re: Dale Brown Blog

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Great motivator? yes. Great coach? No way.

"I was worried about losing until I looked down the floor and saw Dale Brown. Then I knew we had a chance." - Bobby Knight commenting Indiana's game with LSU in the final four.

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Getting a team motivated is part of coaching. He won two National Coach of the Year awards. We underachieved with Shaq, Jackson, etc., but we lost to a team in the tournament that also had three future NBA first rounders and a 2nd rounder. Both teams were loaded. Shaq and Roberts were only freshmen. And there were a couple of other years where his teams underachieved.

But before he got to LSU, they did nothing. They didn't even make NCAA tournaments when the Pistol was there. Dale Brown took LSU to 15 straight national tournaments. I think he's still the only SEC coach to ever do that. In that streak, he went to 10 straight NCAA tournaments. And they lost to the eventual national champions many times.

He turned LSU into a consistently good program when it was consistently bad before he arrived. Unconventional...sometimes going off the deep end...sometimes underachieving, but mostly good in a conference with the winningest program in the history of college basketball. I still think his record stands for giving Kentucky its worst loss ever at Rupp Arena (35 points).