Capel's softer touch has reaped success, relief
Published: 2/17/2009 6:59 PM
Last Modified: 2/17/2009 6:59 PM
I hestitate to make Jeff Capel-Kelvin Sampson comparisons. Most of them are irrelevant and serve no purpose but to drag Sampson back through the muck. His finishing acts at Oklahoma and then Indiana should be punishment enough, don't you think?
Still, when someone makes a valid point comparing now to then, it's worth sharing. Thus this statement from Carey Murdock's column now appearing on Rivals' Soonerscoop.com:
"Oklahoma basketball and its followers spent over a decade watching a coach obsessed with mistakes. Now we're getting used to a coach who is the exact opposite."
Sampson's biggest character flaw, aside from thinking himself above NCAA law, was he couldn't let anything roll off his back. That wore on some players, and sapped the confidence from several others.
Capel, perhaps because he's younger and gets the fact you have to manage players' egos as much as their skills anymore, runs a looser ship. Thus, as Murdock points out in his column, it's easier for occasionally-slumping players like Austin Johnson or Cade Davis to hang in, keep playing and eventually bust back out. It helps explain why Juan Pattillo can come out of nowhere to emerge as the X-factor for an entire season.
Here's another way to put it: Once, a couple OU players reported to a postgame press conference a few minutes before Sampson. A reporter tried asking a question, only to be informed by the player he had to wait on his coach. So everyone waited.
The first exhibition Capel coached in Norman, he walked in on the postgame presser. It had already started, so he sat down in a chair near the back of the room and browsed through the stat sheet. The players never broke stride.
Bottom line, I really believe the Sooners were lucky to have a coach the quality of Kelvin Sampson as long as they did. I also believe the strain between coach and players at the end of his final season was as noticeable as the blue shirt he wore on OU's bench.
It's obvious by now that Capel brings similar coaching know-how to OU's program. As a bonus, he's much more comfortable going with the flow.
And that has played a large, underappreciated part in the Sooners' rapid turnaround.
-- Guerin Emig
Written by
Guerin Emig
Sports Writer
