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The Last Lesson
What am I doing every day in my life to make sure, when it’s my time, that the guy in my mail room is going to show up for me?
That was the last lesson my father ever taught me.
Fifteen years ago - so hard to believe it’s been that long - on the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2008, I was getting ready to head down to practice at Rhode Island College when my cell phone rang. At RIC my office was in the Recreation Center, across campus from the Murray Center where we practiced and played, so we had to actually get into our cars and drive down to the Murray Center for practice. As I walked out of the Rec Center towards my car, I looked at my phone. It was my Dad calling.
It was odd that my Dad would call at that time, because he knew we practiced late in the afternoon. I had a lot going on getting ready for practice, so I let the call go. I’d give him a call back after practice. I got in my car and started driving down the Rec Center, and my phone rang again. It was my Dad calling again. I figured maybe he just had to ask me a question about something so I picked it up.
It’s hard to describe the feeling you get when your caller ID says “Dad” yet the voice you hear when you say hello is one you don’t recognize. My insides felt hollow. I was sitting at a stop sign waiting to make a right turn when I heard “Detective with the Tampa Police department.” My father had recently bought his retirement home in Tampa. “I’m very sorry to inform you…”
My father had been found by his cleaning lady, dead of a heart attack. He was 63 years old. Just like that, my father was dead. I was too stunned to know how to feel.
I drove down to the Murray Center, parked in the parking lot, and called my brother. I got his wife, who said he was not feeling well and was sleeping. I told her he had to wake him up. When he came to the phone I just said “I just got a call from the Tampa Police department. Dad’s dead.” They had picked up my Dad’s cell phone and looked at his text messages. I had texted him the day before to let him know Providence College was in Anaheim in a tournament, and their game was on TV if he wanted to watch it. He never got the text. The Tampa Police did.
I went inside the Murray Center, totally stunned, and told my AD. I went into the gym and gathered my players who were warming up before practice, and told them. It seemed weird that I told my team before I told anyone else in my family, but I had to let them know I wasn’t going to be at practice. I called my girlfriend – now my wife – and can still hear the shock in her voice.
I went home and called my brother again, and we started calling family and close friends. The feeling is hard to describe, it’s like being in a daze. I was shocked, stunned, empty, yet there was a lot of work to do. We had to let people know, to start thinking about arrangements. Throughout all of it, as bad as I felt, I had this one overriding feeling: Lucky. It’s still hard to explain how I felt that way in that moment. I had a great relationship with my father, and I just felt lucky to have had the relationship I did with him for 36 years. I still feel that way to this day. As stunned as I was, I just kept thinking about how lucky I was, and I guess that helped me get through that day somehow.
My father was very successful. He grew up in Parkchester in the Bronx and had to work hard to get to college. He attended Iona College just North of the City, joining the Marine Reserves to help pay for school, and started a career in business upon graduation. He took a job out of school with KPMG, one of the big accounting firms in New York City, and ended up spending 38 years with the company. By the time he retired he was a senior partner with a big office on Park Avenue. He was very actively involved at Iona College, his alma mater, as the President of their Goal Club, as well as their Alumni Association. He joined a golf club in Westchester and served a stint as the President there. He served on a number of different Board of Directors for different organizations.
My father’s wake was a few days later on Castle Hill Avenue in the Bronx, the neighborhood where he grew up. He was still a working class kid from the Bronx, but he had worked his way into being very well off and connecting with some very successful people. It was overwhelming to see so many people show up to pay their respects. Whenever your in the situation where someone close to you has a death in the family and you feel like your not sure what to do, just show up. That’s what you do. You show up. It really helped my brother and I to see so many people who cared about and had been impacted by our father.
The wake was a who’s who of powerful people. College President’s, executive VPs, high-powered attorneys, wall street millionaires. It made my brother and I feel very good to see so many of my Dad’s friends and associates. The line was long and it took a couple of hours to see everyone.
Towards the end of the night a man walked in who looked a little out of place. He was wearing a baseball cap and a pair of khakis with a golf shirt and a rumpled jacket. He had a work ID badge hanging around his neck, looking very blue collar in a white collar crowd. I noticed him as soon as he walked in, and I didn’t recognize him. He didn’t talk to anyone, he just waited on line and made his way up to our family to pay respects. He shook my hand and simply said “I’m so sorry for your loss. Your father was a great friend to me.” I said thank you, but didn’t ask him who he was. After he got through the line, he went and sat in the back in a chair by himself. I noticed he said a few words to a few of the people from my Dad’s office. Then he got up slowly, put his cap back on, and started to walk out.
