Didn’t work out well

Dear Editor:

West Virginia West (Michigan) is much in the news. Their two major sports teams, football and men’s basketball, both with coaches from WVU, are suffering the indignities of regression to the mean.

While the basketball program is being run with class, the high expectations of superior performance as coach John Beilein achieved at WVU, have not approved attainable. This is Beilein’s third season at Michigan and he should have achieved success.

His mediocrity cannot be blamed so much on his coaching skills. After all, he had great success at WVU and I am sure his assumption was that Michigan was a bigger venue and he could have even more success there.

His failure can be attributed to two things. One is the highly structured offensive and defensive system that he personally developed. To everything there is a season. His prior success, at least in small part, was due to unfamiliarity of other teams with his systems.

As other teams have emulated portions of his schemes and have had further experience with playing against his teams, that edge has fallen away. The other is a mismatch of his present culture to the acceptance of his system by appropriate recruits.

The same problems apply to Michigan’s football program. Alas, apparent shortcuts were taken under the intense pressure to bring, successfully, Michigan football into the 21st Century. Now, Michigan is headed for NCAA sanctions for violation of NCAA rules in the running of that program.

One may apply the “Peter Principle” to our two ex-coaches. The “Peter-Principle” was applied to government and stipulated managers rise to their level of incompetence. While both coaches were caught up in the web of the carefully crafted delusion that Michigan was the ultimate end point for their respective coaching careers, their moves were not only not an advancement over their positions at WVU. They were not a parallel career move — they were actually an inferior career move.

Both coaches, if they had stayed, would be having great success at WVU. As it has turned out for them, they may have both passed the apex of their careers. If they had only listened and learned from a famous movie of a bygone era, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”
Sorry, Dorothies, you are stuck in Oz.

Jim Burns
Berkeley Springs