ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

The 20 new idea books to kick off 2018 (Linked In)

1. When by Daniel Pink

2. Powerful by Patty McCord

3. Great at Work by Morten Hansen

4. Rise and Grind by Daymond John

5. The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle

6. Big Potential by Shawn Anchor

7. Endure by Alex Hutchinso

8. Cringeworty by Melissa Dahl

9. That’s What She Said by Joanne Lipman

10. A Second Chance by Catherine Hoke

11. Truth by Hector Macdonald

12. The CEO Next Door by Elena Botelho and Kim Powell

13. Just the Funny Parts by Nell Scovell

14. In Defense of Troublemakers by Charlan Nemeth

15. Meltdown by Chris Clearfield and Andras Tilcsik

16. Dying for a paycheck by Jeffery Pfeffer

17. Alive at Work by Dan Cable

18. The Opposite of Hate by Sally Kohn

19. Creative Quest by Questlove

20. Unsafe Thinking by Jonah Sachs

21. Us vs. Them by Ian Bremmer

Quotes

-Arrogance suffocates intelligence.

-Fate whispers to the warriors, “You cannot withstand the storm.” The warrior whispers back, “I am the storm.”

ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

Nick Saban, Alabama

“Arrogance creates a blatant disregard for doing things right.”

Chip Kelly, UCLA

-“I believe football is about three things: I believe it’s about relationships, friendships, and championships.”

James Bettcher: The Quiet Candidate (SI.com)

-Bettcher listened. “You have to,” says the 39-year-old, reflecting back earlier this season. “I’ve learned that lesson, sometimes the hard way. You have this preconception of this scheme or thatscheme. But sometimes what you do best overrides what the best scheme is. In-game, hearing what guys are saying coming off the field and having those conversations, that’s important.”

-Bettcher’s players praise his passion and personality, but where they really perk up is in extolling his schematic prowess. More than anything, players want coaches who put them in the best tactical position to succeed; motivation and team chemistry follow naturally from there.

-But over time, Jones realized something. “Yeah, the ball might be getting out faster, but

[Bettcher] is getting me more one-on-one matchups. He knows his X’s and O’s. He knows.

He knows how to formulate and contort the defense so that his best players can get the best matchups possible. He really knows how to highlight players.”

Routed by its bitter rival, Louisville is a program in search of an identity (The Athletic)

-“Nick Richards just came down the lane with 12 seconds left and dunked and nobody knocked him on his f – – – – – – ass,’’ the coach said. “It’s like the bully on the playground. When is it time to stand up to him? We’ve got to change our team DNA. I love you guys to death, and this has been the thrill of a lifetime. But you’re almost too nice sometimes. We need to find an identity.’’ ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

-TOUGHNESS. That was the lone word written on the whiteboard in the video room at the

Cardinals’ on-campus practice facility. It also was a theme Padgett would come back to frequently in the 24 hours leading up to tip-off against Kentucky.

Did Nick Saban create the next Nick Saban? (ESPN.com)

-"I kept telling everybody, 'Hey, guys, everybody is congratulating us about this recruiting class and telling us how great we are, but we're practicing for Oklahoma,'" Georgia coach Kirby Smart said. "Oklahoma isn't hearing about how great their recruiting class was. They're getting ready for us. We had coaches running around with cellphones talking to recruits. I told them, 'Shut it down.

Get your [rear] in there and make sure this practice is right, or none of this is going to matter.'"

-"I worked for him for 10 years and never realized how hard that seat is until I did it," Smart said.

"You take it for granted when you're working for him. When you did your job and did your job to the fullest, he wasn't ranting and raving at you. He was driven. He wanted to win. We had that in common."

-"I think sometimes guys get a little too enamored with titles," Saban said. "I think the most important thing is: Can you win? Are you going to win? Do you have stability and the opportunity to do that in whatever job you're in?"

-"That's probably why you hear my voice is hoarse right now," Smart said. "I'm trying to make sure they understand that you can't acknowledge the pats on the back. You can't embrace that. You can't feel good about yourself. Winning the SEC championship is a great honor, and they'll have that for a long time. It will be on these walls for a long time, but they can't be satisfied."

Yes, Notre Dame is playing at Delaware. But, no, Mike Brey hasn't lost it (The Athletic)

-So when his old employer went looking for a new coach in spring of 2016, Brey had some juice and he used it. He stumped for Ingelsby, a Notre Dame player-turned-assistant coach who was primed for the opportunity to run his own program. But Brey did not come bearing only a recommendation. As a sweetener, he told Delaware athletics director Christine Rawak that he’d bring the Fighting Irish to a game in the Blue Hens’ gym if she hired Ingelsby. ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

Why is Georgia the new Alabama? Kirby Smart’s spin on Nick Saban’s ‘process’ could be a game-changer (Yahoo Sports)

-In December of 2015, new Georgia coach Kirby Smart met with his team for the first time. He held his fingers one inch apart, explaining how close they’d been under former coach Mark Richt to playing at the highest levels of football. Smart promised the Bulldogs he’d teach them how to traverse that inch, the gulf between excellent and elite, that Georgia’s teams could never quite navigate.

-Managing and efficiently using all the information available is the genius behind Smart’s process.

There’s nearly a dozen student workers in an office known as the Dog Pound that watch tape, set up mailings and serve as do-it-all gophers to help coaches recruit better. (There’s incentives like

Starbucks gift cards and dinner at Five Bar for weekly challenges like uncovering the best unknown recruit.) There’s more than 30 workers from the R.O.S.E. Society who work to put together personalized communication and help on recruiting visits. (They use a color printer the size of a

Star Wars transport.) There’s a director of recruiting, director of player personnel coordinator, a graphics department (with interns), a digital media department (with interns) and even an employee focused just on the transcripts and academics of individual recruits. “I hate comparisons,” said Mel Tucker, Georgia’s defensive coordinator who worked at Alabama before joining Smart’s staff, “but the platform is similar. We try and be unique in what we do and how we do it. It’s really about the people and personal interactions.”