I wanted to talk to him before he left, but I hesitated because I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable. I didn’t want him to think that I was stopping him because I didn’t know who he was. I watched him walk out the door of the funeral home and head back down Castle Hill Avenue – past a number of car service Town Cars ready to take some of the attendees back into Manhattan. He put his cap on and walked back towards the 6 train.
This man was on my mind all night. Before everyone left, I asked one of my father’s work associates if they knew who he was. I thought I had seen him talking briefly with some of the people from my Dad’s office. It turns out he did work in my Dad’s office – in the mailroom. He delivered the mail to my Dad’s floor of his Park Avenue office building. He would sort the mail for my Dad exactly how he wanted it. He would bring my Dad his coffee with the mail in the morning, make sure he had an umbrella when it was raining, call down to make sure my Dad’s car was ready in the garage when he needed it.
My Dad had asked him what his name was, befriended him, and developed a relationship with him. He asked him about his family. He found out he had two young kids in catholic grammar school. He’d buy them Christmas gifts so they had nice toys under the tree. At different times when things were a struggle, my Dad had helped out by paying the tuition for his kids so they could stay in the school in their neighborhood. He helped out the family whenever they needed something over the years, and he, his secretary and the family were the only ones who knew about it. I had never met the man or his family.
When I learned about this, I couldn’t hold back the tears. This man had gotten on the 6 train in Midtown Manhattan and taken a one hour subway ride to Castle Hill, then walked the six blocks to pay his respects, to say “I’m sorry for your loss” to two sons he had never met. He didn’t know us, and hardly knew anyone at the wake. He certainly looked a little bit out of place. But he knew my father, and considered him a friend.
I still think about him all of the time. I can still see him putting his hat back on and slowly walking up Castle Hill Avenue to the Subway station. He spent at least two hours on the subway and waited at least 30 minutes in line just to pay his respects. I didn’t even know who he was, nor did my brother. We would have had no idea if he didn’t show up. But he made the trip anyway.
I am very lucky to have had the relationship I did with my father, to spend the time with him that I did. I’m also very proud of the way my Dad lived his life. He made a lot of money and traveled in circles of very successful people. But he was always the same person, the kid who had worked his way out of the Bronx. He had no sense of entitlement about him. I learned so much from him, simply from the way he lived his life and how he acted towards others, even those he didn’t know. He treated everyone with dignity and respect and went out of his way to help people who needed help.
That night, that moment, that man who showed up to pay his respects for my father made me think about how I live my own life. Do I treat everyone with the same respect? Am I courteous and genuine to everyone I meet, regardless of their circumstances and what they can do for me? Do I give people the benefit of the doubt if they are struggling with something, not knowing what might be going on in their life? Do I show the right amount of gratitude in my daily routine?
How do I treat the people in my “mail room?” We all have people in the mail room in our life. How do we interact with those people? Do we treat them with respect and go out of our way to make sure they are comfortable? Do we think about what we can do to help them? Or others who might not come from the same background that we do?
What am I doing every day in my life to make sure, when it’s my time, that the guy in my mail room is going to show up for me?
That was the last lesson my father ever taught me.
Great Passers Think Score First
To be a great passer, you have to think like a scorer. The best passers think score first, and it's something you really have to instill in your players.
It seems counterintuitive, but it actually makes a lot of sense. Players who drive to pass are usually pretty easy to read. Players who drive to score draw the help and open up passing lanes to their teammates.
Great passers are obviously unselfish, and thinking score first does not mean you have to be selfish. It actually helps you be unselfish. Thinking score first puts a lot more pressure on the defense and creates more opportunities.
The best passers I've ever coached are scoring threats. You can be a scoring threat and also be unselfish. If the defense can play you as a passer you are going to have a hard time finding open teammates. They are going to close those lanes down and dare you to score. You see a lot of turnovers on penetration and on the fast break when a player knows they are going to pass the ball, and they aren't a threat to score.
Great passers have to think score. Convince your players to think score first when they get into the paint, and they'll become better passers.
Yoda To Luke
More great stuff from Buzz Williams...
"The best leaders transition the fastest..."
https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ck_GRfhOuys/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
Wojo on Failure Recovery
I liked this quote from Steve Wojciechowski on what he's learned since he got fired.
