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The ncaa, even to this day, it's too big and it's too immobile and it's too laden with committees and bureaucracy, and they couldn't nimbly move in any way at any time.

And then they were belligerent in the ways they demanded.

No, this is how we've always done it or this is how it's going to go.

Rick Boyages has worked inside the college sports industry as a basketball coach, special assistant, conference administrator and consultant for 39 years.

Most recently, he spent 12 years as vice president for men's basketball at the Big Ten Conference in Chicago.

His role included oversight of event management, game operations, conduct policies, and officiating.

During his tenure, Rick served as Sports liaison to 31 head coaches, 30 athletic directors and dozens of network television executives, arena directors and NCAA stakeholders.

As executive director of the collegiate Officiating Consortium, LLC, he simultaneously directed men's basketball officiating operations for 65 Division 1 institutions in 22 states.

Boyages also spent time as associate commissioner for the Mid American Conference and special assistant to the athletic director at Ohio State University.

His 19 years as a college basketball coach included stops at Ohio State, Boston College, William and Mary and Bates College.

He was an integral part of Big east and Big Ten championship seasons with Ohio State and Boston College, and coached in five NCAA Tournaments, two Elite Eights, and a Final Four with the Buckeyes in 1999.

As a consultant, Rick has advised clients in areas including sports tech, higher education, professional and international basketball.

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Get ready to take some notes as you listen to this episode with Rick Boyages, former college basketball coach and administrator.

Hello and welcome to the Hoop Heads podcast.

It's Mike Cleansing here without my co host Jason Sunkel tonight.

But I am pleased to be joined by Rick Boyages, former college basketball coach, former college administrator, and someone who has played a lot of roles in his athletic life.

Rick, welcome to the Hooped pod.

Thanks, Mike.

Thrilled to have you on, Rick.

Looking forward to diving into everything that you've been able to do in your career.

Let's start by going back in time to when you were a kid.

Tell me a little bit about some of your first experiences with the game of basketball.

What made you fall in love with it?

Well, it was really my dad.

My dad actually was first generation son of Greek immigrants that came overseas and kind of settled in the Boston area.

He went on to play at Everett High School outside of Boston and actually made it to Dartmouth.

And the interesting thing about the story is in the early 50s, he was the captain of Dartmouth and his coach was a guy named Doggy Julian.

And Doggy's famous for being known as the head coach of the Holy Cross Crusaders and winning the national championship with Bob Cousy and Tom Heinson.

So my dad was lucky to.

He played baseball too, but he's lucky to, you know, play for a great college coach.

Doggy actually left Holy Cross and went to Dartmouth, but after he got out of the service and he worked in the aircraft engine group at General Electric for many years.

But, um, he, he started the youth basketball program in my hometown, which was Wakefield, Massachusetts.

And it was by the time I was a kid, probably no.

8 or 9 years old, there'd already been a generation of kids in the town that had gone through the program.

So by the time I probably was winding out of it, you know, guys that had played in the league initially had their own kids now they were taking part in the, in the league.

So he, he did it for over three decades and it was at a time where there weren't a lot of elementary and middle school basketball teams affiliated with, you know, that type of secondary education.

So he.

He just treated as intramural, really.

They'd have a draft down in my basement.

I remember being a little kid.

And they'd be coaches down there drinking beer.

They'd have a chalkboard out, and they'd be, you know, putting the names of all the kids up, and they'd have a draft.

And the rule was every kid had to play the same amount, except for maybe the last five minutes of the game.

He really, his philosophy was that, you know, when kids are 10, 11 years old, you don't know who's going to be, you know, five, eight, who's going to be six, eight, you know, and he just wanted to have a good experience with.

With basketball and have fun and get a chance to play.

And then there'd be travel teams and things for.

For kids that want to do a little bit more, you know, had a chance to maybe do something more special.

So it was for sixth, seventh, and eighth graders.

Mike.

And I was playing in the sixth grade division when I was probably in first or second grade, you know, as a political connection.

There you go.

Yeah.

I'd hang around the gym, and if kids in the seventh grade games, if anyone was sick or didn't show up, I jump into games.

I'd play, you know, sixth or seventh, eighth grade.

Always play with older guys for four or five years until I actually got into sixth grade.

So those are my experiences, and they were fun and.

And wholesome, and it was a good balance.

You know, it wasn't an overemphasis in esports like today, or, you know, today we got private equity, you know, buying AU teams.

You know, it's going full circle, so.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And over the years, his program fed a lot of good players into the high school system.

Some kids would go on to play other sports or have other interests, but those that did have fun and stayed with it created really a winning program at the high school level.

So that's really kind of how I fell in love with the game and got involved.

And I had an older brother that was four years older, so I was always competing against him and his buddies.

So, yeah, those are some of my earliest recollections of playing.

Playing basketball.

When you think of your dad and you think of who he was as a coach and how he went about his business, what do you think are one or two things that stuck with you, that influenced you, that sort of became a part of you when you became A coach.

I was.

He was always empathetic.

I think he, you know, he really got to know the kids as people and their family situations, the socioeconomic background, that type of thing.

The other thing, he kept it simple, and he just taught you good principles and fundamental concepts.

We wouldn't run any plays really, but we would do stuff like run and jump.

You know, I'd be with a back foot.

Maybe teach us how to kind of spin a guy or turn a guy, and a weak side guard would come over and steal the ball.

You know, give and go, moving without the ball.

I don't remember us running a lot of different things.

Just playing, you know.

And then defensively, he'd be like, first thing you got to do, force your guy to his weak hand, you know, or box out or, you know, basic, basic stuff.

But we really had fun, you know, and I think.

I think that's always a big part of it.

And then, you know, he was exposed to good coaches.

And then he actually was a captain in the Marines during the Korean War.

And he played a lot of, like, semi pro ball through the military.

And there were a lot of guys that he was in officer's candidate school, but there were others that enlisted in that era in the 50s.

A lot of those guys played ball on base or traveled to other competitions through the military.

So he had a lot of great experiences that way that he'd like to share.

You get into high school and you start taking the game maybe a little bit more seriously.

What do you remember about your development as a player?

Obviously, it looked a lot different than player development looks like today.

But just tell me a little bit about your experience, both in season as a high school player and in the off season, what you did to try to get better.

Well, during the season, I just remember it was a really good, structured high school program.

It's typically based on seniority.

Unless you got a break somehow.

Um, you know, the older kids would have a shot before you.

Uh, I got really fortunate.

I.

I think as a freshman, I played freshman basketball and a half a JV and sat on the bench with the varsity.

Um, you could only play so many quarters of a week.

It was one of those kind of deals.

And then as a sophomore, I was behind just some older juniors and seniors, and it was actually a disciplinary situation where before the guards got in trouble.

I forget what they did, you know, and.

And I got a shot to crack in as a starter, and I never lost my position, you know, so there was a little bit of fate that.

That kind of was involved with that.

But as a point guard, I just remember my coaches.

I had a really great, like a hall of fame high school coach outside Boston.

And he basically taught me how to call offenses and defenses and kind of quarterback on the court.

So he had a philosophy where we played one defense after makes one after misses another after turnovers.

And so I, I was kind of calling offenses and defenses and things.

And I had a lot of control on the court to.

To quarterback the team that way.

And I had played so much from such a young age that that was kind of a fun part of my development.

The other thing we did back in those days is we went to overnight camps in the summer and we.

My coach was in with a group of high school coaches, very successful small college coaches, and then some of the Boston Celtics back in that day.

So we would go to camps with Sam Jones, John Avlichek.

We would bus up to Maine and stay at an overnight camp at a small D3 school.

We take a five hour bus ride.

We'd play other towns around our community, you know, other suburban all star teams and things.

We had summer leagues in town as well.

So it's probably a whole different.

You remember, Mike, like a whole different scenario than what eventually evolved from what would be, you know, kind of a U club ball and how it is today.

And I think, like I said, I've already used the word wholesome.

It was just healthier.

Most of us played two or three sports.

We.

We were encouraged to play multiple sports.

And I think that was always great for our development.

When I was a small college coach, I used to teach sports sociology.

And I remember one of the textbooks was.

It was kind of a case study on great.

On superstar athletes, you know, the Wayne Gretzky's Larry Birds, whole host of athletes.

And they all played multiple sports growing up and they all talked about, you know, they avoided burnout that way.

They used different muscle groups.

And they also learned fundamentals in different sports that they could apply to basketball once they decided to specialize, or ice hockey or whatever their niche was.

Once they got to be about 15 years old and they felt like this is either the sport I love the most or the one that physically my gifts match up best.

As far as advancing from this point.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, that's totally a different scenario than what we have today, obviously.

I mean, kids.

To play two sports now for most kids is really, really difficult.

And then you talk about in the era when you and I grew up, we're talking about there were a lot of three sport athletes.

And now it's just with the, with the year round sort of requirements almost to be able to just the price of admission is you almost have to play year round just to be able to be a part of it.

