Oklahoma head men’s basketball coach Porter Moser was asked his thoughts about the situation after the Michigan at Wisconsin basketball game from Sunday afternoon.
Wisconsin topped Michigan, 77-63, and tempers flared in the postgame handshake line. It stemmed from Wisconsin head coach Greg Gard burning a late-game timeout when the game’s result was no longer in question.
It ended with Michigan head basketball coach Juwan Howard hitting Wisconsin assistant coach Joe Krabbenhoft in the face. Howard has now been suspended for the remainder of the season and fined $40,000 by the Big Ten Conference.
Moser was asked if perhaps it’s time to do away with postgame handshake lines all together.
“Yeah, I’m not one of the ones that’s going to knee-jerk reaction and say we can throw away the handshake line. I loved what one of the players tweeted out today. He goes, I never would’ve been able to tell this other player how hard he played and how tough he was if it wasn’t for the handshake line. I’ve been coaching for 30 years and a lot of these coaches have. It’s not easy to go shake somebody’s hand when you just lost a game and you feel gut-wrenched, especially on close games, especially on games that have so much meaning in February. It’s not easy. But, what are you always telling your guys? You’ve got to handle adversity, you’ve got to react when things don’t go your way. I don’t like the message that the way to respond is to avoid it. I don’t think avoiding it is the way to handle the problem. Let’s handle this problem by avoiding it. I just don’t belive in that and that’s my take on it,” Moser said.
Moser expounded upon those thoughts after Tulsa World reporter Guerin Emig said that sometimes players and coaches may make it look easy handling the types of emotions that are present immediately following a game.
“True. It’s not easy, but a lot of things in life aren’t easy. You don’t understand what it’s like unless you’re in that seat as a head coach. Even assistant coaches don’t know what it’s like. I remember Drew Valentine called me after his first loss. Bryan Mullins did. I’ll bet you every assistant that took over somewhere and had their first job, called their mentor and said, ‘Oh my God, I had no idea what you were going through.’ On how you take each loss way more personal than an assistant does. Not to say the assistants don’t take losses hard. It’s just different as the head coach. So, to do that, it’s not easy. Then, you don’t know the backstory. There might be some things in the recruiting process that have gone on that nobody knows about. There might’ve been a recruiting battle that got testy. You don’t know those things. So, it’s you want to win so bad, the games are meaningful, there might’ve been something going on. I’m not saying in that case, I’m just saying in general,” Moser said.
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