  While the idea of using the operator product expansion (OPE) to extract the
strong coupling from hadronic $\tau$ decay data is not new, there is an ongoing
controversy over how to include quark-hadron "duality violations" (i.e.,
resonance effects) which are not described by the OPE. One approach attempts to
suppress duality violations enough that they might become negligible, but pays
the price of an uncontrolled OPE truncation. We critically examine a recent
analysis using this approach and show that it fails to properly account for
non-perturbative effects, making the resulting determination of the strong
coupling unreliable. In a different approach duality violations are taken into
account with a model, avoiding the OPE truncation. This second approach
provides a self-consistent determination of the strong coupling from $\tau$
decays.
