My girlfriend is a UNC alumna, and she is not what you would call a huge basketball fan. Sure, she was on Franklin Street after the Tar Heels won each of their national championships. And yeah, she did love Sean May. But she certainly could not pick the Wear twins out of a crowd, and when we recently saw Marcus Ginyard at a restaurant, the best she could do was, “Hey, that guy plays for Carolina!”
But this weekend, she looked at me and asked, “Are you jelly that UNC signed Harrison Barnes?”
So yeah, losing out on Barnes was kind of a big deal.
But that doesn’t mean that missing out on Barnes was Coach K’s fault. It doesn’t mean that North Carolina head coach Roy Williams is a better recruiter than Mike Krzyzewski—or, as one of my friends put it, that “Roy continues to eat K’s lunch.” It doesn’t mean that recruits don’t think Duke is cool. It doesn’t mean that the Tar Heels are the new dominant team in the country.
All it means is that one kid decided he wanted to go to UNC over Duke.
To a certain extent, recruiting appears to be like trying to convince someone you met in a bar to go home with you. Except this would be the case only if bar scenes were always characterized by rich old men pursuing very tall and athletic high school boys while thousands of other old men broke down the rich old men’s strategies on the Internet and tried to guess which rich old man the tall, athletic young boy would sleep with. The presence of the pursuer and the pursued makes it tempting to compare recruiting to hooking up. Doing this enables one to say things like “Coach K isn’t cool enough to score top talent” and “Coach K can’t close.”
Only, this is kind of a silly comparison because recruiting is not at all like trying to close the deal on a Friday evening. Trying to hook up requires that the pursuer convinces the pursued that he is worth spending one night with. Trying to get a recruit to come to your school requires the coach to convince the player that he’s worth spending at least one year (and possibly four) working without pay. In that sense, it’s less like hooking up and more like actual real-world dating. When we think about it like that, the analogical phrases we’d use are “Those two just couldn’t make it work” and “They weren’t right for each other.”
That’s what happened: Harrison Barnes and Duke just were not right for each other.
And really, should we be surprised? For all the talk about Barnes surprising Coach K on his birthday, and Barnes having a 3.4 GPA, and Barnes taking AP Physics, and Barnes basically being God’s gift to the state of Iowa, did we ever know Harrison Barnes well enough to say that he and Duke were compatible?
Think about it. His name is Harrison Bryce-Jordan Barnes. He has a sister named Ashle Jourdan Barnes. His mom started taping Tar Heel legend Michael Jordan’s games in 1987 just in case she had a son to show them to. She kept taping MJ’s games until he retired. You think Shirley Barnes likes Michael Jordan?
Of course, that might not have been what swayed Barnes. Maybe he thought his game fit better in Roy Williams’ up-tempo scheme. Maybe he didn’t really want to work that hard on defense. Maybe the Dean Dome appealed to him more than Cameron Indoor Stadium (Hah!). Maybe he really did want that undergraduate business degree (Hah!). Maybe he didn’t think he’d fit in with Duke’s Twitter-centric basketball team culture. (As another of my friends said, “Harrison Barnes doesn’t even have a Twitter. How cool could he be?”)
The essential fact is that Coach K can only sell the program he has. He could set up a meeting for Barnes to talk to the dean of Fuqua about why a Duke education prepares a young man for a career in business better than a generic Bachelor’s in finance, but he couldn’t convince his school to offer Barnes the option of majoring in finance. He could tell Barnes that he really does look great in Duke blue, but he couldn’t change the team colors. He could show Barnes the energy and excitement of a game in Cameron, but he couldn’t promise to tear down the building and put up a 20,000-seat arena. He could tell Barnes that he’d get plenty of shots if he came to Duke, and that Kobe Bryant and Lebron James didn’t mind playing in the Krzyzewski system, but he couldn’t promise to change his defense-first philosophy.
Perhaps most importantly, Krzyzewski could tell Barnes that if he came to Duke he could be the next Grant Hill, but he could never promise him that he’d be the next Michael Jordan.
I’m sure Coach K did his best to get Barnes, just like he does his best to get every kid that he thinks would be a good fit for his program. But Barnes thought UNC was a better fit. Other kids, faced with the same choice, have picked Duke—Josh McRoberts (the second-ranked player in his class) is the most recent example—and, in the future, kids will pick Duke again.
Of course, Barnes actually made the wrong choice, but maybe that’s just the sour grapes talking.
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