-And many of those revolved around Smart’s philosophy of personalized recruiting – invitations to games through graphics via direct messages on Twitter, a focus on assistant coaches directly contacting prospects every day and enough mailings with personalized graphics to kill half of the

Amazon rain forest. “We all have great weight rooms, we all have great things like that in the SEC, it’s about what makes you different,” Smart said. “That’s the relationship building.”

Paulo Coelho

-Patience is not about waiting, but how we at when things take longer than we expect.

ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

Among former Saban assistants, Kirby Smart may be closest thing to the original (SI.com)

- In the days after a 40–17 loss at Auburn on Nov. 11, Georgia players heard the same message whether they were eating dinner at their training table, bench-pressing in the weight room or doing homework in study hall. The season isn’t over. All of your goals remain in front of you. Beating Kentucky is all that matters. Second-year coach Kirby Smart and strength coach Scott Sinclair had begun formulating that refrain the night of that loss, the

Bulldogs’ first of 2017. Smart honed it after he met with his staff. To make sure every athletic department employee who interacted with the players knew what to say, the word went out to all department heads: No one was to dwell on the defeat in the presence of the players.

-Why does Smart care what the person serving chicken breasts or the academic advisor says to his Bulldogs? “What’s really been important in the success of the places I’ve been is that the message came clear and direct and everybody understood that,” says Smart, whose team responded with three straight wins to close out the season, the last of which indeed kept their goal of a national title in front of them.

-When Smart accepted the job, McGarity didn’t issue marching orders. He asked questions.

What did Smart now need from the administration to build a championship program? “He needed to educate us,” McGarity says, “about what it meant to go big-time.” In other words,

Georgia wanted to Sabanize.’

-The coach must clearly define everyone’s role in the organization and then hold employees accountable when they don’t deliver. According to people who have worked with Smart and

Richt, this was a major issue at the tail end of the Richt era. “Nobody wants to hold people to the fire,” Smart says. “They just want wins.”

-To build a program like Saban’s requires expertise in four key components: Recruiting,

Management style, Schematic flexibility, Inspired hiring and deft managements of staff churn.

Matt Rhule, Baylor Football

-Process isn’t a word, it’s an action. ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

Painful changes give Notre Dame a ‘first coat of paint’ (ESPN.com)

- It took necessary but painful changes from Kelly to the staff to the schemes to the players. The result was a more cohesive, more opportunistic, tougher team that rose to No. 3 nationally after a splendid October, only to have reality set in during November. Notre Dame didn’t end up with a playoff spot, but it emerged with a stable foundation after a gut-rehab. “There’s different work to be done now,” Kelly told ESPN.com. “If I could be as basic as saying this was the first coat of paint, using that analogy, we now really can get into some detailed work with our football team. That’s what will be exciting.”

-“Badass dudes who came in here ready to change and bring this place back to where it’s supposed to be,” senior offensive tackle Mike McGlinchey said. “The first time you hear Matt Balis speak, you know what this guy’s about. He’s an intense, fiery, passionate dude. This is his dream school, his dream job. “The mindset that those coordinators had going into this year was infectious on every player.”

Butch Davis has provided the rejuvenation FIU was seeking (ESPN.com)

-“People say, ‘Wow, Coach, these new guys they really turned it around!’ but you look at the depth chart this year versus the depth chart a year ago and it’s a lot of the same guys,” Davis said of

Gardner and his teammates. “What’s that tell you? The talent was here to make that happen. I knew that as soon as I saw them, and I told them that.”

After incredible rise, Wisconsin’s Jonathan Taylor plans to keep on going (ESPN.com)

-Taylor was able to spend a couple days with Love and Barkley while in Atlanta earlier this month for an awards show. He said the red-carpet treatment was nice, but he thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to pick the brains of his older counterparts. “Both of them told me you better make sure you never get complacent,” he said. “Because as soon as you get complacent you’ll start to see a decline.”

ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

Patrick Beverley just said that (The Ringer)

-A goals board is exactly what it sounds like: a board with some goals written on it. Beverley has a set of them. One goals board is for basketball-specific things (Make the Playoffs; Be a Good

Teammate; Shoot 40 Percent From 3; Make an All-Defensive Team), and the other is for just general human-specific things (like being a better father, better family member, etc.). In 2013, he wrote “Make an All-Defensive Team” on his goals board for the first time. Ten months later, he was selected to his first All-Defensive Team. He skipped writing that specific goal down for 2014-15 and 2015-16, and in both of those years he missed it. He added it back before the 2016-17 season, and at the end of it, he was selected again

-You know the thing where, when you wake up in the morning, you brush your teeth in the bathroom while you stare at yourself in the mirror and wonder about all sorts of things, like maybe about how your day will go or whether or not a piece of your face is oddly shaped? Patrick

Beverley does that, too, except he doesn’t stare at himself in the mirror, because he uses that time to stare at his goals boards instead. He literally just stares at them. Brushing and staring, brushing and staring, brushing and staring. And he doesn’t wonder about all sorts of things. He only thinks about the goals, and the things he’ll need to do to accomplish them, and how he will refuse to let anybody prevent him from accomplishing them. Which is probably why he is in the NBA and you are not.

-It’s a thing that he asked for, but it’s also a thing that’s terrifying. And of course, all of this is exacerbated by the fact that he is replacing one of the seven greatest point guards in the history of basketball. “You’re supposed to have that feeling, though,” he says. “You’re supposed to wanna run away from it. The running away is the extra work. The extra running, the extra lifting, the extra shots. That’s how you run away from the fear: by outworking it.”