And so it's, it's definitely a different era when it comes to that.

And I like the word wholesome.

I just think that when I look back and reminisce on my experiences in the game growing up as a kid, I just feel like I played a lot of times just up at the park, at the playground with older guys, just with people in my neighborhood.

I may grow up just like you playing in the community league where again, you're just playing with other kids that live within the confines of your city.

And, you know, now we're driving kids around, you know, hours at a time to find, to find games.

And it's, there's, there's some positive to it, but there's also, I think, a lot of just challenges that we spend a lot of time and money as parents for something that we probably got just as much, if not more out of the experience that you and I had back in the day.

Yeah, I mean, the other thing with me was my mom passed away of breast cancer when I was 14.

So for a couple years going through treatments and things, I mean, and then a couple years subsequently, I spent a lot of time just out in the driveway by myself, you know, trying to figure out other things and how to cope with all that that was going on.

But sports was a great outlet for me when I wasn't just out there playing by myself or working on drills that I'd been shown at camps.

I had a buddy in town.

A bunch of us played, but I had one friend in particular, a best friend that, I mean, we played one on one till like it got dark and the neighbors told us, you know, you guys going to go to bed at some point?

You know, it's 10:30 and it's, you know, a weekday and you guys are out there in summer, you know, still pounding away and making noise or, you know, having pickup games.

Like you said, we did so much of the kind of sandlot, you know, they use that term with baseball.

But in those days we just got our own games together a lot of times too.

You know, I had a.

I had.

A buddy, I used to play it one on one to 100.

We would ride our bikes probably we lived whatever a mile and a half, two miles away.

And so one day we'd ride to his house one day we'd ride to my house, we'd play one on one to 100.

And now I tell my own kids that or kids that I've coached or kids at camp, they look at me like I got like six heads.

They're like, what do you play one on one to 100?

What are you, what are you talking about?

So yeah, it's a different, it's a different world, Rick, for sure.

Now that was my exact experience.

The funniest was that the one camp up in Maine, I mean we had 400 kids at summer camp and we were probably 12, 13 years old.

And we would, in our age group, whatever, we would have a one on one tournament through our teams and then the best one would advance on like a tournament during the week of camp.

And we had played.

My buddy Peter and I had played for years and years and we ended up in the finals of the camp.

That's awesome.

You know, it was crazy.

But.

But yeah, just, just great experiences, great fun, you know, recollecting those times.

When did playing college basketball get on your radar?

Was that something that you dreamed about from the time you were a kid or was it more as you got closer to that time that it sort of become, started to become important to you?

Yeah, I was, my situation was interesting from the standpoint of I wasn't big, you know, I was, you know, five, eight and a half, barely five, you know, I don't know Aaron to five, nine.

But I had great speed and quickness, but I was small.

So the question was then, you know, what level can you play at?

I was an all Boston area kid, you know, I got selected by the Boston Globe, you know, as kind of one of the better players in the, in the area.

I wanted good academic situation too.

So I applied to some schools first time around and I really didn't like my, my opportunities that I had.

And so I took a postgraduate year at a boarding school at a New England prep school, which really even to this day is kind of still a great recruiting ground for college basketball players.

And it was kind of a way to have a fifth year, repeat your senior year and go back, you know, or get some better study habits.

I'm actually do all my homework and study hall and a couple free periods, you know, and then just live to play sport.

So at Northfield Mount Herman, which was a really good private school, we had 90 postgraduates.

It was one of the largest boarding schools in the, in the country.

And it was really like a college freshman team.

So I played basketball captain the team there.

And I also played tennis actually there.

But that was a great kind of redo of my senior year.

And then I was kind of between the Ivy League and the small Ivy League, and I just came to the realization that I just wanted to play.

One of the things that happened with me because of the story I told you about my childhood was I never, I always started.

I never once in my entire life came off the bench ever really.

You know, and I figured I had four years to play, four years of eligibility, so why wouldn't I want to just max out?

You know, I.

A lot of, A lot of my friends and people I played against, you know, would throw around the D1 term, but to be honest, I, I even tell people this day there's probably three, four, five divisions within division one, you know, so, yeah, absolutely mean.

You know what I mean?

And so, and I, And I was recruited by some Ivy League, but a lot of the small Ivy League in New England, so I ended up in that league.

I.

I was a starting point guard at Bowdoin College in Maine for four years.

Played every minute of every game.

And I used to kid people, I would say, from our all scholastic team in the Boston Globe, who were the two players that played every minute of every game in their college career in that era.

And it was me and Division 3 and Patrick Ewing.

Jewish happens.

There you go.

I always say, you know, only get 40 years of play, you might as well max out, you know.

Absolutely.

Well, I.

The other thing I would tell kids is go one level below where you aspire to play, and you'll probably just, you know, you'll be able to walk in and compete immediately and have great success, you know, and now it's interesting because you see, you know, a story like Duncan Robinson, who was in the same league at, you know, Williams College, you know, decades later, but actually found a way to go from T3, you know, up to the Big Ten, even.

And with nil now, they're not recruiting freshmen anymore, a lot of these people.

So they go and prove themselves in the d2 ranks or the low d1 ranks and move up from there.

So even the recruiting's changed dramatically with NIL and the transfer Portal.

Yeah, there's no doubt that that's had a huge impact on the college basketball landscape, just in terms of the tenor of conversations that I've had on the podcast with different coaches over the six years we've been doing this thing.

And obviously you go back to when we started and NIL and the Portal didn't exist.

And now you think about the impact that those two things have had.

I mean, it really is incredible.

Sometimes I, I think about the job that college coaches have to do today and just the way that they go about doing it and how different it is certainly from the time when you or I were in college as players and certainly for a lot of the time while you were coaching.

Completely different in terms of thinking about building a team and saying, hey, we got a really good freshman class and this group, we can wait for them to mature and by the time they're juniors and seniors, wow, we're really going to have something.

And now it's almost a year to year.

I've got to create a whole new team with bringing in players out of the portal, but also having players that go into the portal for, for whatever reason.

And so it's a, it's certainly become a very challenging profession.

When you think back to your time in college, what were you thinking about as a career when you went to school?

Were you thinking coaching already at that point?

Or was that something that didn't really get to you until, hey, looking around like my playing career is over now I want to figure out how to stay involved in the game.

What was your thought process as you went into school?

No, I really did want to coach.

I mean, it was really my goal.

And then what I did was all throughout my prep school and college years, I worked camps all summer long, seven, eight weeks of camp.

And you know, Mike, back in those days there were a lot of overnight camps.

So I could work a week at camp on Cape Cod or in New Hampshire or somewhere.

And then, you know, I'd have room and board, I'd get my meals there, I'd make, make a few hundred bucks and I would go on to the next one.

And then you would basically develop a network of contacts by doing that.

And then after two or three years of doing that, I actually developed a ball handling routine and became like a lecturer.

You know, back in those days, every camp after lunch would have a 45 minute to an hour lecture where we kids would digest their flight lunch and sit there and learn something.

And then they would drill on whatever that topic was and then go, you know, do some other drills and play some games in the afternoon and at night, the morning was all fundamental drill stations.

And I even remember when I was a kid I saw, I mean I can remember this day seeing lectures by Sam Jones.

Like I mentioned Havoc, JoJo White, you know, hall of Famers.

I remember Calvin Murphy.

I was at A camp.

Brian Winners, Paul Silas, all kinds of Hubie.

And then on the coaching side, you know, it was far back.

Like what, When Hubie was coaching Rolly, Massimino, Patino when he was very young.

I was a.

Probably a counselor then.

I used to actually Rick would see me at so many camps.

He had this one on one chick.

He would do it, he would do his.

His clinic was one on one basketball, you know, like mine a couple years later was ball handling.

Other guys were, you know, before Dave Hopper, what's his name?

I can.

Oh, George Lehman was the shooting expert.

So there's new people doing it over each decade.

But when I developed a ball handling routine, you know, I juggle balls, spin them on my finger, I'll do crazy tricks, all kinds of things.

And you know, cause I.

I couldn't get near the rim.

I was small, you know, so I had all the other dog and pony show that I'd roll out.

But once I started doing that, then I got booked sometimes two or three camps in a day.

So instead of working seven or eight camps over the course of the entire summer, I was doing 40 to 60 camp appearances all over New England.

So by that time I knew everybody.

And then my first job was right out of school was a D3 assistance job at Babson College in just outside Boston.

And then I did that for just a couple years and I was very lucky.

I.

I interviewed for a D3 head job at Bates College in Maine and somehow got the job at like age 24.

And then you and I talked about this in a previous conversation.

You know, when you're a D3 head coach, you do the laundry, drive the van, you know, you wash.

You know, when you're not washing uniform, sweep the floor, you do the recruiting, the scouting, the film work.

It's a great laboratory for being a young coach.

