Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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victories as the Irish can muster in this year ���s postseason tournaments, has put his blue-collar stamp on the program. Television analysts and fans of opposing teams never let the physical comparison to former Notre Dame star Luke Harangody die, but folks in the know understand how Cooley chiseled out his own identity in South Bend. how much the two resembled each other physically. ���My freshman year, I said Harangody is great at what he does, but I���m going to try and be great at a different type of thing,��� Cooley said. When Colley was a youngster, his father showed him a video of Charles Barkley eloquently explaining the art of rebounding. (12.5 points per contest), rebounding average (8.9 per game) and blocks (52) en route to the Big East Conference���s Most Improved Player award. Every aspect of his improving game, Cooley said, hinged on his appetite for getting his mitts on ricochets. ���There are a lot of little tricks in there and I can���t tell you all those,��� he explained. ���You just have to ���He has never tried to reinvent himself as a player or think he had to do more because it���s going to help him professionally. He knows who he is.��� Head coach Mike Brey on Cooley Whereas Harangody was a prolific scorer (more than 20 points per game through his final three seasons) and could occasionally take defenders off the dribble from the elbow, Cooley has been most effective getting the ball on the move with good angles to the basket and has never really been the offensive focal point. He���s collected most of his points via cleaning up on the glass, and his often bruise-covered body is proof of how much more he wants the ball than his opponents. Yet most folks couldn���t resist pointing out just ���I always laugh when people ask me about rebounding techniques,��� Barkley said in the interview. ���I���ve got a technique. It���s called just go get the damn ball.��� That persistence is what got the 6-9, 246-pound Cooley rolling as a sophomore in 2010-11, when he appeared in all 34 games and averaged 3.7 points and 3.1 rebounds per game while shooting 65.6 percent from the field. He followed that up with a breakout junior campaign, when the first-year starter led the Irish in scoring average have a feel for the game, what time of the game it is, how tired people are, where shots are going to go after misses, which of your teammates are shooting and how the ball comes off the rim. There are a lot of things you have to think about quickly in order to get where you think the ball is going to go.��� Cooley went from a reliable player as a junior to a dominant one this season, earning a spot on the All-Big East first team March 10. He was the only Big East player to average double figures in both scoring (10.6) and