“What coaches hear is, you gotta grind, grind, grind. To me, it’s such B.S.,” Wojciechowski says. “You’re told you gotta want it as much as you can breathe. Really? Really? You need to win as much as you need to breathe? Think about what you just said. I talk to young coaches about, what type of failure recovery plan do you have? You’re going to have losses, and not all of those losses are on the court. If you don’t have a plan internally to get you back to a baseline level of clarity, then they pile up. If I had to do it all over again, I’d carve out more space for quiet.”
He is really talking about coaches and how their failure recovery plan as individuals, but it applies to teams as well. And obviously they are connected. How is your team going to handle failure? Because handling failure is a big part of sustaining elite success. And your team's failure recovery plan is going to come from you.
I've always said that elite teams have a good relationship with losing. I learned that from my teams at RIC when I first became a head coach. What is your team's relationship with losing? That will go a long way towards your ability to win.
Warren Zevon Says Goodbye
Just a terrific article on the night musician visited with his friend David Letterman when he was dying of cancer.
“Thank You, and Goodbye”
On October 30, 2002, a cancer-stricken Warren Zevon returned to the ‘Late Show With David Letterman’ stage for one last performance. Twenty years later, Letterman and more remember the gravitas and emotion of that stunning night.
By Alan Siegel Oct 28, 2022, 6:30am EDT
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DavidDavid Letterman, 20 years later, still thinks about the interview. “It was the only time in my talk show history that I did anything like that,” he says. “I’ve never sat down and talked to anybody on television where we both understood they were about to die.”
Warren Zevon appeared on Late Show With David Letterman on October 30, 2002. That summer, he had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Doctors gave him a few months to live. To say goodbye to the musician who had graced his stage dozens of times over the previous two decades, Letterman devoted a full episode to him. There were no Hollywood stars promoting a movie, no musical guests debuting a new single. It was just Zevon. He and Letterman chatted, and then he played three songs.
“There are two things at work here, and only one of them I know for a fact: that when people get to be on television, they raise their game because they get to be on television,” Letterman says. “The other thing is, we guessed maybe that there was some pharmaceutical help. But it was stunning. And again, from my standpoint, do you expect a guy to be good-natured about it? I mean, God. It was weird.”
The singer-songwriter’s final hour with Letterman unfolded into one of the most memorable moments of their careers. Like a classic Zevon track, their conversation was shockingly funny and casually profound. “David didn’t make it like a whole long greeting card,” says comedian Richard Lewis, a buddy of Zevon’s and a frequent Letterman guest. “It was just like two guys bullshitting on a park bench.”
When Letterman asked his friend how his work had changed after learning that he was sick, he replied, “You’re reminded to enjoy every sandwich.” As soon as he heard it, Letterman’s longtime band leader Paul Shaffer knew the line would become famous. “Man, if I had only said that in my life,” he says, “I think my life would’ve been worth something.”
Looking back on it now, Letterman can’t believe the send-off happened at all. “If I was dying, I’m not going to go and talk to anybody on TV about me and my impending death,” he says. “Selfishly, and of course under the circumstances, why would I think about anything other than myself? That’s all you need to know about what I am.” Zevon, however, seemed to savor the chance to give himself over to Letterman and his audience one last time. “He was kind of on a mission,” says Late Show producer and booker Sheila Rogers. “He knew what he was doing. He was almost revitalized a little bit. It was so important, this appearance.”
Letterman admits that the idea of asking someone he revered questions about his mortality threw him off. “I just wasn’t grounded,” he says. But as “ill-equipped” as he claims that he was, he knows that his discomfort was a natural byproduct of the extraordinarily emotional circumstances.
“One of the rare cases where I give myself a bit of a break,” Letterman says. “Because, holy shit!”
WhenWhen Letterman found out that Zevon was sick, he felt optimistic about his friend’s chances. “In the beginning, it seemed like something that he would outlive, that he would get by because it was described as ‘cancer,’” he says. “At some point the idea of lung cancer stopped being a death sentence. … So I think that in that little loophole, there was hope that, ‘Oh, well, he’s a young guy, he’ll still be all right.’”
Then Letterman learned that the 55-year-old Zevon’s illness was pleural mesothelioma, an aggressive disease that affects the lining of the lungs. Yet despite his dire prognosis, Zevon wasn’t yet ready to publicly lapse into sentimentality. “I’m OK with it,” he said in a September 2002 statement. “But it’ll be a drag if I don’t make it till the next James Bond movie comes out.”
