May 22, 2013
It is a proudly wonky place, American University. The private school in Washington built a marketing campaign around the term, infusing "wonk" with cool, turning a word with a nerdy connotation into a badge of honor for life's delvers and grinders - studious folks preoccupied with the arcane details of a particular field.
In that sense, AU had the perfect basketball coach the past 13 seasons.
Jeff Jones, hired from the school last month to be the coach at Old Dominion, might not be a classic wonk, but he has some tendencies.