And so I did that, and I did that for four years and still maintained my network all throughout New England.

Still did lectures in the summer and things.

And then I actually started to coach internationally because at D3 at that time, they didn't have huge budgets and they really didn't want you out recruiting a ton.

And there wasn't an AAU circuit, you know, so you had to rely on waiting for high school basketball and maybe some summer league stuff here or there.

So I coached in Africa, Czechoslovakia, before the political changes.

And when the wall came down in 87, I coached a lot in Greece.

I've still got some good contacts there.

So I did all that and that led me to Boston College after four years at Division 3.

So, yeah, but I knew I wanted to be a coach, and I kind of got involved in the game in the summers while I was attending college.

And then, remember, they hired me at Bates College.

And the president, actually, it came from the College of Worcester, a guy named Don Harwood.

And he said, rick, we want to hire you, but you're going to make me one promise.

I said, what?

He goes, you got to get your master's.

Most of the faculty have their PhDs, and I'm going to hire you at 24 years old, but just assure me that you'll get your master's degree.

So I started that summer and knocked that out in a couple years.

But I was really, really fortunate that the toughest decision I had to make was to give up one of those great D3 jobs where you could stay for 25 years, maybe become the athletic director.

You could raise a family, your kids be running around the campus at all the events using all the facilities.

You know, I coached, for instance, against.

I played and coached against Dave Hickson at Amherst, you know, and called him, you know, less than a year ago to congratulate him on being the first D3 coach into the Naismith hall of Fame.

But I go back with a core of guys, Dick Whitmore at Colby.

I mean, there were a whole bunch of them that they were just as good a coach as anybody in Division 1.

They just.

They chose that lifestyle.

And so I don't have any regrets about it because I was able to move up within Division 1 and Experience Final Fours and NCAA tournaments and do just about everything you want to do.

But I.

I think I would have been maybe just as happy if I was still that, you know, at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and, you know, living the.

The D3 dream life.

It's.

It's interesting.

A lot of guys that offer that, I have a lot of respect for that.

What was the transition like from that first assistant job at Babson to becoming a head coach?

Obviously, at that point, as you said, you're very young, you've got a couple years under your belt, but still, comparatively to the amount of experience that most coaches have when they get their first head coaching job at the collegiate level, you were relatively inexperienced.

What was that transition like for you?

You know, when I think back, I really don't see it as anything problematic.

I was just so excited and enthusiastic about having the opportunity, you know, and.

And I think, you know, we were able to win.

You know, I was able to move the Needle a little bit on the program.

The very first game I ever coached, Mike, was against my alma mater.

It was Bates, Bowdoin, and in, in Maine in Division 3, there's Bates, Bowdoin and Colby.

They're all, you know, great small Ivy League schools.

And so I think it was a home game.

I think we won.

And a local newspaper beat writer was like, do you feel bad, you know, beating your alma mater and you first game?

And I was like, feel bad.

I'm like, I'm undefeated.

I'm.

That's like, yeah, it's like.

That's like beating your brother in a backyard basketball game.

Do you feel bad for your brother?

Absolutely not.

There's no way.

Well, it was this little gym that held about 800 and we would jam 1200, 1400 kids in there.

It was insanity.

I mean, there was, it was a blast.

We had a lot of fun.

And then because I was traveling internationally, like I took my team to Prague, you know, one winter, actually during a Christmas break.

So you're able to do a lot of different things.

I also coach tennis and golf, and I, I taught that class I mentioned earlier, taught an academic class.

So I did some other things, but it was a great, just great training ground, you know, And I think that's really what led me to get offered a position with Boston College, which was my next stop.

And I was from Boston and I was, I actually asked the president, I was only in it four years at D3, Mike, and I asked him for a sabbatical because at the time, Jimmy O'Brien was the head coach at Boston College.

And they had come off only 2, 1 win seasons in the Big Ten, in the Big east.

And the rumor was, you know, he was going to be let go.

It was a lot of pressure on him.

And days before the Big east tournament, his, his.

Tragically, his wife passed away from complications with Hodgkin's disease.

And so I think the AD was in a position where he's like, you know, how am I going to do that?

Yeah, young daughters, whatever.

So I think the trade off was they, they, they told him he could stay on a year, see how it goes.

But he had to make some changes with his staff, and a lot of people turned him down because they thought he was a dead man walking.

So I said, I said to myself, I gotta play this like two ways.

One, I want to take the job, but if he doesn't make it or I don't make it, I want to be able to come back.

Like, this is a Great job, a good G2.

And unbelievably, the president said yes.

He said, okay, I'll make a deal with you again, maybe because I got my master's mic and I.

And I came through on the first promise.

But he said, just help me find a coach to replace yourself, someone you trust, someone that would be good for us.

Because I had my best team in my fourth year.

I was going into my fourth year, I think it was, or fifth, and we probably.

It was going to be the best team in the history of the school.

So I helped him find a high school coach that I really respected.

And then we won seven games in the Big east that year.

And we had a great group of sophomores.

We had two NBA players, Billy Curley from Boston and Howard Isley.

And we had two other players that would play professionally as well, two other guards that played international basketball for a long time.

Very successful.

So Jim got a two year extension.

And so I re.

I resigned my D3 job in May.

And I mean, I was so lucky that I had a president like that was, you know, even willing to consider such a thing.

But I think, again, if that hadn't worked out, I probably would have stayed in D3.

You know, it was.

It was a taste of the Big east.

And at that time, the Big east was everything, you know, you can only imagine.

I mean, you know, Allen Iverson and Alonzo Mourning and, you know, it was a little bit after Derrick Coleman, but unbelievable coaches, you know, Carneseca, Patino, Thompson, Boeheim, Massimino.

It was.

Yeah, it was a.

It was an unbelievable experience.

And we were good.

We.

We went to the.

We made it the NIT that year.

The next year we went to the Elite Eight.

We were a stone's throw from the Final Four and we lost a heartbreaking game.

We had to play Florida in Miami.

I think we had about six fans there in the Elite Eight games, and we led most of the game and lost in the last couple minutes.

And I was.

It's crazy how things work.

I'm saying to myself, that was my one shot at the Final Four, you know, that was it.

And crazy, two years later, after we have another good year and go to the second round of the NCAA tournament, Jim gets the offer to go to Ohio State and brings the whole staff with him.

And our first year was abominable.

We won eight games.

We were, you know, horrendous, but we.

We laid a foundation of, you know, discipline and expectations and developed a culture there.

And.

And we were lucky.

We inherited A couple good players.

And then we brought along Scooney, Penn from Boston College and somehow we went from eight wins to 27 in the final four in, in 99.

And I'm looking at it and I'm saying to myself, you know, I thought that game in Miami with Boston College would have been my last gasp.

And here we are two years later coming off of an eight win season and make it all the way to the Final Four.

So that was, that was a crazy year.

And it was just one of these years.

Coaches talk about it on occasion where everything lines up perfectly and you get on a roll, you get on this train and it just keeps rolling and, and we just had great kids and we fell into a style of play and just, I think we, early on we were like 6 and 2 or 6 and 3.

We lost at Toledo.

We didn't really know what we want.

We expected, we hoped we would be 500 that year and get to the NIT.

Maybe that was our goal.

And we end up just getting on this tier and you know, we end up, you know, with that unbeknownst most of the time.

But, you know, Michael Redd becomes an NBA player, Scoony's an all American, probably the best point guard and, you know, as good as any point guard Ohio State's ever had.

And he goes to four NCAA tournaments, two with Boston College and two with Ohio State in his four years.

And then we had other great players.

Kenny Johnson led the country in shot blocking.

We had great role players.

So that was a, that was a great run too.

So I, like I said, I, I had a chance to do just about everything.

And then I was head coach at William and Mary.

I left Ohio State and did that for a few years before going back to Ohio State a second time.

But, but yeah, it was, I feel blessed with just all the opportunities I had, the confidence, you know, people had in me as athletic directors or school presidents, and just all the friends you meet, you know, Mike, over the, over the decades, I mean, the basketball fraternity that you get involved with, it's been amazing.

Yeah, there's nothing more special than that.

And it's just amazing again, how close knit the basketball community really is.

That's something that, I mean, I think I knew that before I started the podcast, Rick, but in all honesty, just the connections that I've been able to make through this thing and then the number of people that know somebody, that knows somebody, that I know somebody, and it's just, it's kind of incredible when you really start drawing the connections between people, how close knit the basketball community is and kind of going along those lines.

Talk a little bit about your relationship with Coach O'Brien and what going from, okay, you get the job at BC and you guys are there and have that success and then take that, as you said, the entire staff to Ohio State.

So just talk a little bit about the, both the personal and the professional relationship that you had with Coach O'Brien.

Well, it was interesting in that our staff, we organized ourselves probably a little bit differently.

I was one of the three full time assistants, but I was kind of the X and O guy.

So my role was game plans, practice plans, video breakdown, strategic stuff.

