State of the Program: Marquette
A deep dive into Shaka's first year
Just kidding.
It’s been a short off-season. In the span of 18 days, Texas went from Big 12 tournament champs to 1st-round disaster to a coach voluntarily leaving Texas for fucking Wisconsin to hiring a coach who has been a fever dream for a plurality of the Texas fanbase for 3+ years. From there Burnt Orange Judas - this is the name at least one Texas Tech forum has given Chris Beard, which is objectively fantastic - set off on a dead sprint putting together a murderer’s row of recruiters and restocking an obliterated roster with as many high-level transfers as he could afford to get his hands on. He blitzed the transfer portal, bringing in 8 players to fill up a practice gym that had Andrew Jones, Courtney Ramey, Brock Cunningham, and Jase Febres doing shell drills against air. The pace was breakneck, Beard & Co didn’t so much hit the ground running as buzz the Tower at Mach 2.
It’s been a long off-season. I spent the days immediately following the Abilene Christian debacle vacillating between various stages of sports grief, reeling from the worst Texas basketball loss in my lifetime (congrats to the Arizona 3 Seconds Game for getting off the hot seat!), engaging in the sort of personal life-choice examination/regret/self-loathing that most fans go through in their lowest moments. That was followed by watching Texas halfheartedly mimic a coaching search - you think that Royal Ivey ‘interview’ was over or under 20 minutes? - before hiring the guy that they wanted, about whom I have, uhh mixed feelings.
I am not a person who emotionally invests easily. Call it a consequence of Dad’s often implied but occasionally explicit “they can’t fuck you over if you don’t let them in” worldview winning out against Mom’s more emotionally accepting perspective as I grew up, or me not having the emotional intelligence to learn how to properly govern how much or little I care about a given person/team/subject, or whatever demons lie waiting behind door number three, but I tend to stay pretty guarded about a lot of the world. Add in how many times I’ve been burned by Texas Longhorns sports over the years - I’m writing this after many of you watched the Razorbacks teabag the football team, ‘sup - and it’s rare that I emotionally buy into a team. The 2020-2021 Texas basketball team was the exception; it wasn’t just that I thought they were going to be legitimately good, but we spent the last half-decade watching this program almost put things together only to fall short for one reason or another and Texas was finally ready to achieve its goals. They spent the better part of the season hitting the lofty marks they had set, with the only real stumbles a result of COVID running through the locker room like a toddler holding a knife for the first time with no parents around. All the signs were pointing to the Longhorns finding success in March, even winning the Big 12 conference tournament for the first time ever. For success-starved basketball fans like myself, this was it. Then Abilene Christian happened.
It wasn’t so much the loss itself - disastrous though it was - as it was it felt like six years of waiting had been for nothing. The process yielded a shit sandwich the size of a Twinkie that’s 35 feet long and weighing approximately 600 pounds. That’s a big shit sandwich Twinkie, and we had to eat it. But hey, at least they get to hire a new coach, right? Time to wipe the slate clean, try something new, go a totally different direction. Everybody gets to cleanse their palate by learning about a new coach who isn’t intimately familiar to Texas basketball f- holds finger to ear I’m sorry I’m being told they hired a coach we’ve all watched in the Big 12 for the last five years and has been responsible for some of the ugliest games on TV over that time. Fantastic.
Look, I’m not trying to turn this preview into my personal therapy session…well, any more than any of my previews and recaps are already me working through things, we’re one conniption fit away from a 1,500-word essay on why J’Covan Brown is my spirit animal as I search LinkedIn for a new job as a bike mechanic in Laos; but I feel like this is necessary to set the stage for why I’m less enthused about Beard than many others. It has less to do with the quality of the hire - Beard had objectively the best resume of any coach on the market at the time, unless CDC somehow managed to get Roy Williams to do a sunset tour here or money-whipped John Beilein to do a 5-year stint far south of his usual waters - than it does my personal preferences. Chris Beard is the obvious hire for people who care about wins and having a guy who Clearly Cares About Basketball; and for those who bounced on Shaka early, it’s entirely understandable why you gravitated towards the guy who looks like Barnes if you squint a little. There’s a really good chance Beard is very successful at Texas! I just…yep, sorry, it’s happening again…
One of the things I like about coaching changes is that it’s a chance to try something new; you learn about a new coach, get to study their habits, find out about new and different offensive & defensive concepts. It’s a clean break, a real chance to reset everything and build a new program from scratch. So here I am, not getting a clean break so much as being told the coach whose style I compared to a very effective colonoscopy not 6 months ago is now the guy in charge of the program. The guy who most recently made Sportscenter for throwing himself on the court in a tantrum over a charge call is now the guy I get to watch 30+ times a season.