Tum Tum reminds new No. 1 MSU: ‘Keep your edge’ (Detroit News)

-“Most of these guys have never been ranked No. 1 in college, and most of our players, especially our best players, are sophomores,” Nairn said after practice Tuesday. “So, in every situation like ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

this, the biggest thing is to keep your edge and remember who you are and just continue to play like you’re nobody. This will continue to help us be on the quest for being our best every day.”

Unspeakable tragedy gives way to unbeatable basketball for Ball State (IndyStar.com)

-But the tragedy, nobody saw that coming. Tall young men in black suits, slowly circling a casket. A letter from Connecticut. An empty locker. Used to be, when the Cardinals came together as a team, they’d huddle around their coach and scream two words: “All in!” That was before Aug. 22,

2017. Now, when they surround their coach and break the huddle, they say one word, and they don’t scream. They say: “Family.” But when the coach isn’t there, when it’s just the players, they huddle and say another word. It is their heartbreak, and their motivation: Hollywood.

-“There are days you go to bed at night, you don’t give a rat’s ass how many games you win,”

Whitford was saying Tuesday night in his office, less than an hour after Ball State has rallied to win its MAC opener 72-62 against Eastern Michigan. “This is about trying to help everybody recover.

This is about trying to keep our team together. This is about making sure Zach’s family feels respected through the process, gets the questions answered that they want to have answered. If that was my son …”

Michigan State's leader, 'Tum Tum' Nairn, 'maybe the greatest teammate ever' (USA Today)

-But the key to another national title under Tom Izzo might be Nairn, a senior who started 30 games last season and led the Big Ten in assist-to-turnover ratio. Though he will never be an offensive threat in the way Bridges is — and he came off the bench in MSU’s first game behind sophomore guard Cassius Winston — Nairn is making a push to graduate as the best leader in the

Izzo era, a distinction typically awarded to former All-Americans Mateen Cleaves and Draymond

Green.

-Green spent the summer before Nairn’s freshman season working out in East Lansing, and was struck by how Nairn pushed his teammates from day one—and how they respected him immediately. “As a freshman, you don’t come in with that mentality of, ‘I’m out in front of everything. I am the voice. I am the motivation. I am the hardest worker,’” Green says. “You saw that ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

(leadership quality) all the time. you saw it in workouts in the gym when he was the one pushing everybody. He’s the one bringing all the energy to the workout ... then you also saw it in the weight room. Like, this dude is jumping around, flying around the weight room, making sure guys are doing what they’re supposed to be doing, flying around the weight room motivating guys to get two extra reps. It’s things like that that may seem so small, but those things go a long way. Those things are the difference between being good and great…It was special to watch.”

-That’s clear to anyone who watches Michigan State practice. Amid thumping music and a flurry of activity, it’s Nairn’s voice that stands out, screaming and hollering, cheering on his teammates. He slaps the floor when the Spartans need a defensive stop, signaling it’s time to lock down. He applauds freshmen and challenges veterans, celebrating each small success. After Izzo chews out a player who shies away from attacking the rim, Nairn is there, whispering encouragement. The next possession, when that player explodes from the perimeter to the hoop and slams home a dunk,

Nairn is there again, beating his teammate’s chest and slapping him on the back, telling him he can dominate anytime he wants.

-Besides being “maybe the greatest teammate ever,” Izzo says Nairn’s value is found off the floor.

Acknowledging that Nairn is “a good player, not a great player,” he most appreciates that because of Nairn, “Our locker room is always stable.”

-A great leader, according to Nairn, is someone who’s extremely self-disciplined and self- motivated. “You have to be a servant first,” says Nairn, who plans to be a pastor whenever his basketball career is over. “And you have to meet people where they are — you can’t talk to different people with different skills the same way.” This explains his light-handed touch with newcomers vs. his intense approach with upperclassmen.

-That’s the one thing missing from Nairn’s résumé: a national championship. When Nairn called

Izzo to commit, he told the Hall of Fame coach he planned to leave East Lansing with a national title. To do that this season, he’ll have to continue to be comfortable using what he says is the greatest lesson Nairn has learned under Izzo: how to lead your best friends. Calling out your best friends when their work ethic isn’t up to snuff is no picnic, Nairn says. But it’s worth it, because that leads to group celebrations, instead of individual achievement. ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

Boston Celtics news: Brad Stevens explains why he doesn't overreact to foul trouble (Mass Live)

-Why does Stevens eschew commonly held beliefs about foul trouble? The coach's philosophy dates back to his time as a player and has as much to do with game flow as anything else. "I hated as a player worrying about getting a foul or breaking a rhythm of coming out," Stevens said Thursday night before a game against the New York Knicks. "And I didn't always -- I wasn't probably leading the league in fouls."

-Stevens believes the benefits of leaving a player on the court outweigh the risk that the player will eventually pick up enough fouls for the issue to matter. For a long time, coaches have been yanking players off the court to preserve playing time, but sometimes they end up doing the opposite -- artificially limiting minutes by worrying about fouls a player may or may not ever commit.

-"You know it's funny, I think every time you go to a clinic or a retreat, my favorite thing are when people start questioning the norm," he said. "And I remember hearing Jeff Van Gundy talk about this a long time ago. Jeff said, sometimes as coaches, we take people out because we don't want to get criticized for not taking them out. And I think that that's something that's probably true to an extent. Mine goes back more to like, I just think you can break a rhythm of a player if you bring him in and out of a game."

-Further explaining his history dealing with foul trouble, Stevens recalled, "I had some guys in my years at Butler that we really had to make those decisions with. And obviously some guys are more prone to fouling again than others. But I'd almost personally rather roll the dice on a rhythm and keeping a rhythm of a game and then figuring it out later than trying to then manage the game just because of a guy's got two fouls in the first quarter or three fouls in a half or whatever. They still have three more to go to foul out so usually that's been the plan of attack.

We haven't a ton of guys foul out anyways. Obviously, Al did (earlier this week)."