The other two guys weighed in on that.

But they were on the road a lot recruiting.

And at that time, Mike, only two of the three assistant coaches could recruit, one couldn't.

And I don't know if you remember years back there was, they tried to restrict the earnings of one coach.

Yep.

There was a limited earnings guy.

Yep, yep, yep.

Cost cutting measure that was actually an antitrust violation.

So for two years at Boston College, I think I made $16,000 a year and I was the associate head coach.

So what happened in that case was it was interesting.

It took about three or four years, but we finally got paid.

We won the case, which was a landmark antitrust win against the nca.

And what was interesting about it was what really swung things were the associate head coaches that didn't recruit.

So what happened when we got out in front of the jury?

The case was out in Kansas City and the jury was trying to understand how associate head coaches were being placed in this, what was supposedly an entry level coaching position, the third assistant position.

And it was myself, Pete Gaudette at Duke, Jimmy Rothborough at Arizona, Norm Law at Pitt, Bernie Fine at Syracuse.

And those the lawyers kept asking guys, these guys and myself, about, well, what happens if the coach passed away or had a car accident or a bad flu?

Who coaches the team?

Well, we would probably, you know, for that, for that segment.

And they were like, wait a second, I thought this was a cost cutting measure for entry level coaches, you know, and that kind of swung the case real fairly quickly.

But going back to Jimmy, I mean, the thing I tell people about Jim, that they don't even know, I always ask him, I said, do you know who his two college coaches were at Boston College?

He was a standout four year player at Boston College.

And they always go, now who?

And I tell him, his first two years, Bob Cousy, and his second two years, Chuck Daly and then he went to coach at UConn, and he was kind of adopted by that.

By the UConn guys that were prior to Calhoun, you know, it was before that era.

And D.

Rowe was a legendary UConn coach and don Perno, you know, like, they, he.

He was just a genius basketball guy, a former point guard, unbelievable basketball iq.

And again, like, kept it pretty simple and had a real good feel for the players.

You know, it was a really, what, you know, people refer to player, player, coaches, you know, Jimmy.

Jimmy was that type.

And then the other thing I tell people about Jim, they didn't realize he played in the ABA and he was with the Kentucky Colonels and then.

But when he was with the San Diego Conquistadors, he would tell me that the head coach was Wilt Chamberlain and Will.

They were in San Diego, but Wilt still lived in Los Angeles and would like, never be around for practice and fly in for games.

And it wouldn't surprise me, like, Jimmy was coaching the team a lot of times, you know, so he had, he had unbelievable playing experience and knowledge.

He played for great college coaches, played in with amazing players in the aba.

I still, I collected basketball cards when I was a kid, and I have a lot of ABA basketball cards.

And it's amazing to see, go look back and see the guys and how that league merged a few teams into the NBA that, you know, Julie Serving and, you know, Marvin Barnes and all kinds of guys that you, you know, you'd laugh now looking at the, you know, their, their baseball playing cards.

But Jim was amazing.

X and O coach, kept it simple, great relationship with players.

And so much of the season we were connected at the hip because we were doing a lot of strategic work together and that allowed the other guys to recruit and they were able to find us some great players.

And we just had a great staff.

We were together nine years, which is somewhat rare, and nine years when we had a lot of success, when we made it to NCAA tournaments and advanced deep in the field at both Boston College and in Ohio State.

And we went from last place to first place in both leagues.

So we kind of learned how to do more with less.

We tried a lot of junk over the years.

We ran a lot of junk when we just couldn't line up, you know, initially player for player with other coaches, especially in the Big Easter, Big Ten, when we first got there, ran a lot of motion offense.

Bobby Knight loved Jimmy.

He would always compliment him that, hey, you guys play the right way.

You know, always very, very complimentary and we.

We actually had great success against Knight's teams.

We beat him twice in the NCAA tournament at Boston College and then had pretty good success in the Big Ten.

But.

But, yeah, unbelievable coach.

And I remember as a young coach, the last story I tell you is Jimmy had this feel where occasionally guys would show up and we'd be having a crappy practice and they just mentally wouldn't be ready.

And he would just say, that's it, that's it.

We're wrapping it up.

That's it for today.

I don't want to see you go do whatever you got to do, but, like, God forbid you come in tomorrow with this mindset, you know, and.

And we might be two days before a game, Mike, and I'm like, doing the scone report, and I'm like, obi, what the hell?

Like, we gotta go out of bounds place and we gotta do this and that.

And he'd be like.

And sure as hell, every.

Every time he did it, like, we come back the next day and have a great practice.

Kids would be fresh.

He just had a feel for.

I think that there are times, probably from his pro career, there were times when you just.

You're just tired or you mentally need to get away a little bit or take a break or.

And.

And if you did try to force a practice under those circumstances, it was you.

It was unproductive.

It might even be useless.

And so as a young coach, I was always amazed.

I was like, ah, we could never do that.

We gotta prep for this, you know, and we always came back fresher and playing better, you know, so he just always had a good feel for the team and those type of things.

I think that feel for your team is one of the things that really good coaches do very well in terms of what.

What they need at a given moment.

And then you could take that and break that down even further when you start talking about feel for an individual player and what that player needs and wants.

And I think good coaches are able to discern that and figure out, okay, hey, maybe here's a day where we do need to send him home earlier.

Maybe this kid needs a kick in the butt, or maybe this kid needs somebody to put their arm around him or whatever it may be.

And I think really good coaches have a feel for that because, again, they build relationships with their kids.

And when you build relationships with your kids, that helps you to really understand it.

And so talk a little bit about from.

From your perspective, both obviously your time as an assistant and also as a head Coach, when you think about the relationships with your players, how did you go about building and strengthening those relationships over the course of your time with a particular player?

Yeah.

Well, before I do that I'll give you two other things that I think people would enjoy hearing about Jimmy.

Sure.

The first one I'd say is when we would play non conference games, you know that they call guarantee games.

You're paying 70, 80, $90,000 for a team to come in and you know, more often than not it's an ass kicking but every once in a while we would run into a team that was really well coached or had talent or a player.

And I can remember in those games a lot of big time coaches, they, they get their ego up and they, they're not going to change.

They're like how can we be losing this team?

Just go out and play, play harder, blah blah blah.

And Jimmy was the type that I remember we had a game for Iowa State, I think we were playing Bellarmine, I want to say Bellarmine.

I don't know if that was true or not and I don't even know if they would D2 or D1 at the time but I think up.

But they had a kid and he had transferred I think from, from somewhere else and the kid was destroying us, you know, I mean we couldn't guard and he was going to go for 40.

And we get in the huddle and Jim says forget that like we're playing a box and one on like the amount of Big Ten coaches that would put a box in one on a low mid major player or something, you know, or mid, you know, he didn't crazy like he had total respect for that there were great coaches or good players, you know.

And then the other thing was, I told you he kept it simple.

I remember playing, we're playing at Wisconsin and we were struggling something but he's always good at matchups.

He's always watching matchups.

So Mike Red's playing opposite Scoony and Scoony's like 5, 9 and Mike 6, 6, 6.

So we would occasionally when the clock was down we just go 1 4.

I don't know why coaches don't do this anymore.

Like just go 1 4, give it the ball to your best player and put shooters in the corners or you know, and guys down at the short corner and see who runs up to double if you know if they're going to try to help off a good player, you know.

So he said we're not huddling the Cole center and I He says, scoony.

He goes, Go, 1 4.

He's like, Mike, you got a kid.

What was his name?

Really good.

Like, supposedly their best defensive player.

He goes, he's guarding Mike.

But Scooney, Mike will run up and just give a little dribble handoff and pick his man off, force a switch.

So basically, he just, in a simple wrinkle, he'd get a 1 4, Mike would come out of the corner of somewhere, come up to the little ball screen handoff, and we'd get the point guard on red.

So now Mike six, six, and a point guard from Wisconsin's maybe six feet.

And he would just say, tell the guys.

He goes, scooney, just go back to the corner where Mike came from.

Mike, it's 14 flat.

Just back, back him down.

And he just back him down, back him down and paint, you know, scored on him like four times in a row, you know.

And then I think it was Dick Bennett, you know, called timeout, and he.

They had to run a double team at him or something.

But, I mean, this is what I was saying about my dad, like, how we learned to play early on, just kept it so simple.

It's like all we have to do is switch the smallest defender onto our best offensive player and then get the hell out of his way.

And we would do stuff like that all the time.

We play 1, 3, 1, and teams would always go 2, 1, 2.

So we would put a guard on one of the wing spots and a big man in the back.

Usually you put the.

Like, a small guy in the back and he runs corner.

The corner, Yep.

So the team would go 2, 1, 2, and we would put a big man in the back.

And one of the two wings then would be a guard, a smaller guard.

Well, if they threw from wing to corner on that side, we would X the guy through to the other side, and we would basically start playing a 2, 3 zone.