The acerbic artist may have turned his death into an ironic joke, but he approached his dual role as a musician and provider with sincerity. Without much time left, he began work on a new album and went on a press tour. He also made a plan to visit the Late Show. Technically it was to promote the release of a new best-of record, but it was really a going-away party. “Warren wanted to do the show,” Rogers says. “There was no question about it. I think the bigger issue was, would he be up for such a big undertaking? And then when we told Dave he was gonna come do the show, Dave said, ‘It should be his show.’”
TV send-offs had happened before—Letterman points out that Johnny Carson interviewed Michael Landon on The Tonight Show in 1991 two months before the actor died of pancreatic cancer—but showcasing an artist who hadn’t had a Top 40 hit since “Werewolves of London” in 1978, even one whose days were numbered, was a fairly bold move in the hyper-topical late-night world. “Like so many nights that ventured from the normal, I sat in my office, watching the taping, worried whether or not we would make it,” Late Show writer Bill Scheft says via email. “And by that I mean: Can we make it through an entire taping? So often, we fall in love with the idea rather than the reality. And the reality, let’s face it, rarely measures up. Of course, it was an inspired idea, but it was so intensely personal to Dave. Could the reality possibly match?”
Letterman had been an obsessive Zevon fan since his girlfriend recommended that he read Paul Nelson’s 1981 Rolling Stone cover story about the singer-songwriter. The profile, published three years after the release of his breakthrough third album, Excitable Boy, is a compendium of the artist’s self-destructive behavior. “I became interested in the guy because the story at the time was crazy and fascinating, not atypical as it turns out of artists,” the host says. “And it was that that caused me to start listening to his music.”
He quickly realized that Zevon’s music was more interesting than his sordid image. His songs could be romantic, angry, self-loathing, political, violent, and funny—or a mix of all those. “I had the good fortune to go see him live in New York,” Letterman says. “I just thought, ‘Now wait a minute, this guy is a poet.’ He’s a historian. His music is unusual. It’s rock ’n’ roll, but nobody talks about these things.”
Letterman is particularly fond of “Desperados Under the Eaves,” the chronicle of a man’s descent into alcoholism while holed up in a Los Angeles hotel, and “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” the tale of a Norwegian mercenary who seeks revenge against the man who killed him. “Jesus, I think he’s unique,” Letterman says. “He can take these ideas and sit down at the piano … it’s like a magic trick.”
In the summer of 1982, just months after Late Night With David Lettermanpremiered on NBC, Zevon made his first appearance on the show in support of his album The Envoy. He returned five years later, shortly after getting sober, to promote his next record, Sentimental Hygiene. Zevon started to come back more regularly in the early ’90s, following Letterman to CBS and occasionally filling in for Shaffer as band leader. The host was so fond of Zevon that during one of those stints, he sent a cooler full of steaks to the musician’s hotel room. “Dad gave them all to us because he couldn’t do anything with them in the hotel,” his daughter Ariel says in I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, her mother Crystal’s biography of Zevon. “So we went back with this enormous quantity of very high end steaks.”
In 2001, Zevon asked Letterman to visit him in his studio. The musician had written a ballad with sportswriter Mitch Albom and wanted the host’s voice on it. That’s Letterman shouting the titular line on “Hit Somebody! (The Hockey Song),” an ode to the game’s goons. “It’s a bad acting job on my part,” Letterman says. “He’s standing in the God-dang room and I had to do it and then I realized years later when I heard it again, ‘Oh, that’s not what he wanted.’ I know exactly what he wanted, and I’m not sure I could accomplish that now. But listening to it after the fact, I realized, ‘Oh, you can tell I don’t know what I’m doing.’”
But even if he wasn’t happy with his performance, Letterman concedes that he’s “pleased to have been in the song.” There was no way he was saying no to Warren Zevon.
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KeepKeep the jokes coming. Before the rehearsal, that was Zevon’s main request. “I don’t want any weird questions or anybody to say, ‘How are you feeling?’” Shaffer remembers him saying on that day in October 2002. “None of that.”
Zevon wanted the performance to feel normal, but Shaffer knew it would be anything but. After all, the musician wanted to play three songs; artists on Late Show usually performed only one. “And it’s hard enough to do one, and sometimes when you finish the rehearsal, you’re almost tired,” says Shaffer, who recalls that Zevon used to fly into New York for Late Show a day early to make sure that he’d have time to clear his inevitable headache. “Forget about being sick with cancer.”