So yea, not super-pumped right now. But that’s my own shit to deal with, and I’ll get over myself eventually. I can learn to love offensive basketball that looks like it was designed by an AI written in C++ by red-pilled CS majors who never even remotely got over being picked last in PE. Avery Benson in crunch time for no discernible reason! Bench players being yanked because they aren’t taking enough charges! Illegal off-ball screens can be beautiful, everybody!
It may be a bit.
Look, I’m not anti-motion offense. There are a hundred different flavors of motion and some of them are legitimately pleasing to watch. If I’m picking a flavor of motion that I would be happy to watch, it’s Bob McKillop’s offenses at Davidson. He run a 5-out motion offense that can go slow or fast - some years he’s near the bottom in adjusted tempo, some years he’s in the top third - but it invariably features immaculate spacing and the ability to get shots from a variety of spots on the court. If you want to see a breakdown of his offense, this is a solid primer:
If Beard ran this version of motion, I’d be significantly more excited for the start of the season. This version could really highlight a stretch big like Mitchell or Disu, where they can play the role of the trailing big you see over and over in the video above. It could get also Marcus Carr or Andrew Jones open for a ton of good looks either from the corner or running off staggered screens. It also allows for running motion at a faster tempo, something Beard does not ever do. Beard runs a flavor of motion that doesn’t reliably place shooters in the corners for spacing - sometimes they start there, but over and over I see them start to lift out of the corner nearly immediately after the first pass, compressing the area the defense has to manage - and they seem almost intent on ending up a jumble in the middle of the floor. Here’s an example from a video I watched today:
You might notice that’s an old game - it’s from their Elite Eight year - and wonder if it’s still like this. Fair question, here’s one from the COVID year against Kentucky:
That’s marginally better, but here’s how they started the possession:
I would find you more recent examples but not that many people break down Beard offenses. I can’t imagine why.
Oh wait, here you go. I loaded up the Houston/Tech game from this season to the point I paused it from an earlier viewing and this is literally the first possession after I hit play.
There’s a good chance Beard is going to start a lot of possessions in a box or stack configuration similar to what you see in the Kentucky images, which can be fine in the same way a triple-option football team can cause chaos with putting a bunch of players in a small area and go multiple ways with the ball. (Similar to the triple-option it relies on extreme precision to pull off and I have questions about how well a team that’s 70% new players can repeatedly execute to that level of precision, but that’s a discussion for another time.) If the players don’t execute perfectly, the spacing will suck just like it did in the photo a couple above this one. And this one. And the one in between. And the first one.
I hope to god I’m wrong about this and Texas spends the season featuring trailing threes from Mitchell & Disu, corner threes from AJ & Febres, and Carr & Ramey back-cutting other teams to death. I will be happier than most if Beard trots out McKillop’s offense (or hell, a functional pace & space ball-screen offense) against Gonzaga. He just hasn’t shown a desire to do so to this point, and the word I’m hearing from the off-season practices is that it’s going to be more like Beard’s early motion stuff than anything else which..ehhh.
Anyway, the off-season is the time for fans to drink the Kool-Aid, and Beard has been mixing up enough to drown a kindergarten class. He landed a handful of all-conference players, multiple players who can start for most teams in the country, and turned a decimated roster into one of the best in the Big 12. His defense will probably be one of the better defenses in the conference, and the offensive pieces are talented enough that the team can contend for the Big 12 title if he can mesh all the pieces together in time. The potential for this team is really high, and it’s understandable why lots of Texas fans are ready to see this season get going. They’re going to be heavily favored in nearly every non-conference game, favored in more than half (possibly all except 4-5) of their conference games, and be a topic of national conversation for most of the year. So let’s get the season started, maybe we’re all pleasantly surprised.
BWG’s writing tunes provided by James Zabiela.
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Good read. Mimics my thoughts on the Beard hire. Remember watching a Gonzaga/BYU game with my buddy who went to GU and saying 'this is why you like CBB so much' because it looked like a different sport than the 2016 Texas/KU game we had just attended.
Also, I've taken your advice and filled up my Saturday schedules to avoid caring about the football team. We'll see how long that takes.
"They’re going to be heavily favored in nearly every non-conference game" - an impressive display of back-handed compliment.