Steve Kerr, Golden State Warriors

-Mic’d Up: “Let’s discern the difference between a great shot and a decent one. Let’s get great shots.” ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

Kenny Atkinson shares ‘scary’ similarities with this NBA coach (New York Post)

-“It changed my coaching life. I learned a ton about culture, a ton about basketball in general. Bud was a great mentor. I copied, stole a lot of things [from Budenholzer],” Atkinson conceded. “That’s the biggest compliment, just how we run our program.”

-“Same thing they did in Atlanta. … You get high character guys in a great system. You plug them in, you get good results. I feel like that’s kind of the same method Sean brought from San Antonio and Kenny brought from Atlanta.”

Is Dave Toub the best coordinator you’ve never heard of? (SI.com)

-Here’s a dull story about a simple conversation: When Dave Toub first became a special teams coordinator in 2004 with the Chicago Bears, he walked up to longsnapper Patrick

Mannelly and asked him how he did what he did. Fourteen years later, the coach’s approach still resonates with Mannelly. Toub was inquisitive without exposing his naiveté (after all, most special teams coordinators were never kickers, punters or snappers). He resisted the urge to tell Mannelly what he should be doing differently. He was genuine and he was interested.

-First impressions are everything for a new coach and Mannelly, who has appeared in more

Bears games than any player in franchise history, noted that Toub didn’t come across as trying to be someone he wasn’t. There was no gimmick or shtick. He wanted to coach football—eventually lead his own NFL team—and his philosophy was simple: Learn how to motivate your players collectively and individually. Always let people know where they stand.

-“Everybody wants to get the offensive minded guy to come in and coach up their quarterback, but at the same time good head coaches aren’t must good offensive minds and good defensive minds. Good head coaches, they manipulate the whole building,”

Cowher said. “They provide direction, they provide structure. They provide accountability.

And that’s what you want out of a special teams coordinator anyway.” ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

-As the league gets younger and rosters churn at a higher rate than ever before, they wonder what will serve a team best—someone with a reputation for coaching good quarterbacks, who won’t be able to spend all their time with quarterbacks anyway, or someone who can have a simple, boring conversation with just about anyone and leave them remembering it more than a decade later? Here’s the thing: So many NFL regimes, the

Giants being the latest, came to an end because those talks weren't happening; because the quarterback guru stayed with the quarterback instead of learning something about the other 52 players on his team.

Fran Fraschilla on Chris Beard

-Attention to detail to what Kansas was going to do (offensively and defensively)

-Sign on their bench: LOBS/BACKDOORS

-No lobs or backdoors out of timeouts

-Piped noise in their arena during their walk-through (crowd noise – music – crowd music)

-Shootaround culture

-Practiced running their offense away from their bench

Walter Isaacson on Steve Jobs

-I once asked Steve Jobs, often mistakenly considered a lone visionary and authoritarian leader, which of his creations made him most proud. I thought he might say the original Macintosh, or the iPhone. Instead he pointed out that these were all collaborative efforts. The creations he was most proud of, he said, were the teams he had produced, starting with the original Macintosh team working under a pirate flag in the early 1980s and the remarkable team he had assembled by the time he stepped down from Apple in 2011.

Jeff Van Gundy. ESPN

-You have to have an element of 3-point shooting that not only gives you some 3-point shots, but also space for your attackers or playmakers. ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

Dabo Swinney

-Football, to me, is just the unique opportunity to have a pathway into their lives. I want them to truly love their experience, and not just be a football player, but to grow and be a person of excellence that just happens to be a good football player, too. And my philosophy is: If we develop them that way, football will take care of itself because they create habits of excellence that carries over.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon

-If you think you’re good at course-correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.”

-Being slow is usually more expensive than being wrong.

How Kirby Smart got Georgia this far this fast (ESPN.com)

-"The cancer to life is complacency," he said. "And I'm not saying we got complacent at Georgia, but some things were being done that were just good enough and we weren't exceeding the expectations. And I'll be the first to admit it because I was a part of it.”

-"Kirby is a very, very high-energy, very intense -- he loves football," Georgia defensive coordinator

Mel Tucker said. "He's always trying to find a way to make it better for the players, always trying to find a way to find a competitive advantage."

Michael Lombardi, The Ringer

-Winning in the playoffs is all about whether you can win when someone forces you to play left- handed (challenging you to play to your weaknesses).

Kyle Smith, San Francisco

-You can only have one guy who can’t shoot on the court at at a time.

ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

The Basketball Vagabond: Texas Tech’s Chris Beard is thriving after returning to his roots

(NBC Sports)

-“I had an opportunity to take a step back and reflect on what I wanted to do,” Beard told NBC

Sports in an interview last week. “I’m not a guy that was going to go do TV or anything like that. I’m not good looking enough. But I knew I wanted to stay involved in basketball.”

-“We have success and people reach out,” Beard says. The truth is that Beard, who has Texas Tech in the top ten of the AP Poll in just his second season in charge, was coaching at a level that was beneath him all of those years, and when a better job – with better pay, better players and a better chance at winning – comes along, he took it. Most people in most professions would do no different. And for Beard, the real point of pride is in how he left the previous school. “Each time I’ve moved, one of my assistants has gotten the head coaching job,” Beard said. “Everybody benefited.

I would like to think that if you talked to any of those jobs – South Carolina Warriors, McMurry,

Angelo State, Little Rock – they would tell you the program is in better shape when I left than when

I came in. I’m really proud of that.”

-After last week’s win in Lawrence, Beard got onto the Texas Tech bus and sat next to his assistant,

Max Lefevre, who has been a member of Beard’s staff since 2013, when Beard was at Angelo State.

“No disrespect to Kansas,” Beard said, “this is what it felt like when we beat Tarleton State…My girlfriend now is a high school volleyball coach,” Beard told me, “and I tell her that her season is just the same as mine. It’s all relative. When she has a big game it’s just like if we’re paying Texas or

Baylor. When you’re a competitor and you’re in competition, the level doesn’t matter. The moment does.”