And what would happen is what he would teach the kids how to within one or two passes basically match up to them perfectly.

And in those days, it's probably the same now.

I mean, people run man to man offensive sets and zone sets.

And I remember definitively, we.

We did it at Seton hall one year at Boston College, some kind of junk.

And the point guard would call a zone offense because he saw his own.

And then within two passes, we were playing man to man.

And then he would call a man to man set.

And then we go back to the zone again.

There was this cat, mouse, and PJ Kalisimo starts Screaming from the sideline, just play like, don't run anything, just like just move and cut.

It's like actually a bad defense but if you don't stand still, you know.

So I wanted to mention those because that kind of gets to the heart of Jim and, and like I said, the best compliment you get is that Knight thought like he was a great coach and like saw through it.

A guy that, you know, ran motion offense and we would steal shit from Indiana, you know, back then we would run sets, we run this thing pairs.

Pairs meant Scooney has the ball in the middle third of the floor and we have a five and a three and a four and a two in the alleys.

And they just played by themselves.

They just screen, re, screen curl, pop, what that was the offense or the point guard goes into the paint and runs a three man triangle offense with the four and five and the two and three stay on the, in the alleys and move the ball.

And that was the offense.

And you would run a three man offense and, or reversible the other side.

And if you had your point guard little scoony and he's screening big fours and fives, a lane on cross screens and down screens and back screens and it was just like simple basketball.

But, but you did have to work on the fundamental principles of learning how to curl a screen, fade a screen, back screen and slip.

Just you know, the basic techniques for how to take advantage once you notice how you're being defended.

What did that look like in practice to work on again those, those types of skills?

How did you guys design your practices?

Everything Mike was progressions, you know, you like.

We wouldn't just practice a shell drill on defense.

We'd start with one on one.

Then we go to help and recover two, one, two.

Then we go to three weeks, I'd help, then we go to four.

And then in a four man box shell that we turn it into a triangle.

We'd work 1, 2, 1.

And then we would pass, just pass around the perimeter.

Then we'd pass on the perimeter and we'd say okay, you can cut.

And we try to have our cut is face cut over the top.

And then we teach our kids to deny that and always make the cutter go behind.

And then we would include dribble penetration.

So like whether it was offense or defense, everything was built from one on one up to five on five.

And then same with concepts of motion offense.

We'd play just three on three basketball.

We'd run a triangle offense with a point and two Low post, guys are off the lane, then we'd invert it.

We'd play with two guys on the perimeter and we would run things.

We had an offense, we just back screen the passer, that's all.

Whoever passed the ball was going to receive a back screen from one, two or three players, usually two.

And then that leaves you people to swing the ball to, to the other side every single time.

It sounds simple, right?

Every single time a player passes the ball, he's going to receive back screens from some other players unselfishly on the team.

And if you weren't the player catching the pass, obviously you couldn't screen and, and the other two of the five players, passer, receiver of the pass, two guys would then screen the passer.

So there's your five, you know, so.

And spacing.

If you're going to do that, you have to have great spacing.

And the thing we did a lot was we always tried to keep the ball in the middle third of the court so there's no strong side and weak sides.

The defense has to play both of those two man games or whatever your offenses are, they can't cheat and play 5 on 4, 4 on 3, 3 on 2 and load up on the weak side.

And then because we did that, we would scout, I would scout teams and we would sometimes switch at the 1, 2, 3, sometimes at the 1, 2, 3 and 4 and sometimes all five positions depending on what offenses the other team was running.

And if it wasn't a good well run offense, strategically we would just outnumber it, you know, we'd, we'd flood the weak side, you know, and just a lot of junk that probably came out of playing when we just weren't as good.

And we're trying to compete against great teams.

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It's so interesting, just the changes in the game from time when I was playing, even since I've been coaching and obviously since you've been coaching in terms of when you talk about a Bob Knight style motion offense, right, you're talking about movement off the ball, you're talking about screening off the ball.

Whereas now almost all the screening action that takes place initially starts with a ball screen to get that scoony Penn Michael Red switch, right?

That's the whole idea of trying to get your offensive player to have an advantage when you, when you switch.

But it's just amazing how the game has evolved and changed from again, 15, 20 years ago where you had the Bob Knight style of offense versus now, again, everything, like I said, starts off with a ball screen.

And it sounds like you guys were doing some of those things even back in the day, just getting, not probably done at the same volume.

Well, you know, it's interesting.

It drives me crazy.

I watch games now and the star player on a team is being totally denied the ball or he gets doubled on every ball screen.

And he's the best back screener out there.

Like, they're so glued to him.

Why wouldn't you have sets ready where he's a back screener, right?

This man's glued to him.

So it's really a double screener.

And every time he sets a screen for a player to cut to the basket, you know, and the other thing I always say to coaches is, why don't you have backdoor plays ready?

You know, you, you have, you got a, I don't know, a seven or eight point lead and it gets inside of four minutes and at some point their defense is playing it straight.

But now they have to come after you, you know, or that you just went on a, you know, 9, 0 run.

They call timeout.

They're going to get real, real aggressive.

Like, where's that, where's that sucker play that's just so ready to be called?

You know, just clearing a side and getting a back door layup.

Great.

Coaches still do it, but I don't, I don't.

It's just like again, it's you, you wonder what is the training ground for coaches coming up the ladder?

Or are they, were they recruiters or, you know, in the NBA?

No surprise.

A lot of those guys that became good coaches were video guys.

They came up through the video room where I think is still to this day is the greatest training ground for being an X and O person.

You know, whether it's offense, defense, special situations, anything.

If you're not breaking film down and stealing things from.

I mean, I laugh.

I was coaching the Czech national team back in 1987 through like 91.

I've been over there a few times.

When it was communist, they were one of the top five teams in the world in the Olympic ratings.

And when I coached the team, we had three seven footers.

I mean, it was a great basketball team, but it was behind the iron Curtain and crazy shit would happen.

Like one day a guy got a bloody nose.

They took him over to the training table, Mike, and laid him face down.

And the trainer started karate chopping the back of his Achilles tendon.

And I'm looking and I said to the interpreter, what the hell is he doing?

And he goes, he says something to the trainer and he turns back to me and he goes, pressure point, pressure point.

And all of a sudden the kid's nose stops bleeding.

And I'm like, holy shit.

Because you go over there thinking, you know everything about basketball.

The Americans are the greatest, you know, and they're doing deep.

They're doing double sessions with deep tissue massage.

There's no ice.

You can't even find an ice cube in the country.

You know, they, they drink beer and it's cool, but it's not.

They don't like ice cold things, you know, so you learn things like that.

But the reason I brought it up is we were playing in a tournament in Sweden.

It was the Czech national team, the Swedish national team, the Polish national team and Kansas State University.

And guess who the coach at Kansas State is.

This would have been 19, I don't know, 1987.

Oh, man.

So are we talking.

Mitch Richmond was there.

He's still coaching a great Division 1 program today.

And I'm trying to, I'm trying to think who would have been there.

No one ever get it was Dana Altman.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So Dana's the young coach, head coach of Kansas State.

And we're running a set that I never like the check taught me, the offensive set.

And we score three three point shots on the, on the first three possessions of the game.

It's nine to nothing.

And it was like a reverse action thing where you swing the ball one way, say right to left.

And then you, you.

The low post center was a giant seven footer.

He comes up and sets a flare screen for a three point shot.

But he bananas out in such an angle wide that the defender on the ball has been trained to jump to the basketball.

So on the pass in that middle third of the court, he jumps to the ball and every time he jumps to the ball, we had cleared out the backside and the five man comes up and, and runs a flare screen for a Three point shot.

So this little guard on Kansas State gets annihilated by a blind back screen side, you know, side flare screen on the first three possessions.

And we'd been running in practice, but we were running against each other, so they knew the set.

So I'm watching from the sideline and it's three nothing, six nothing, nine nothing.

And Dana's screaming at the kid, get over the screen.

And the kid screams back at Dana and he goes, I'm jumping to the ball like you taught me to jump to the ball.

And now you want me to go opposite.

Like, I'm supposed to.

The guy, my man, passes it to the left and I'm supposed to go to the right like that.

We don't do that.

And so I was like, holy shit.

Like, I think we could make an offense out of it.

So I bring it back to Boston College and we put it in and then we add.

We build off of it and we create an entire offense around this, which initially was like a secondary break.

We would run it as a secondary break.

And we called it check.

So for years we call it check.

And the players, when I see him 25, 30 years later at Boston College or Ohio State, they still think it's C H E C K check, like.

And I'm like, I tell them the story.

Now, 20 years, 25 years later, I'm like, guys, you know why we call that check?

I said, because that was stolen from the Czech national team.

It was actually the eca, you know, but.

But again, like, there's no original, you know, there's very few original offenses or defenses or, you know, and being a video guy or, you know, being tasked with trying to come up with game plans and practice plans and drills.

