points in the fourth quarter and take us home? And you can do what you want to do during the early part of the game and then put the onus and the nail in the coffin in the fourth quarter to seal the deal.’ He kind of liked that idea.” “And, you know, I think we lost two or three of our first games that we played in my first year coaching, and everybody had to kind of figure out how to do it, how to play together when the ball was dictating the action, when the passes were dictating what people would do, rather than a specific number for a player being called from the sideline. And I gave the team a little bit of authority, which is exactly what a coach wants to happen.”