Let’s look at two NCAA coaches — one revered as an all-time great and the other considered to be a bit of an underachiever — using the tried-and-true method of blind comparison.

These coaches are quite similar: Both get the top recruits, sometimes losing out to one another. Both are affected by one-and-dones and constantly have to play the guessing game as to what their rosters will look like the following year. And each get massive television exposure.

In the chart below, the numbers for each coach represent the amount of times his teams have either had that specific seed (left) or advanced that far in the tournament (right) over the past 10 years.

Which coach has had the better decade? It’s an easy call for No. 2, right? Both have a title, but Coach 2 has more tourney wins (22 to 18), more Final Fours (2 to 1), more Elite Eights (4 to 2), a better cumulative seed (19 to 22) and fewer first-round losses (2 to 3).

So, have you figured out which coach is which? If you follow the sport closely (and either read the headline or saw the picture atop this post), you’ll have guessed No. 1 is Mike Krzyzewski, who has one national title in the past 10 years and a bevy of top-two seeds to go along with those three shocking first-round exits. For a coach with three national titles during his career and a team that’s a mainstay in the top 10, these are fairly pedestrian results. I’d go far as to say they’re shocking.

Over the past 10 years, Duke hasn’t made the second week 40% of the time. The Blue Devils haven’t made the first weekend three times, with two of those blow-ups coming in the past three years. And Duke’s last three non first-round losses all came via blowout, with the team losing by an average of 20 points.

Duke is great, but it’s been a down decade, for certain.

But who’s No. 2? Who has the upper hand on Kyzyzewski? Rick Pitino? Jim Boeheim? John Calipari? It’s actually Bill Self of Kansas, a coach who gets his due in the sport, but is often labeled an underachiever when he can’t take his Big 12 title winners (10 regular-season titles and counting) deep into the tournament. It’s almost as if people still think of him as the guy whose teams experienced major first-round upsets in 2005 and 2006 to Bucknell and Bradley, respectively.

If you look at the totality of the NCAA, Self if probably the coach over the past 10 years with the best resumé in basketball. Rick Pitino is close (a title and five Elite Eights and beyond, which is better than Self) but he doesn’t have a second title-game appearance and missed the tournament completely in 2006. What about John Calipari? In his time at Memphis and Kentucky, he’s never had a first-weekend loss, but has two NIT appearances to go along with his title and six appearances in the Elite Eight. Billy Donovan has two titles (n 2005 and 2006), but two NIT berths hurt his candidacy.

But if Self has had a better decade (considerably) than Coach K, why do we keep hearing about Coach K’s talents while Self is mostly ignored? Krzyzewski has clearly earned the benefit of the doubt but like the late Dean Smith before him, a lack of relative success late in his career has been largely ignored by the media. Ther aren’t any stories wondering why Duke can’t win first-round games. Coach K gets treated like it’s 2002 and his teams are always Final Four bound. And maybe he’s earned it. It’s not as if Duke is playing in the NIT every other year. It’s still the destination for top high-school recruits and a contender every March.

Still, Kansas has had the better decade-long run, even though its experienced flameouts too. That goes with something we wrote about Smith earlier this week: the NCAA tournament is really, really hard. It’s basically a crapshoot. What happens in the madness of March makes not a great coach. The best coaches do it in the regular season, during offseason workouts, in team meetings and in preparation. What happens on the court sometimes in March is often a coin-flip. Catch Bucknell on a day when the Bison aren’t missing and what are you going to do?

So, it’s not necessarily unfair to praise K while ignoring Self. Coach K has been doing this for more than 30 years. One decade of supremacy doesn’t make Bill Self a better basketball coach than Mike Krzyzewski. Maybe one day he will be, but for now he’ll just have to settle for best current coach in the country. This whole comparison was just an interesting way to look at the numbers and show how the power of perception and the importance of media coverage shapes our views of players, teams and coaches.