Ask a men’s college basketball coach how to build a team in this scattershot era, and he will talk himself dizzy before shrugging and asking whether his answer made sense. The never-ending, circuitous process humbles even the most successful architects. It may be the first time in history that these competitive humans have won something and canceled the ego trip.
At the Final Four, No. 1 seeds Auburn, Duke, Florida and Houston stand as perhaps the most impressive quartet ever to make the national semifinals. Sometimes, it seems they have decoded a deregulated system that disperses talent to the highest bidder. But while these programs have done plenty right, they understand they have merely circumvented the instability.
Their methods work, for now. They will have to build a little differently next time. They’re shooting jumpers at a moving basket.
“My hope is that we can continue to build our program this way,” Florida Coach Todd Golden said. “It’s always going to be a challenge with NIL.”
Those three letters are referenced more than a team’s mascot these days. NIL stands for name, image and likeness, which alludes to college athletes’ ability to make money through endorsements, sponsorships and other business pursuits. The NCAA allowed itself to be sued into anarchy, and now some schools are believed to have multimillion-dollar payrolls, though no school reports the exact compensation. Add unlimited transfer freedom with immediate eligibility for players, and there’s no such thing as roster certainty anymore.
Two weeks ago, when he was still leading Maryland, Kevin Willard spent 3½ minutes wading through the issues. How much time to invest in high school recruiting. How to factor in experienced players who enter the transfer portal. How to re-recruit your own players so they don’t leave. How to account for the unknown when mapping out future rosters. How to balance an NIL budget. How to prepare for revenue-sharing, probably starting next year. How to create balance and continuity out of policies that encourage disloyalty.
After detailing the tricky scenarios and talking about running a team like a CEO, Willard concluded: “It’s gotten extremely complicated putting your roster together. That was a long answer, sorry. I’m tired.”
Then, presumably still exhausted, he took a new job at Villanova. Maybe he’s getting paid by the yawn.
Willard bounced partly because everyone leaves things unfinished now in this sport. Yet to win a national championship, programs must turn the randomness into a sustainable model.
With deadpan candor, Houston Coach Kelvin Sampson talks about current hoops politics as if assessing an opponent he cannot solve. Never mind that the coach is flourishing. During the rapid professionalization of the sport, Sampson has been the most consistent winner, delivering a 159-23 record the past five years that includes two Final Fours, two Sweet 16s and one Elite Eight finish. But the game beyond the game remains a daunting task.
“Nobody controls college basketball,” Sampson said. “We just sit and figure out what to do next. So right now, here’s what we’re dealing with. Next year, who knows where it’s going to take us?”
There is no right way to build a Final Four team now. There are many wrong ways to try. Still, there are lessons to be taken from the last teams standing this season.
Sampson is putting on a clinic in Houston. The Cougars stay true to their identity, even as their personnel shifts. With transfer guards Milos Uzan and LJ Cryer, this team shoots better than past versions, but its toughness and defensive mindset remain intact because the five former high school recruits in the rotation have developed gradually and reinforced the team’s hard-nosed culture.
At Auburn, Coach Bruce Pearl aced the evaluation of transfers with multiple seasons of eligibility, most notably all-American center Johni Broome. This season, the Tigers supplemented the roster with a strong freshman class, led by guard Tahaad Pettiford. Pearl has created both a laughably old starting five (with an average age of 23.2) and a young bench that features Pettiford, the team’s best NBA prospect.
Over the past three years, Golden assembled a squad that possesses enviable depth. The Gators mined the portal mostly for mid-major talent and signed three-star high school recruits who would be willing to develop over several years. They helped Walter Clayton Jr., who played for Rick Pitino at Iona, become the best guard in the country. They have unselfish players willing to play their roles without drama.
And then there’s Duke, the most talented team in the bunch, as the Blue Devils usually are. But in the three years since Coach Jon Scheyer replaced Mike Krzyzewski, he has modernized Duke. Scheyer realized he couldn’t be a former player worshiping all of Coach K’s methods and preaching the Brotherhood gospel every sermon. He hired Rachel Baker, a former Nike and NBA executive, as the program’s first general manager. Then, over this past offseason, he welcomed another banner freshman class led by prodigy Cooper Flagg and added transfers Sion James, Maliq Brown and Mason Gillis to play defined roles and add experience to a young roster.
Most of all, Scheyer was more hands-on about indoctrinating this team to winning basketball.
“Our program was built on players teaching players in addition to, obviously, what the coaching staff has done,” Scheyer said. “It’s something you would always pass down. But you have to deal with a new group almost every year. I think that’s the biggest challenge. Where you feel like you can skip steps when you really can’t. You have to start at ground zero every summer. And for us, we went back to the basics this summer of just how to build this team from the ground up, build the connectivity, teach the standards, hold them accountable to what the standards are, and that’s something I know we’re going to have to do each year going forward.”
A consistent program must be a chameleon. The intangibles that a coach demands can hold a team together, but personnel and style of play must be fluid. This era is hell for all system coaches. When it comes to strategy and player preferences, flexibility is a virtue.
“What I’ve learned as a coach is that, in this ever-changing model, you have to have skill to be able to coach a lot of different ways,” new Maryland coach Buzz Williams said. “And I think the coaches that I’ve studied that are married to their style, I don’t know if that’s sustainable in what this model has become.”
Of the four coaches remaining, Golden may have the most to prove. With an emphasis on analytics, Golden is as detailed as it gets. But as five-star, potential one-and-done recruits show interest in Florida, it will be fascinating to see whether the Gators can keep building cohesive teams.
“It’s all about just making sure our floor stays incredibly high,” he said.
No desperate moves. No awkward fits.
“We’ll continue to do it, trying to make sure we have a great nucleus in the program that we can return year after year, go out and find like-minded, tough, competitive kids that want to be part of our program,” Golden said. “If they’re five stars that want to be a part of what we’re doing, great. If not, we’ll go get guys that compete their tails off and are really prideful about wearing the Florida jersey and do it that way and live with the results.”
The coach plans with conviction. But in this disorderly time, college basketball abuses a good plan.