Randy Bennett, St.Mary’s

-Seal set:

ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

Vikings stun Saints (MMQB.com)

-But the joy was cool to see. I asked Mike Zimmer what it was about football that caused so many coaches and so many teams to latch onto the no-respect angle, or the thought that no one gave them a chance. It seems so natural with this team. “I think it's even not so much football,” he said. “I think it's sports. All sports. They see all your deficiencies and the guys that end up making it are the guys that keep their nose to the grindstone and keep fighting, keep trying to figure out a way. That's a little bit like our team. No one thought we were going to be any good. I know you guys didn't pick us very good going into the year. But we have a bunch of fighters in that locker room, guys that will compete. I said to Harrison Smith yesterday in practice, ‘Are you afraid of these guys?’ He said, ‘I am afraid of everybody.

That's why I play good.’ That's how our team is.”

-“We got guys, taken late or free agents,” Diggs said after a while. “We got so much to prove. Adam Thielen? Come on now. Guy’s got so much much to prove every day, every play. We got a group of those guys with things to prove daily. We’re all the same. With us, every play matters. I believe that’s why we can make plays like we made today.”

Bruce Arians: On Bear Bryant, the long ball, and why the game should survive (MMQB.com)

-On the Cardinals’ culture: We put something on our shirts, given to the players, that we live by: Trust, loyalty, respect. Everything that happens in our locker room is amongst us. No one knows our business, and no one interferes with our business. Outside noise … nothing matters, and we keep things in-house. People lose mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers. People might get in trouble, and it stays inside. I heard two or three guys were asked point blank about my situation after that last game, and they lied about it. They were protecting the team, like we always do.

-On what he’ll miss the most: The players. Those relationships, watching guys grow. From the Andrew Lucks to the Ricky Seals-Joneses … the great players, and then the guys that have no chance and they work and improve and then they can play with the guys that are great. You miss that. That’s what I’ve done for my whole life so I’ll miss that. ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

-I will miss the players, I will miss the coaches. The game, I think the game and me, we owe each other nothing. We’re even.

Tireless work ethic propels Oladipo up NBA Draft rankings (Orlando Sentinel)

-Similiar anecdotes about Oladipo's work ethic abound. A case-in-point: He visited the Hoosiers' practice facility so often during his Indiana tenure that he wore out his ID card's magnetic strip and needed to have the card replaced.

-"He really worked as hard as he possibly could, and if the gym was going to be open, you knew you could count on Victor being there," Jones said. "He kind of became like the Pied Piper. When

Victor worked out, other guys wanted to work out, too. His outlook and his approach are definitely contagious."

-"He never takes a day off," Hoosiers coach Tom Crean once said of Oladipo.

-"I feel like I've got a lot of potential to be really great," Oladipo said. "So I've just got to keep working in order for that dream and for that goal to come true. I'm just going to stay in the gym and keep working hard and play with whoever my future teammates might be."

The secret of Spencer Dinwiddie’s success (The Ringer)

-“He’s got a little bravado about him, which is fine,” said Atkinson, who attributes Dinwiddie’s performance to the hard work he put in during the offseason. “That’s what the good players have.

When you shake his hand before the game, he’s coming to work. He’s not saying, ‘Oh, jeez, I’m a little timid about playing Kyrie Irving or all those other big-time guards.’ I think the challenge to become a starter in this league is to do it consistently. He’s put his finger through the ceiling of development; now he’s trying to punch it with his fist.”

-“When you see a lot of really good guards in the NBA, their change of pace is what separates them,” Harris said. “Spencer is really good at creating space. His first step is really quick. Oh, man.

He does this kinda hesitation when guys are on him, and honestly, it’s really hard for some of the quickest guys and best defenders in the league to stay with him.” ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

-When the subject of opportunity comes up, Dinwiddie is reflective, sounding more like a life coach than a player. “You have to be on the floor. You have to be allowed to fail. Bron had 10 points the other day and they got blown out. But nobody is gonna sit here and say, ‘Maybe they need to make a change, maybe they need to move on from LeBron James, guys.’ But, often times, that’s how it works for guys who are in that tumultuous situation. How are you going to build consistency if you aren’t given consistency?”

Jon Gruden to Case Keenum

-In 2012: Does the draft matter? All it takes is one coach that believes you. Make a note: be ready, just be ready. You’ll get your chance.

-Keenum went undrafted.

Frank Martin, South Carolina

-My responsibility to them is to teach them how to act like a man so they can succeed because that’s what I promised their parents when they sit in their houses. I don’t promise their parents

NCAA Tournaments, I don’t promise their parents playing time. I promise their parents that I’m always going to be a part of their lives when they need me. When they’re 10 years removed from being Gamecocks…as far as wearing the uniform…I’m still responsible for helping them with the things they need. My job is to help prepare them for that.”

Offseason Watch

-IPFW offense

-Manhattan versus Siena – Manhattan hurt Siena on BLOBs (Siena traps ballside pass) – M Henry

-Belmont offense

Stats

-Mount St. Mary’s gets 40 shots per game out of the pick & roll (handler, spot-ups + rolls). Next closest is 34. Look at this in the offseason. ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

Ryan Leaf (Monday Morning Quarterback)

-Pride was my career down-fall.

-How many of you would want to be a backup for 12-15 years? Every single person I asked that raised their hands. My pride wouldn’t let me be the backup quarterback. My pride killed me.

Jim Calhoun

-No one worked at his craft more than Ray Allen.

-You have to let everyone know where they fight in the program. I convinced Jake Voskul he was the greatest screen-setter in the world.

Quotes

-The past is a place of reference, not a place of residence. The past is a place of learning, not a place of living.”