The singer-songwriter’s mood during the warm-up eased Shaffer’s fears. “The band starts, the drums kick in, and he’s no different than any other musician, sick as he was,” he says. “He was getting into it in the rehearsal. And so obviously anybody would’ve been exhausted after that, but he went on and did that amazing show.”
Leading up to the taping, it was Letterman—not Zevon—who was the most nervous person at the Ed Sullivan Theater. “I remember being uncomfortable about it from the very beginning,” he says. His 20-year relationship with Zevon made it difficult for the host to focus. “If I had not known the guy, it would’ve been easier for me to approach, to execute, to take care of,” he says. “But the fact that I knew the guy and knew what he was doing and thinking …”
When the show started, Letterman succeeded in not succumbing to his self-consciousness. After beginning with a traditional monologue that featured jokes about disgraced celebrity publicist Lizzie Grubman and the murder charges against Robert Blake, he sat down at his desk and told the audience about the evening’s guest. With Shaffer’s help, he spoke of his own Zevon fandom, the musician’s history with the show, and the singer’s catalog. “This guy is the real deal,” the host said. “You know, he’s not one of these pretty-faced, phony rock ’n’ roll guys.”
In hindsight, Letterman thinks that the introduction sounded stilted. “On paper, it just couldn’t be more, ‘OK, and your first guest would be somebody who only has a few months to live,’” he says.
Lewis isn’t surprised that Letterman is so hard on himself. “I never would think David would feel good about much of anything,” the comedian says. “As magnificent as he was for such a long stretch, he’s just not the type of guy to go on about himself. That’s why he was so great. He was a perfectionist, and he would never feel that satisfied.”
What Letterman saw as awkwardness came off as admiration. The episode was a tribute to a musician who’d been underappreciated; giving people a primer on his work was appropriate. Following a Halloween-themed Top 10 list, Letterman finally brought out the guest of honor. “A brilliant songwriter and a musician who has been a friend of ours for 20 years, and believe me it’s a thrill to have him here with us,” he said. “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Warren Zevon. Warren!”
The well-tanned singer, wearing his signature dark glasses and a gray pinstripe suit with an open collar, came out with a smile on his face. After the two friends shook hands, they sat down at Letterman’s desk. “I guess a couple of months ago,” the host began, “we all learned that your life has changed radically, hasn’t it?”
“You mean you heard about the flu?” Zevon joked. Then he let out a laugh that cut through the tension in the room like a machete. “When he laughed, his eyes would almost roll up like in a slot machine just as it’s coming to an end,” Lewis says. “And then each one would stop.”
Letterman served as straight man to Zevon throughout the interview, deftly guiding him with straightforward questions that resulted in poignant (and often funny) answers. “Dave did an amazing job of not making it as awkward as it could have been,” says Shaffer, who during the show played several Zevon songs with his CBS Orchestra. “Warren’s days were numbered and he was here to talk about it. Not ignore it, but talk about it.”
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Untangling the Complicated Legacy of Warren Zevon
Zevon told the story of his diagnosis, which came after he experienced shortness of breath for months. “First of all, let me say that I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years,” said the singer-songwriter, whose trusty dentist, “Dr. Stan,” finally convinced him to see a medical doctor.
When Letterman complimented him on looking “remarkably healthy,” Zevon quipped, “Don’t be fooled by cosmetics.” The host still marvels at how on the musician was that day: “He was vibrant, for God’s sake. And he had more energy than did I.”
Eventually, things turned serious. Zevon told Letterman that he wanted to make the most of whatever time he had left. “I really always enjoyed myself. But it’s more valuable now,” he said, before dispensing his most famous piece of advice. “You’re reminded to enjoy every sandwich and every minute playing with the guys, and being with the kids.”
The line was so good that it practically worried Scheft. “My memory is when he said that, I thought, ‘This will not get better,’” the Late Show writer recalls. “That line is positively Zen-like. Nobody can follow that.”
It’s unclear whether Zevon had used it before, but it was perfect for the occasion. “It certainly encapsulates his overall presentation and seemingly upbeat mood about things,” Letterman says. “But yet signaling what he was up against.”
The night confirmed the obvious about Letterman and Zevon: Their admiration was mutual. The singer-songwriter thanked the host for his support over the years, correctly pointing out that “Dave’s the best friend my music has ever had.” As the conversation wound down, Zevon owned up to the reality that having “lived like Jim Morrison” had consequences. “And then,” he said, “you have to live with the consequences.” He also acknowledged that after his diagnosis, the streak of gallows humor running through his work made songs like “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” “Mr. Bad Example,” and “My Ride’s Here” feel prophetic.