The other thing we did was we never took practice shooting drills in spots on the floor that weren't part of our offensive sets.

So that the footwork, like on that situation where you would flare to a three point on the weak side, you would repeat the footwork so often that you were used to catching the ball, you know, up near your shoulder as you were moving left to right, catching, and then, you know, grounding yourself and going up into the shot or, or driving from that position or whatever, you know, So I don't see that as much too.

When I go watch shoot arounds, you know, for, for 12 years I ran basketball in the Big Ten.

So I was.

I'm at games three, four days a week, I'm at practices, and a lot of times I watch the shoot arounds and I Don't see them utilizing the same spots on the floor where they actually get the shots in the game, or the exact footwork that they use in their set offense, which always kind of amazes me too, you know.

Yeah, it's interesting when you start thinking about just the evolution of players working on their game and then coaches coaching that within the confines of their practice or a shoot around.

And I think that one thing that players definitely have done over the course of time is become more skilled.

You look at the shooting that you see in the game today.

I mean, I'm talking at all levels.

But back you go back 15 or 20 years ago, and maybe every team had one or two guys that could shoot it.

And now every team has maybe one or two guys that can't shoot it.

And again, it's all to varying degrees.

But I would definitely say the skill level in terms of the shooting in basketball at all levels has improved dramatically.

And I think part of that is there's some.

You can get good coaching when you're a kid and you can get bad coaching when you're a kid, depending upon where you're at and who's giving you that coaching.

But I think for the most part, when you look at the way kids shoot the ball, you see very little variance anymore.

When you think back to guys that played professionally, you were talking about the aba, but you think about guys from that era and the way that Jamal Wilkes world be free, even Bird, the way they shot the ball, Magic, the way they shot the ball is not the way that you would if you were going to design a textbook jump shot.

Those aren't the guys that you would look at.

And yet they were all very, very good shooters.

Whereas today you look at most kids shoot the ball sort of the same way within their own physiology.

So it's just interesting the evolution of the game and how much better the shooting has become over time.

No, it's a really good point, Mike.

And bringing up Europe, I mean, when we in the 70s, 80s, 90s, like, we thought of European basketball that way because they just played in the gym all the time and they drilled and they drilled in a drill.

And in the 6050, 6070s, 80s, we played in playgrounds, we played outside.

Like the Americans were known as one on one.

Like I tell you, we played hours and hours and hours of one on one basketball.

Yeah, it was, it was like improvised jazz, you know, it was much more like free flowing.

And we didn't probably run a lot of set plays or things like, you know, A ton of that stuff.

And now it's kind of flipped where because of the AAU system and the club system and kids playing year round, they're probably in gyms all the time where the condition.

Absolutely.

That you can just shoot and shoot and shoot and they have the gun and, you know, different tools like that.

But yeah, I mean, it's kind of interesting now.

I agree with you.

There was even like, you know, Mike Red.

I give Mike so much credit.

Mike was not a good three point shooter in college and he had this quirky like he brought his left elbow way up and he had like a slingshot.

And you know what was lucky for Mike was he was drafted by the Bucks and he ended up kind of behind Ray Allen or under Ray's wing.

And I think he learned just how to practice and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and the repetition because for us he was an unbelievable slasher and maybe the best player I ever coached in using the backboard.

Mike had an uncanny knack of using the backboard, but he really deserves all the credit for making himself a three point shooter at the NBA level because he would make some threes in college, but that really wasn't his game.

And we were taking advantage of the fact that he was 66 and could get down in a low stance and handle the ball and cross it over and spin, dribble and slash and get to the glass and use the glass.

But yeah, it was kind of interesting to think about.

I say this a lot of times, even with nil.

It's almost as if the American system is moving more towards the professional club system of Europe.

The way it was when we knew it that none of those guys played in the school system.

They went to school and at 2 o'clock they went to the local sports club and that's where they got their training.

And they played in the youth games and then they played other sport clubs in cities across Europe and things.

But it's almost like we've moved into that direction now.

Why?

You know, we pay players, they're playing indoor basketball 12 months a year.

They don't play outside anymore.

I mean, a lot of communities, you can't even find outdoor courts, you know, or people don't use them a whole lot.

So it is just different how the game evolves.

Like you said, let's talk a little.

Bit about the NIL piece of it.

And I'm assuming that you've talked to a lot of people in the game since NIL has come on board.

And so I'm just curious to get, A, your thoughts, and B, just some of the feedback that you've gotten from some of the people that you've had the opportunity to interact with over time.

Just where are we with Nil, and where do you think it's headed?

Well, it's funny, you know, we talked about Jim O'Brien, but I also worked with another legendary Jim, Jim Delaney.

And I think, you know, in my 12 years at the Big Ten, you know, we.

Jim basically invented, you know, the Big Ten network in college television network.

And, you know, since.

Since he did it, everybody's kind of copied the other power conferences have copied it.

But he.

He was revolutionary that way.

And I think he realized about a decade ago that we were losing the Argum, the amateur argument.

You know, we, the Big Ten, had money to pay players.

Initially, it was what they call cost of attendance, which is all athletes were looking for at that time was just some spending money.

The scholarship covered room and board, tuition, books and fees, but that was it.

So, you know, if you wanted to go out for pizza or go to the movies or go out with a girlfriend or, you know, buddies or have your parents come visit or come to some games or go home a couple times, they really didn't have the loose change.

You know, at Ohio State, we were lucky.

A lot of our kids lived off campus, and they pocketed the stipend money for.

What was that?

That.

That room charge?

Yeah, for the dormitory.

But because in Columbus, three or four of them could live for, you know, for so inexpensive of a.

Of a rent, a monthly rent charge.

They'd end up with 500 bucks in their pocket every month.

But at Boston College, you couldn't afford to get an apartment somewhere in Boston.

Like, you had to be in the dorm.

You know what I mean?

But I think Jim sensed it, and the real problem was that the NCAA got even.

To this day, it's too big and it's too immobile and it's too laden with committees and bureaucracy, and they couldn't nimbly move in any way at any time.

And then they were belligerent in the ways they demanded.

No, this is how we've always done it or this is how it's going to go.

And so Jim's argument, I think he recruited Mike Sly from the sec, and they got together and they basically went to the membership and were threatening to almost break off if we didn't change the voting structure.

Because the way the NCA was set up, Mike, every school had one vote.

So if there were 350 schools in Division 1.

Can you imagine?

You know, you know, I don't know.

You know, NC A and T has the same vote that Ohio State university has with 50,000 students.

You know, so coaches were starting to bounce around, get million dollar contracts and they had freedom of movement.

And then we were putting millions into Taj Mah, Taj Mahal of athletic facilities and the kids weren't getting anything.

I mean they got a, they might have got a multi, you know, hundred multi, you know, not million dollar, but maybe 2 to 3 to $400,000.

Education paid for wasn't like it wasn't worth anything.

But there wasn't that trickle down.

And as the network television money grew, we needed to pay the players.

The problem is we probably lost a decade.

And so finally we did get permissible voting through for the, it was Powell 5 at that time and we got in cost of attendance.

And you know, they used a, they used a formula for it.

So maybe the, the top Division 1 athletes were getting five to 8,000 and if they were doing in the mid American, they could do nothing or they could do $800 or 1500, but they didn't have to match the Big Ten.

But we still, we lost kind of the public sentiment as to what the kids, you know, should get as a piece of all this growth and development and you know, obviously the money, you know, and so that was kind of the start of it.

And now they give even some money, some Alston money, you know, for academic performance.

But we just lost a lot of ground.

We lost 10 or 15 years where people now all of a sudden weren't even talking about the value of an education and what a four year degree is worth and how it impacts you over the next 50 years of your life in earnings and things.

And the other funny thing is when those kids wanted to work the NCA's telling them you can't have any job, nothing.

Exactly.

You can't for a kid in basketball, you can't run a camp.

But really what they wanted to do, they wanted to be influencers.

It was all social media.

They were like, you know, you mean you get paid if you have 50,000 followers that you know that you get a check?

You know, that's really what they wanted to do.

They didn't want to, I mean occasionally someone would write a children's book or you know, you know, they could have autograph signings or things like that.

But I can remember Mike, they were selling Ohio state uniforms in the, in the gift shop or the bookstore at The Schein center and Scoony came up to me and this probably would have been 98, 99, 2000.

And he goes, coach, I know my name's not on the jersey, but they're selling.

That's my jersey with my number on it.

Nike knows like they're either going to want to.

Kids are going to wear my number or Mike's Red's number and we don't get anything from that.

And I, and I was like, that's a pretty good question, Scoonie.

I really don't have any, an answer for you.

You know, and then you, you know, you fast forward 15 years, 18 years, and you see how, how we got to this place.

You know, I think I, I like to think that if we could have got them, you know, four, five, six thousand dollars cash in with everything else, we could have stayed on track.

I mean, at some point, you know, the, the, the network television contracts are so immense now.