Patriots on losing coordinators: “The culture is built” (Pro Football Talk)

-“The culture is built,” Patriots safety Duron Harmon said. “The culture is built. This is two decades of winning. A winning franchise. Coach Belichick is going to make sure whoever is in the defensive room is going to be the right guy to display the message and the picture that he wants his defense to play with. That goes through the defensive coordinator, whoever he hires.”

-“Whenever you’re trying to get something done professionally, to be able to have consistent leadership and foundation upon which to build is important,” Patriots special teams captain

Matthew Slater said. “A consistent message, understanding what you’re trying to get done. And we’re fortunate not only with Josh but obviously Coach Belichick and the rest of our coaching staff.

That consistency with the character of the coach, with the message of the coach, with what he demands of you is important because it helps set a standard. And then when players come in you say, ‘OK this is what’s expected of me and anything less is not going to be good enough.”

ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

The Art of Scheduling (College Insiders)

-“When I got the job at Notre Dame, coach Brey told me you want to be successful in this business remember three things,” Ingelsby said. “‘Recruiting, Scheduling and Recruiting.’ If you’re good at those three things you have a chance.”

What hot seat? Tim Miles is trying to turn things around at Nebraska in his unique, entertaining way (The Athletic)

- He moved from one level to the next, climbing the ranks on his own merit and hustle, leaving each place better than he found it. “He’s always carried himself, I’ll quote him, as a career middle reliever,” says Phillips. “I’m just going to plug away. I’m going to put in a lot of years. I’m going to get this done one way or the other. He’s always at his best when his back is against the wall.

That’s always the way it’s been.”

-He knows some of it has been of his own doing. At Nebraska, he knew he had to recruit differently, so he took some calculated gambles. “I made the decision early we were going to take length and athleticism so that we could guard, and we just didn’t have enough skill,” Miles says.

“We’ve always felt like if we can get them enough reps, we can improve them. We just haven’t done that well enough. Whether I guessed wrong — like I think that kid will be able to do it — or I just didn’t have enough shooting, or we just had some bad luck.”

-Miles was not himself. He gave up Twitter. He used to tell his players he could not have a bad day, but he let long losing streaks get to him. White’s departure was a major blow. Injuries piled up.

There was no follow-through on some contract updates Miles was expecting. “I think I coached angry for a year,” he says. “I really do. All of these things were adding up. When a player is under stress and making mistakes in a game, he internalizes and kind of shuts down. I think that happened to me.”

-His early teams at Nebraska played that way too, but as the game has shifted to prioritizing an analytical shot breakdown — 3s and layups — he has coached his teams to chase opponents off the

3-point line. “You’ve got to track it down like a hound dog when a guy gets the pass to get into his shot,” Miles says. “You’ve got to be above the ball. We talk about, what a contest looks like. I think ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

the NBA has it if you’re within three feet, like no way. You need to be within three inches. Get there!”

Belichick and Saban: The stores behind football’s most powerful friendship (MMQB.com)

-This was in the late 1980s, summertime; they were both a couple years away from turning

40, and neither man’s name meant then what it does today. Nick Saban flew in from

Houston, where he coached the Oilers’ defensive backs. Bill Belichick, then the Giants’ defensive coordinator, drove up from New Jersey with 16-millimeter film canisters and a projector stashed in his car. They were two assistants from opposing teams, planning to spend the weekend discussing the intricacies of the Cover-2 defense. The rendezvous might have gotten either man fired had their bosses found out about it, so it was conducted with a stealth more befitting of the military academy down the road.

-Their secret mission turned into one of the most significant friendships in football, one based around the very thing that brought them to that hotel in West Point: the realization that they didn’t have all the answers, and a shared obsession to find them. “We are like we are because of that,” says Saban. “We’re always trying to learn, to improve the way we do things.”

-Saban had only been in Annapolis a few months, but he’d made an impression. He was intense, he was vocal, he was detail-oriented—all the reasons head coach Gary Tranquill, who’d worked with him previously at West Virginia, had hired him. Saban’s job was to coach the secondary, but his coaching points often spilled over to other positions. Saban has always seen the big picture of the defense, how all the positions work together. When coaching his safeties on responsibilities in coverage or run fits, he’d end up working with the linebackers, too.

-“It wasn't just the secondary, which was his forte,” Belichick says. “He knew what the nose guard was doing, and he knew what the quarterback was reading. He knew how receivers adjusted routes based on coverage. He understood all the components of the game, and ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

that was very interesting for me. Because I saw the game that way myself; that everything kind of affects something else.”

-Saban had spent a year as the head coach at Toledo, and for all of his and Belichick’s like- mindedness, they’d been running very different schemes. With the Giants Belichick used a

3-4, two-gap front, primed for run-stuffing, with mainly Cover-2 zone on the back end.

Saban, meanwhile, had learned from George Perles at Michigan State the stunt 4-3, an attacking front made famous by the Steel Curtain, and he favored man to-man coverage.

This led to an early lesson in what has been a pillar for both coaches: Be rigid in fundamentals and techniques, but flexible in scheme.

-Riddick was starting just his second game of the year. Earlier that season, playing the

“money” linebacker spot in the dime defense—terminology Saban uses today at Alabama— he’d blown some assignments. On one play, he read the release of the back wrong, and gave up a third-down conversion. Saban reamed him on the sideline and promptly yanked him. Later, Saban came to him privately, and told him he had a choice: You sulk, and I guarantee you’ll never get back on the field. You keep working, and you’ll have the chance to earn it back. In the final game of the regular season, starting safety Stevon Moore went down with an injury. You’re in, Saban told him. “It’s probably the biggest lesson I learned in pro football,” Riddick says.

-“Everybody knows who Bill Belichick is, right?” Saban asked the room, rhetorically. “I worked four years for the guy and the guy is great, organized, but I will tell you one thing he does: He defines what everybody in the organization is supposed to do.”