One of the last things that Letterman asked Zevon was whether he now knew something about life and death that the host didn’t. And once again, the musician responded by talking about savoring every last bite of life. “Not unless I know how much you’re supposed to enjoy every sandwich,” he said.
“I think Zevon probably really appreciated the way that David pursued the truth and how he was feeling,” Lewis says. “He enabled Warren to get all the information out on his terms. He wasn’t feeding him softballs for comments that would be either too dark or too depressing. It was just a mano a mano kind of thing. It was great.”
AsAs moving as the night was, it wasn’t a funeral. Zevon wanted to put on a show, and that’s what he did. With Shaffer and his band backing him, the musician, as promised, played three songs. The first, the title track off his 1995 album Mutineer, was written from the perspective of a romantic rabble-rouser. “I was born to rock the boat / Some will sink but we will float,” Zevon sang, “Grab your coat, let’s get out of here / You’re my witness / I’m your mutineer.”
Zevon’s next song, “Genius”—“modestly titled,” he deadpanned to Letterman—was also the name of his 2002 greatest-hits album. The self-referential cut, which name-checks several cultural icons, features one of Shaffer’s favorite lines: “Albert Einstein was a ladies’ man / While he was working on his universal plan / He was making out like Charlie Sheen / He was a genius.”
“He was a genius, as far as I’m concerned,” Lewis says. “I hate that word. Now it’s thrown around like a rag doll. But he was clearly a genius.”
Though Letterman never convinced him to play “Desperados Under the Eaves,” Zevon closed the show with another one of the host’s favorites, “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.” The haunting song ends with the titular ghost showing up in conflict zones around the world. “In Ireland, in Lebanon, in Palestine, and Berkeley,” Zevon belted out. “Patty Hearst heard the burst of Roland’s Thompson gun and bought it.”
“At the end, he invokes Patty Hearst,” Letterman says. “And it’s just, I don’t know. It’s like a card trick.”
The moment Zevon played the final note, the host walked to the piano and shouted, “Yes sir! There you go! Warren Zevon, everybody!” Letterman shook the musician’s hand. “Warren,” he said, pulling him close, “enjoy every sandwich.”
He knew that there was no other way to end the evening. “It just seemed like for a lack of anything better to say,” Letterman says, “I will repeat what seemed perfect.”
WhenWhen the taping ended, Letterman and Zevon met in the musician’s dressing room. The host didn’t typically socialize with his guests after a show, but on this night he made an exception. “While we’re talking he just perfunctorily is taking his guitar, taking the strap off, doing whatever you do to a guitar,” Letterman remembers. “He gets out the case, and we’re continuing to talk and who knows what we’re saying. It was small talk. Just fill the air with something while he’s going through the business of putting the guitar in the thing. He puts it in, closes the lid, snaps it closed, hands it to me, and he says, ‘Take good care of this for me.’ And I burst into tears. Uncontrollable. I had no idea that I would be bursting into tears, but I did. And I hugged him and I said, ‘I just love your music.’ And that was it.”
As emotional as Letterman was, it was the most grounded that he felt all day. “The only part of it that felt normal to me,” he says, “was after the show upstairs in his dressing room.”
That was the last time Letterman saw or spoke to Zevon. Zevon outlived his prognosis by 10 months, getting to see the birth of his twin grandchildren and the release of his final album, The Wind. He died on September 7, 2003, almost a year after his last public appearance—on the Late Show.
To this day, Letterman is still the best friend Zevon’s music has ever had. In 2017, he inducted Pearl Jam into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He ended his speech by stumping for an old pal: “I would just like to say one day I hope to come back here for the induction for my friend Warren Zevon.” When Letterman was being awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor later that year, Eddie Vedder honored him by singing Zevon’s bittersweet “Keep Me in Your Heart.” At the end of the performance, Letterman caught up with the Pearl Jam lead singer. “He says, ‘Thanks for calling Warren to my attention,’” Letterman recalls. “And I thought, ‘You’re kidding me. You’re kidding me!’ Really? Am I the only one that knows about this guy?”
At home, the retired host has a wall covered in guitars given to him by artists who played the Late Show. Gifts from Foo Fighters, U2, and Pearl Jam are all special. But Zevon’s stands apart. “It’s just my favorite,” Letterman says. “The others were sort of, ‘Hey, thanks. Enjoyed the gig,’ kinds of things. This was, ‘Thank you, and goodbye.’”