You, you probably couldn't have held it back, but you could have stemmed the tide a little bit as far as appreciating what an education means because now a lot of the kids are transferring to 2, 3, 4 places and for the right reasons, they can immediately play.

They don't have to sit out a year academically anymore.

But Jim would, Jim Delaney would reflect back when he played for North Carolina and they, you know, freshmen were ineligible.

So it's just amazing how things evolve over time.

And a lot of it's technology and usually it's, it's changed for the better.

But people do get nostalgic for, you know, a low post back to the basket center.

They do get nostalgic for Mikhail or Elijah one every once in a while.

See somebody with some post moves.

Right.

I understand.

There's no, there's no doubt about that.

Yeah.

The nil landscape is so interesting to me.

I look at it and I'm, I try to go and go back and picture myself and what that would have looked like in terms of money.

And just like I, you, you mentioned about the guys at Ohio State sort of, you know, skimming off the top of the, of their, of their rent payments and I can remember living off campus my two year, two years and being able to save some of that money.

I remember getting, I get 300 bucks every year during Christmas break and I would try to make that, you know, I, I'd save 150 bucks and every year I try to get myself a pair of, you know, buy a pair of shoes over Christmas break, you know, for myself and I think about how, again, how excited myself and my teammates were to have that, whatever, a hundred bucks or 150 bucks and, and then trying to think about what it's like now where guys are getting in again, we're talking about different levels of money depending on what the level of the school is, obviously.

But I mean, if I would have been playing at Kent and somebody would have given me $5,000 for a season, I mean, that would have been unbelievable.

Rick.

I mean, I, I couldn't even try.

Trying to even fathom that is crazy.

And then you hear the stories about guys that.

And we're not even talking about giant schools, but guys who are getting, I mean, real money.

Real money in terms of what, you know, what, what, what you can do with it.

And so it's to navigate that as a player, as a kid who's 18, 19 years old, and then as a coach to try to help those kids to navigate it, but then also to navigate it yourself and then throw the portal on top of it where if I'm not getting what I want at school X, then I can go and make that bargain at school.

Yeah, it's really a challenging landscape and yet I still go back to.

And I think you made the same point that when I think about this whole thing in totality as a landscape, when you think about the fact that in the past coaches could take a job, recruit a kid, get a better offer, leave immediately, go and coach, have that bigger salary.

Now the kid who was recruited there by that school, by that coach, suddenly that kid, if that kid wants to leave, has to sit out a year.

And so the system was inherently unfair to players.

And I think you made a great point about the Runway of it went.

It went from 0 to 60 in such a short period of time.

Whereas if it have had that 10 year run up.

Yeah.

Probably could have been figured out in a much more organized fashion as opposed to sort of the wild west that we have right now, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, no, I totally agree with you.

And even, even the rolling of this, I mean, we still don't have any federal legislation so that states have different laws.

You know, they're finally kind of getting a.

It's almost like the IRS is threatening the collectives that you're not nonprofit.

So if, you know, donors want to contribute, they can't write that off, you know.

But there's still going to be a lot of litigation ahead.

It's going to take another, I don't know, I really think it'll take six to 10 years to sort it all out.

No one's.

We don't know the impact of Title nine as they start to distribute this revenue.

We don't know the impact on Olympic sports.

It'll be interesting to see just how it shakes out, whether the conferences keep expanding.

You know, football will be the kind of the experiment, I think.

They're, you know, they're not really aligned with the NCAA as far as the cfp, and they'll.

They can break off into their own federation at some point and decide how big they want to be or how much you have to pony up to be part of that club.

And depending on the success or growth of that sport, basketball would probably be watching.

And then it'll be interesting to see, you know, if.

If that would be something that that sport would then, you know, take some lessons from what they see football do and see how, you know, that might work.

But, yeah, it's.

It's just really been interesting to follow all that.

All right, let's switch gears and talk a little officiating, because for years you were in charge of basketball officiating in the Big Ten.

Just tell me a little bit about that experience and what you learned about officiating during your time overseeing the Big Ten officials.

Well, when I was associate commissioner for the Mid American Conference, every league typically has a coordinator of officials.

So I worked with a guy named Sam Licklider.

He was an older ex Big Ten ref.

And, you know, as a basketball coach for 25 years, you know what a good call is and a bad call.

But I didn't know any of the.

What we call mechanics of officiating.

I mean, I knew there were three guys.

I didn't know how they rotate positions.

I didn't know the coverages.

I just knew if it was a blown call or a great call, you know, or, you know, if you confirm with a video of whether the ball hit the backboard first or was a clean block.

I mean, those type of things.

And so, you know, sitting next to Sam at games and asking questions and watching video, it was like anything.

It was just retraining yourself.

When in my years at, say, the Ohio State program, I'd have student managers cut and film for me and different staff, and they'd always say, rick, how do you see all 10 players moving at, like.

Because I'd be like, freeze it.

You see this guy over here?

And they're like, how do you see that?

And I'm like, I don't know.

I don't how to explain it.

Just training you know, so it was that type of adjustment I had to make where I was also seeing three refs now and where they were positioned and how they rotated or didn't rotate or when they were in good position to see a play or teaching them how to anticipate those things.

So first I had to kind of learn the mechanics.

I understood play calling.

No coach is very good on the rules, so you really have to get in the rule book and study it and ask a lot of questions.

So, you know, I learned a lot the first couple years at the mid American and then when I got to the Big Ten, Jim actually asked me to do both.

He wanted to rebuild.

We had aging.

We had seven or eight like aging Big Ten officials that were kind of legendary.

You'd see him on all the games for a couple decades and.

But they were all, you know, slowing down and immobile and kind of past their prime.

But we didn't have any feeder system.

So again, Jim was an unbelievable visionary.

He basically created an LLC for us.

So we basically started an outside business that I was the executive director of.

It was called the Collegiate Officiating Consortium and we recruited other commissioners leagues in with us.

So basically it was two things, Mike.

It was one that we would be a better take better use of the finances of the low mid mages if we teamed up with them.

And then the other thing that I would do is I would on off night share some of the top officials in America down as crew chiefs in those leagues.

And then we would also create a whole basically identification, training, development and performance assessment program.

So we built this whole entire operation at its height.

We were managing 65 Division 1 schools in like 22 states and we were overseeing all the officiating.

We were basically using the low mid major as a feeder system up to the Big Ten.

But.

But we also had journeyman refs that for whatever reason had years of experience but had never kind of cracked through to the power conference level, but were great low mid major refs and could be creed shifts, true chiefs, or we would take kind of officials at the big ten level or the power crunch level that should probably be getting less games and supplementing their decreasing assignments with increases in the Max, Summit, Horizon, Metro, Atlantic, America, east, wherever.

And basically I would say to them there's an exit ramp for you to keep reffing, but it's going to go in the opposite direction now and it's going to involve mentoring.

You're also going to become a coach if your ego is such that you can't take going from 25 Big Ten games this year to 15 next year, then you need to, you're going to need to retire, you know, or we just won't.

They're all independent contractors, so it's, we can decide whether to offer them a contract or not, you know.

Right.

So it's kind of that whole process.

And over a decade, I mean, one of the things I'm most proud of is we put 20 referees into their first NCAA tournament, meaning they had to start somewhere in division one.

And they usually start in D2 and D3 and move up.

But to get a referee like to break into the NCAA tournament, as long as they stay healthy and have a great attitude and continue to work, more often than not, a very, very high percentage of them are right in the NCAA's tournament the next year and the next year.

So if you can develop a referee by the time he's 35 or 38 and get him into the NCAA tournament, you may have an NCAA tournament ref for the next 20 years.

And we did that with 20 young officials in the Big Ten.

And then they would also still like go back into the leagues where they cut their teeth.

You know, the challenges are that you have to, you have to watch them and you have to grade them out every game and you have to do tons of video breakdown and analysis to really get a handle on who, who's qualified or not, who's ready.

And then you have to bring them along slowly.

You know, I would, I would take a young ref and give them five or six non conference games and some of those guarantee games.

I protect them with a couple veterans because the coaches will always come at you as like, who the hell is this guy?

I never seen him before, you know, and on occasion it gets comical.

I remember I had a young, I had a young rep, Tyler Ford, who was breaking into Division 1, but also in the NBA training ground.

And they were really high on him.

And I put him on a game at Michigan State.

And Tom ended up losing actually to Texas Southern.

And it wasn't close.

It was like eight points or something.

It wasn't a buzzer beat or one of those.

And we talked the next day and we were just talking about plays.

And you know, Tom was obviously not happy with losing to Texas Southern and probably handed them a check on their way out the door.

But he was like, and who's the young kid?

And I was like, well, that's Tyler Ford.

I'm trying, I'm trying to break him into the Big Ten.

But he goes well, where's he work?

I go, well, just to give an example, Tom, last year he worked in the, you know, Mac in the summer, in the horizon.