-Belichick’s Browns established what they called three “critical factors” for every position, the non-negotiable criteria players needed in order to perform the jobs coaches will ask of them. Cornerbacks, for example, needed to be able to tackle, play the ball in the deep part of the field and play man-to-man. They added in height/weight/speed preferences: 6-feet,

180 pounds, run less than 4.5. “The greatest impact for me, even though we stayed friends for a long time, was systemically learning about evaluating personnel for four years,” Saban says. ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

Bill Belichick and Special Teams: A Love Story

-“I think, it’s maybe a little bit like [Tom] Brady. [Stephen Gostkowski] gets a little bit better each year, but he started off at a pretty high level. He’s had a lot of great years for us and individual plays. He continues to work hard at his job, his training, his conditioning, his technique, obviously the execution with his other teammates on field goals. He just becomes a better student of the game, more knowledgeable, more experienced, better situational player. But it’s incremental. It wasn’t like it started at a low point. It started at a pretty high point and it’s gradually ratcheted it up a little bit. You talk about Brady, where he was in ’02, ’03, ’04, he played at a pretty good level but has continued to improve since then too. His work ethic and attention to detail and focus on a lot of little things, but again, it wasn’t the jump that he made his first year, let’s put it that way.”

The Speedy Morris coaching tree is rooted in Philly hoops (Philly.com)

“A lot of things I did as a coach I learned from Speedy,’’ Griffin said. “I can still repeat for you the way he would teach boxing out or defending the drive. I think his concepts of basketball are so fundamental, they’re timeless. They became the foundation for how I taught basketball.”

-Billy Lange got to La Salle at age 27 — “I’m coaching Donnie Carr, Rasual Butler, Victor Thomas — and we are doing the most basic elementary school drills. The first day, Speedy just said to me, assume they know nothing. I’ve grown to understand he wasn’t meaning anything to do with their intelligence.”

-“When you’re his guys, you’re his guys,’’ Keith Morris said.

-“He had an amazing way of giving his best players confidence,’’ Lange said from his Sixers perch.

The Secret History of the Golden State Warriors’ Unstoppable Play (Wall Street Journal)

-The Golden State Warriors call the play Cyclone because they stole it from the Iowa State

Cyclones, who called it Cougar because they stole it from the BYU Cougars, who called it Dribble

High because they stole it from Utah State. It was called Dribble at Utah State because that’s what it ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

was called at Colorado State and Montana, and the guy who called it Dribble would know its name better than anyone.

-But how did something drawn up a long, long time ago eventually make its way to the Warriors? It took an unlikely series of seemingly unrelated heists for this one play to be perfected by one of the best teams in the history of basketball. And not even the people involved fully understood their pivotal roles in the chain that links Morrill to a potential NBA dynasty.

-One summer day in 2015, Steve Kerr was having lunch with Fred Hoiberg. Kerr had recently coached Golden State to a championship, and Hoiberg had recently left his college job for the

Chicago Bulls. They were chatting about basketball strategy when Hoiberg said he’d noticed that the Warriors used one of his plays. Kerr told him they actually named it Cyclone in honor of Iowa

State. That’s when Hoiberg confessed. It wasn’t his play. He’d taken it from BYU coach Dave Rose.

And it wasn’t his play, either. “We’re all thieves in this business,” Hoiberg said.

-Morrill, who retired in 2015 after more than 600 wins at three schools, had a reputation among his peers for this sort of X’s and O’s wizardry. “I love Stew’s stuff,” Hoiberg said. Morrill was a widely respected tactician. There was nothing he enjoyed more than being in his office late at night eating pizza, drinking beer and diagraming plays. “Sometimes it was really good, and sometimes it was really bad,” Morrill said. “Dribble was one of those that was really good.”

-He came up with Dribble all the way back in 1986, his first season as a head coach, while tinkering with his trusty assistant Blaine Taylor. It had everything they wanted in a set play. It was quick. It was deceptive. And it was almost impossible to defend when executed properly.

-Here’s how it works. The play begins with the misdirection of two guards whooshing past each other underneath the basket. One guard (Andre Iguodala below) continues to the wing and catches the first pass as the other guard (Stephen Curry) curls upward and sets a back-screen for a big man (Draymond Green). “There is no play if the guy doesn’t set a bone-crusher,” Morrill said.

Then comes a pass from Iguodala to Green rolling off the Curry pick. If everything goes to plan— the cross, the first pass, the screen and the second precisely timed pass—the finish should be the easiest part. ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

-“We saved it for the second half when the offense was in front of our bench,” Morrill said, “so the other coaches couldn’t call it out.”

-There is a paradox at the heart of Morrill’s play: It turns a shooter into a screener. The play is devastating for the Warriors because Curry becomes a decoy. The only way to disrupt Cyclone is for the defenders to switch when they realize they’re in the eye of the storm. But the problem is that every basketball player on the planet’s instinct is to stick with Curry, and his gravity creates a brief opening for Green to sneak toward the basket after the back-screen for a shot even more valuable than a Curry three. “If you have a good shooter setting that screen, you get layups,”

Hoiberg said.

-Kerr was in television at the time and happened to be assigned Iowa State’s broadcasts in the

NCAA tournament less than a week later. It was clear to anyone who listened to his commentary that Kerr was ready to be a coach, and he’d been quietly building a library of cool plays that he liked. “There’s no patent on this stuff,” Taylor said. Every good idea in basketball is up for grabs.

The culture of sharing among coaches means the smartest thing you can do if you like another team’s play is to plagiarize it.

Doug Novak, Bethel

-The culture of getting better is far more important than any offense or defense. Be faithful to the stuff that matters.