The Back-Up QB
Interesting look at how much preparation goes into being an NFL quarterback, from The Athletic.
Quarterback John Wolford is in his fourth season with the Rams, with whom he has been the backup to Jared Goff (2020) and Matthew Stafford (2021-22). Wolford also runs a “live” scout team for the Rams, which means he runs a live offense against the Rams’ first-team defense in practices, and has done so since 2020. While starting at quarterback for Wake Forest from 2014 to 2017, he threw for 8,794 yards (fourth most in school history) and 59 touchdowns (third) while also running for 1,120 yards and 19 TDs.
In this op-ed, Wolford shares his unique insight into what it’s like to be an NFLquarterback on one of the busiest days of the practice week.
It’s not a Wednesday unless you’re stressed the f— out.
Wednesdays in the NFL are the first day of mandatory meetings and practice for an upcoming opponent. As a quarterback, this entails processing and retaining copious amounts of information in a finite period of time, all while throwing everything you knew about last week’s opponent out the window.
New defense, new coverages, new players, new strategy, new plays, etc.
I’m often asked by friends and family: “What do you do all day?”
This is what a Wednesday is actually like for a quarterback in the NFL (I plan to write about Thursday through Tuesday in future posts).
First, a few notes to level set before I begin:
1. A good amount of film study is done Monday and Tuesday in preparation for the week of work. By Wednesday, we are walking into the building with a good understanding of our opponent.
2. On Wednesday, most teams focus on “normal down-and-distance” preparation, which is first and second down (minus situational football — red zone, two-minute, etc.).
3. “(Team)” in the screengrabs of my schedule means mandatory meeting/practice. If not parenthesized with “(Team),” then I am personally scheduling that activity.
4. I timebox my day, which I swear by after reading “Indistractable” by Nir Eyal. I highly recommend this strategy for productivity.
5. This schedule should serve as a good proxy, but each quarterback has his own specific method. Common tenets shared among NFL quarterbacks are extra film study and body maintenance.
6. All terminology has been substituted to keep the Rams’ information private. I would like to keep my job.
Morning
Here’s a look at my morning schedule:
5:45-6:15 a.m.
Play calls on the drive in: This particular week, the coaches forwarded the normal down-and-distance play calls Tuesday night (oftentimes we do not get these until Wednesday morning). My drive to work takes 25 minutes — the majority of that time I’m listening to voice memos of the new play calls that I record the previous night. These recordings are two to five minutes in length and generally include priority runs, play-action and dropback passes. Here is an example play call to demonstrate how complex these can get:
“Lense to Deuce Rt Claw Z Short Lander Z Strong X Revo Z Lockback (can) 2 Jet Z-Monday Astro Read Alert Money Deacon Flow F Panama On the Omaha”
I hear the call, pause the recording, envision the play in my head with the corresponding “can” criteria (I will explain later), call it as if I am in the huddle and think through what defensive looks I should anticipate. I find this is a good way to stay productive in the car and steal some reps.
6:15-7:30 a.m.
Review notes and film study: My notes at this point of the week revolve around coverage tendencies for normal down and distance (first and second downs). Secondarily, my notes will cover the opponent’s personnel — who are its corners, linebackers, defensive linemen, etc. It is vital to have a good understanding of how your opponent wants to defend you and which players we want to attack and avoid. For example, if I’m playing the Rams, I would triple-team Aaron Donald.
Any film study in this block typically includes normal down-and-distance cutups.
7:30-8 a.m.
T-spine mobility, ankle stability and breathing exercises: Thoracic spine (T-spine) mobility is vital for throwers of any sport, and in a nutshell, more T-spine mobility equals more torque in a throwing motion (watch Patrick Mahomes). Ankle stability decreases my risk for sprains but also ensures my base in the pocket is strong. “The Oxygen Advantage” by Patrick McKeown sold me on the benefits of breathing properly, so I complete one of his recommended exercises every morning. Typically, I do that exercise outside to get sunlight on my eyes (Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman convinced me of the benefits of morning sun in one of his podcasts).
8-8:45 a.m.
QB meeting: Run game and play-action pass. This is a meeting with all of the quarterbacks — myself, Stafford and Bryce Perkins — the quarterback coach and offensive coordinator to discuss the initial run and play-action pass plays for our opponent.
More times than not, both run and play-action pass plays have their own specific “can” accompanying them. A “can” or “kill” is essentially an alert to audible the play. Teams often call two plays in the huddle, and quarterbacks alert the offense to audible to the second play by yelling “can can” or “kill kill.”
