Did John McCain Pull a ‘Matt Doherty’?

I don’t spend a lot of time writing about politics here, but I had an interesting insight while driving home today to watch the debate that fits pretty well on this blog: “Holy crap, John McCain just tried to pull a Matt Doherty on Barack Obama, with this crazy ‘halt the campaign and debate‘ thing.”

The strategy refers to a Doherty approach used in a 60-48 loss to Duke on March 8, 2002. Now, as you read this post and begin to wonder how in the WORLD I could remember some innocuous game from the worst season for North Carolina in the last 30+ years, just remember that 1) I’ve been a diehard UNC fan the last 15+ years, 2) I watch a LOT of basketball, and 3) I have a special dislike of Matt Doherty. Now, on to the show:

First, a couple of assumptions we’ll use to equate McCain to a particular Doherty strategy (these are necessary so that Chris Lin or other Republican-leaning people are still willing to read):

1. Assume that McCain is seeing the same polls that fivethirtyeight.com and other sites are reporting (i.e. slight slide relative to Obama).
2. Assume that, as a politician, McCain (like Obama and others) is morally capable of using the financial crisis as a prop in a particular tactic to win the election.

If you’re not going to just sing along with those assumptions for fun, then stop reading now.

In 2002, Doherty was busy driving the North Carolina program into the ground. Now, that’s not a material part of the story and in no way am I saying that John McCain is getting ready to lead this country into a hell hole which will have us aching for the days of George W Bush (read into that what you will).

Anyhow, the North Carolina team was so lacking in talent for a program of such prestige, that even Doherty knew the team was hosed. It turned out to be the season that broke UNC’s seemingly infinite run of NCAA tournament appearances, though we didn’t know it at the time.

On the day of the game, the only hope for making the tournament was to somehow triumph in the ACC tournament and win the automatic bid. It was with that backdrop that UNC met hated rival Duke (No. 3 in the country) in the Quarterfinals and Doherty choose to coin (in my mind) ‘pulling a Doherty’.

Knowing that the Duke team was “ahead in the polls” so to speak, Doherty had his players slow the game down to the point of pain. And I’m not talking about a Bo Ryan-like strategy where you play staunch defense and then come down the court to swing the ball 90 times until you get a layup.

I’m talking about Adam Boone bringing the ball across halfcourt and then standing still dribbling until the shot clock was down to 10 seconds before even making a single move.

It’s impossible to convey the outrageous-ness of the strategy, because the final score doesn’t represent the extent of how crazy it was. Duke would run down, score a quick bucket, and then Carolina would eat up 35 seconds (and hopefully get a bucket).

Usually when two teams score at such a low pace, it’s because of tough defenses holding each other to poor shooting. But I’d venture to guess Duke shot something like 55 percent in the game (unfortunately, ESPN has lost the box score to verify).

Remember, Duke was one of the more explosive NCAA teams of the past 20 years. They had put up 93 and 87 points in the first two meetings against Carolina that season.

It was awful. And as a North Carolina fan, it was unwatchable.

But it was also some sort of perverted genius. Doherty himself put it best after the game:

"

“You don’t want to have to play that way, but it was the only chance we had to win,” said Doherty, who had clearly been crying in the locker room.

“We worked on it and I went to Jason (Capel) and said this is the way we need to play to try to beat Duke and he said, `Let’s do it. I’m with you.’ And we thought we were going to win.”

"

(Side note: this type of garbage is why I try to block out the Matt Doherty years in my mind)

He was right, it really was the only possible way for Carolina to win. They had to shorten the game up, possessions-wise, to the point where the importance of every single individual possession was heightened. Where each shot, instead of being worth a tiny fraction of the game, was worth relatively double (or triple). And then Carolina just had to play hard and hope—hope for a slip-up that would be magnified in import due to the shortened game.

It’s a common practice by basketball and football teams (you see three or four teams do it to Peyton Manning and the Colts every year), but I vividly remember the Doherty game because of how explicit it was.

In essence, that’s what I think McCain was trying to accomplish this week. He saw an opportunity to shorten the game up. To magnify the impact of the debate and the last few weeks of the election by pushing things out.

Nevermind that there was noway he would actually be able to make a substantive difference (as he proved tonight in the debate, he and Obama both do not have depth of understanding on the economic crisis). With foreign policy (McCain’s clear advantage) being the focus of the first debate, he wanted to shorten its gap to Election Day as much as possible.

It was a crazy strategy, almost as crazy as Matt Doherty trying to turn a 40-minute game into a 25-minute one, but who knows… it could have worked.