COLUMNS

Raptors 905, Jerry Stackhouse commanding league-wide respect (Raptors Republic)

-One area of the 905 that makes it hard to look at being assigned to the G League as a demotion is the man who stands tall as the head coach. Jerry Stackhouse has brought a work ethic and discipline to the 905 system that pushes players to their limits, and when you’re at that highest point of resistance, that’s when you can achieve growth.

ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

Parker passed torch to Murray before loss against Raptors (San Antonio Express-News)

-Tony Parker received the news before the game from Spurs coach Gregg Popovich. "I think it's time," Popovich said. "No problem," Parker replied. And with that simple exchange, the Spurs unceremoniously made a change at point guard, benching their future Hall of Famer in favor of second-year pro Dejounte Murray.

-"Just like Manu (Ginobili), just like Pau (Gasol), you know that day is going to come," Parker said after the Spurs' 94-86 loss to the Indiana Pacers. "If Pop sees something that is good for the team, I will try to do my best...I will support Pop's decision, and I will try to help DJ as best as I can and try to be the best I can in that second unit with Manu and Patty (Mills)."

Quotes

-“We are all apprentices in a craft that we will never become a master” – Ernest Hemmingway

For Ryan Arcidiacono, it's all about the intangibles (Chicago Tribune)

-As he observed the start of practice Sunday in New Orleans, Bulls executive vice president John

Paxson said: “He fits our culture to a T. Great kid. Tough. You saw that (Saturday) night. Whenever there’s a loose ball, he’s there. He steps up to take a charge. The great thing is, he is paying his dues.”

-“I saw him in that national championship game,” Bulls coach Fred Hoiberg said. “That was fun.

He’s a winner. I talked to his coach quite a bit, Jay Wright. He said the biggest things with Ryan are the intangibles. He will compete every time he steps out on the floor.

-“Jay said you won’t find a better teammate, a tougher kid, a guy who will organize your offense better than Ryan. And he’s exactly right,” Hoiberg said. “To be able to come out after having been away from the team for a long time, and to run our offense the way he did … he’s not a real flashy guy, but he just makes solid basketball plays. And he stepped up with those 3s.”

ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

Nick Saban and Bill Belichick are kindred souls (Boston Globe)

-Saban and Belichick are kindred souls. They’re driven and united by a relentless, uncompromising, seemingly joyless pursuit of excellence.

-Saban credited his time in Cleveland with Belichick for inspiring the gospel that guides the Tide. “I think what we’re trying to say when people talk about the process is there’s a certain way that you go about whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish, and you define that so everybody clearly understands what their role is,” said Saban. “Everybody has got to buy into it, or it doesn’t really work.

-“I probably learned this most from Coach Belichick when I was with him at Cleveland. He was really a well-organized, process-oriented type guy, and was all about putting the players in the best chance to be successful, whether it was personal development, in our case, academics; developing a career off the field; or putting them in the best position to be successful as a player on the field.”

Mike Brey always keeps it loose, even as he nears wins record (Chicago Tribune)

-Brey describes himself as the “loosest coach in America.”

-“He’s never been a yeller or screamer. They know he has their back,” said Rod Balanis, a Notre

Dame assistant for all 18 of Brey’s seasons who played for DeMatha High School in Maryland when

Brey was an assistant there. “Mike’s just comfortable in his own skin. ‘If I get these guys to trust me and to believe in me, we can do some things.’ That formula has worked for him.”

-“We got our energy from him,” said first-year Delaware coach Martin Ingelsby, who played point guard for Brey as a Notre Dame senior in 2000-01 and worked as his assistant from 2003 to

2016. “One day it would be an intense, hard practice; the next day it would be a shooting game or competition. Day before a game, you’re shooting half-court shots and Mike’s out there shooting them with you. It wasn’t a dictatorship. ”

-When Brey recruited Tory Jackson, he was the only coach to visit Jackson outside of a gym or office. At Jackson’s sister’s home in South Saginaw, Mich., Brey ate soul food with a large extended ZAK BOISVERT – JANUARY 2018 COACHING NOTES

family. At one point, Jackson thought Brey had left, then realized he had been on the couch yukking it up with Jackson’s relatives.

-Assistants recall Brey’s scowl when they yell out offensive plays on the sideline. “He wants guys to use whatever skill set they have and he doesn’t want us to overcoach them,” said Gene Cross, an

Irish assistant from 2006 to ’08. “If we were yelling things out on the sideline offensively, he would turn to us and give the most evil eye and tell us to shut the hell up and let these guys play. It was really simple, easy, free-flowing and allowing guys to be creative.”

-As important as his own demeanor, Brey has compiled video clips to show players when they’re demonstrating too much negative body language or showing up their teammates.

-During timeouts when the Irish are trailing and make a basket or two, Brey smiles and claps and says with casual conviction: “Do you guys feel that? Can’t you feel that momentum turning? Feels good, doesn’t it?” Take a five-overtime victory against Louisville in 2013, in which Rick Pitino’s grimace grew tighter with each extra period while Brey laughed and told his players he wanted another one.

-“If there was an X’s-and-O’s contest on the blackboard or whatever, I don’t know if he’s a top-10 guy,” said Sean Kearney, a Brey assistant for 13 seasons at Delaware and Notre Dame and now an assistant at Colorado. “But if there’s a top 10 for building trust, giving and gaining confidence, communicating with staff and players, he’s absolutely on top.”

-“We would work for Coach Wootten’s camps in the summer,” Brey recalled. “He’d say, ‘Be the kind of coach you would want your own son and daughter to play for.’ I really try to live by that. It’s a really simple, corny thing Coach used to say, and it’s awesome.”

-Brey conceded he also occasionally fakes his worry-free aura. “Inside, I can be a knot many times.

But outwardly I’ve got to be (laughing and clapping): ‘Hey, we’re all right. No problem,’ ” he said. “I ingest it. I don’t want the staff upset. I don’t want this place to be a morgue. Some (coaches) have everyone walking on eggshells. Personally, I try to take the bullets.”