He did like 28 Division 1 games.

And then he worked in the G league.

He did 32 games in the G League, and he did four NBA games.

And there's a quiet pause.

And all of a sudden Tom goes, get the F out of here.

And I'm like, well, Tom, you gotta trust me a little bit.

Like, I'm charged with developing the next generation of refs.

And he's really good, but to be honest, we're gonna lose him to the NBA.

And sure enough, the next season he was in the NBA.

And I don't know, it's probably.

It's probably been six or eight years.

He's worked deep into the NBA playoffs now.

You know, he's from.

He's an Indiana kid.

He worked in the.

He ran intramural sports at Purdue, which was the other thing I had to tell Tom.

I was like, tom, he can never do Purdue's games ever, because he works at Purdue, you know, And I have to be careful.

Like, he hasn't advanced to the point where he'd even be on big.

Big Ten games late.

Cause I would have to scrutinize, you know, what people would say if a Purdue employee was working a big game between Michigan State and Wisconsin, you know, so that's the other thing.

Behind the science scenes, as always, we have strict conference conflict of interest rules.

We have rules on policies and procedures on how early they get to the.

To the venues, all the reporting they have to.

They're required to watch video.

So much goes on behind the scenes.

But it was kind of a neat concept of regionalizing officiating.

And really what happened was, Tom, Jim Delaney went to some meetings where 31 referees, 31 coordinators, officials were representing 31 conferences.

And Jim was like, we can never get 31 guys on the same page for what's good for the game.

And Jim had done a huge study back when the scoring got down into the 50s, Mike.

And he was like, this is not good for the game.

And he took it upon himself.

He.

He created a competition committee and he looked at 50 years of college basketball.

And he basically came to the realization that the defense has way too much of a advantage and the games are way too physical.

And we had to make a real philosophical change nationally to open up the games and start to call fouls for hand checking and body bumping and plays off the ball and really deal with the physicality of the game.

So that was kind of an interesting con.

Part of my job.

You're developing a young guy.

You're looking at somebody that you're bringing in and you're interacting with them.

What were some of the intangible qualities of a good official?

Well, first of all, they have to have, like, all those mechanics down.

So all the positioning and signaling and rotations and being in the right spot to see plays is first and foremost.

But then as they work, you start to get an analysis of their judgment.

And I would tell them, you know, it's like having a college degree now you're starting on your master's, but these guys that have been veterans working the Big Ten or the ACC or any of the power conferences, they've got like, PhDs.

Not only do they do all these things from a fundamental level, but now they understand the nuance of the game.

You know, they match plays up at each end.

If there's a, you know, an over the back file here and there's one slightly over the back, they'll.

They'll try to match it up, or there's a lot of nuance in it that kind of falls into this judgment category.

And you'll see other officials sometimes just don't have a feel for it.

It's like a call that doesn't fit the game, you know, kind of that stuff.

So it's really.

It's really interesting.

There's really both an art and a science to it.

And then as they progress, then it's a question of talking to coaches.

One of the hardest things to teach young officials is to go to a coach, and especially if he's reasonable and he wants an explanation or being honest that you miss it or you didn't have a good look at it or you wish you had it back.

You know, the worst thing you can say is, no, no, I was right.

Because they're going to go in at halftime and look at the video.

You know, there's so much technology now, or it's going to be on social media.

Someone's going to take a screenshot and post it on X.

You know, so that's a.

That's kind of a big developmental thing.

And then obviously dealing with the pressure.

I mean, it's interesting.

The Big Ten now, because of Oregon, Washington, UCLA and usc, they're bringing in west coast refs in the Big Ten games.

But what happens initially is they're bringing in guys that the majority of the league, the coaches have never seen before.

Right.

And I do think that, that there's difference in styles of play.

As much as we want to ref the whole country the same way, you know, there's, there can be a physicality difference or a style of play difference.

But even more than that, in the Big Ten, the Big Ten has led the country in attendance for like 45 consecutive years.

So I was just noticing the other day they had 6,000 in Oregon.

I mean, 6,000 in the Big Ten is like half empty everywhere.

You know, you don't see it.

I mean, it's even bloodthirsty at Rutgers and at Nebraska, you know, sold out arenas.

So there's press pressure that comes with that in every game in the Big Ten is nationally televised.

So there's no, there's scrutiny everywhere and millions of people are watching the games.

And you have to be able to deal with all that pressure, you know, night after night after night.

So those are kind of the, the hurdles that even great young refs have to kind of get over.

That makes a lot of sense.

I mean, I think, right.

The ability to have confidence yourself.

First you have to have, as you said, the mechanics down and be able to have that feel and then to be able to have the confidence to A, back up your call, but B, be able to admit when you make a mistake.

Sort of like just about, just about anything in life.

Probably that's a, that's a.

That's probably an app description with just about anything.

All right, we're coming up on an hour and a half.

Rick, I want to ask you one final two part question.

So part one, when you look ahead over the next year and you think kind of about what you're doing, where you're at, what you've done, what do you see as being your biggest challenge?

And then the second part of the question is when you think about what you've gotten to do in your career, what you're going to do, what brings you the most joy.

So your biggest challenge and your biggest joy.

Well, I think the challenge for me now, I've shifted a little bit.

I do some consulting.

I'm working with some tech firms.

I still, I do some kind of quiet basketball analysis for coaches behind the scenes here and there.

Sometimes a lot of these guys, even some of the great coaches, they just want some feedback from someone outside the program, usually acknowledge what they're seeing is accurate or to kind of bounce a couple new ideas off of them.

But this year I joined the faculty at Denison University.

So I'm.

I'll be teaching a leadership theory class in the spring.

I think the challenge for me right now is that 62 in working with young college people.

Can I still be like, can I be relevant generationally?

You know, I'm.

I'm not the greatest on technology.

I mean, I mean, I live for years in a video room and video editing and some of that tech, but AI and things like that, you know, that's new to our generation.

And, you know, we're trying to figure out, you know, Excel spreadsheets and some basic stuff like me trying to get on this program on my laptop.

I lucky I've got three daughters that are all, you know, relatively recent college grads.

So they, they helped me out a little bit, but I think it's just that, like, they basically hired me to, as a practitioner in, in the sports industry to go onto campus that's laden with professors with PhDs and try to give the students some real life advice about networking, interviewing, you know, the grit you need after you hear no, you know, dozens of times to keep kind of plugging that, trying to find that at least the first internship or the first job or so it'll be interesting to see, you know, as my experience on campus.

You know, how, how can I give them some lessons but.

But still try to be relevant to, you know, what they deal with, you know, in the here and now for what they all face and post Covid it's a very different.

It's a lot of things.

You know, there's a lot of mental health issues and there's a lot of things going on.

So I think that's, that's probably the challenge.

And, and at the same time, I get a great sense of benefit from just again, like giving back or at this stage in my career, I've done just about everything.

I.

I feel like, you know, there's certainly things I regret or things I would have liked to have done.

But when I look back overall from a standpoint of 40 years in basketball, you know, I've coached at different levels.

I've.

I've experienced horrible seasons and championships and a Final Four and multiple NCAA appearances.

I've.

I've been on the administrative side where I.

I'm looking at officiating or the.

I'm the liaison to head coaches, advocating for coaches and rule changes and the way they select teams for the tournament, all, all kinds of things.

I've coached internationally.

So basketball has been unbelievable to me and continues to be.

I'm going to do some work in Athens and in April at a camp overseas, but it's time to Give back.

It's time to kind of share a lot of the stories that we got to talk about.

And I really appreciate being able to reminisce and tell some of those stories or to try to get people to understand how good a coach Jimmy O'Brien was or what an amazing, you know, visionary Jim Delaney was with regard to the Big Ten, the commissioner for over 30, 30 years.

And so, so, yeah, so I think that's probably the best answer to your question.

Absolutely.

That's very well said.

Before we get out, I want to give you a chance to share.

How can people reach out to you, get in touch with you, whether you want to share, email, whatever, whatever you feel comfortable with.

And then after you do that, I'll jump back in and wrap things up.

Yeah, these days probably the best is just LinkedIn, you know, just trying to, you know, connect through LinkedIn and then depending on what, you know, people are interested in chatting about or whatever, you know, see how it goes from there to either then to share phone numbers or email addresses.

But I think most people are on LinkedIn these days or know what it is.

The other thing is, you know, I, you can probably find me know, just through Denison University right now or, or just like, like us, you know, word of mouth, you know.

Right, exactly.

I know.

I, I told you, I've got.

You always said you want a couple recommendations too of people that have on the program and I think I got a couple people that you'd really enjoy talking to.

There we go.

Well, shout outs to my daughter Meredith, who connected us.

So again, Rick, cannot thank you enough for taking the time out of your schedule tonight.

Really, really appreciate it.

And to everyone out there, thanks for listening and we'll catch you on our next episode.

Thanks.

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