For example: We break the huddle after calling two plays; the first is a toss sweep, and the second is a zone read. If the defense lines up in an “X” look, which is bad to run toss sweep against, we “can” or “kill” the play to the zone read.
In this meeting, we talk through anticipated defensive looks for these plays and when we want to audible (can) them. It should be noted that I am intentionally simplifying in that example. When you rattle off a long play call with a complicated “can,” break the huddle, diagnose the defense and audible the play, you feel like Alan from “The Hangover” when he’s counting cards. Your mind is absolutely spinning, but when you get it right and hit blackjack (throw a 60-yard bomb), it’s incredibly exhilarating.
8:45-9:45 a.m.
Lift. Music is bumping in the weight room, with 315-pound giants moving the barbells like they’re toothpicks. But if you observe the quarterback lifts, you would notice that we are on a different rhythm. While we still move weight, our lifts are completely different from every other position. As rotational athletes, quarterbacks require a training plan that is based on the biomechanical patterns and unique force demands of a thrower. Maxing out with 350 pounds on the barbell bench press and popping a blood vessel in my eye does not translate to throwing the football better. On the field, I have to run fast, cut hard and, most importantly, throw. This lift works to optimize those functions. Also, our in-season lifts are slightly less voluminous than offseason lifts (true of every position), and each exercise works to ensure that I maintain strength and power without inducing too much fatigue.
9:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Offensive meetings: Offensive coordinator Liam Coen or Sean McVay runs these meetings with all skill position players (QBs, RBs, WRs) present for the entirety of the meeting (the O-line also comes in from time to time).
The focus of these meetings is twofold:
1. Break down opposing defensive tendencies on normal down and distance.
2. Discuss corresponding play-action, dropback and screen passes to attack those tendencies.
New plays are installed, tweaks are made to existing plays and film is always displayed showing how we anticipate the opponent will defend us. A substantial amount of information and strategy is communicated in this meeting, and my brain is typically fried walking out the door.
Afternoon and evening
Here’s my schedule:
12:25-1:15 p.m.
Walk-through: This occurs on the practice field with the first-team offense walking through the normal down-and-distance play calls against the scout-team defense. The scout-team defense does its best to mimic the opponent to give us a realistic look. I receive the play calls in my helmet, recite them to myself and then emulate Stafford’s movements as if I were taking the rep.
1:15-2 p.m.
Lunch/review practice script: The lunch spread is always healthy, with the team cafeteria changing the menu daily. I’m typically not hungry, but I force myself to wolf down a protein and some rice or a banana so I have energy through practice. I subsequently find an empty meeting room to review the practice plan. At this point in the day, the practice plays are scheduled for us, and I will review those play calls and make sure I know all the “can” criteria and the intent of each play.
2-2:30 p.m.
Pre-throw routine: This is a routine that preps and primes all the body tissues associated with throwing. The purpose of having a detailed pre-throw routine is to:
1. Induce blood flow through the body and rotator cuff to prepare for high-velocity throwing.
2. Ensure my throwing motion is properly sequenced.
3. Ramp up my nervous system to feel fresh on the practice field.
2:30-4:15 p.m.
Practice: I won’t explain every segment of practice, but at a high level, I am running the scout-team offense against the first-team defense. When the first-team offense is up, I am behind the play taking mental reps.
4:15-4:45 p.m.
Post-throw routine plus cupping: I have a specific post-throw routine designed to focus on flushing the tissue and restabilizing the joints associated with throwing after practice. I subsequently go to the training room to receive shoulder and back cupping treatment while I guzzle down a protein smoothie.
4:45-6 p.m.
Third-down film study: I head back to the quarterback meeting room, quickly buzz through practice and turn my attention to third downs (third-down plan is installed Thursday). I watch film cutups of our opponent sectioned into third-and-short, third-and-medium and third-and-long. For example, most teams play more man-to-man coverage in the third-and-short window because they want to contest every throw. Every team is different though, and this is when I dive into the film to understand the tendencies of our next opponent.
Night
Here’s how my night shapes up:
6-7 p.m.
Dinner, review play calls: I am now driving to grab food and head home. I will flip on the voice memo that I listened to in the morning (I add to the memo throughout the day as plays are tweaked). If feeling masochistic, I will increase the audio’s speed and skip any silence to increase the difficulty. Dinner is salmon, a veggie and rice or pasta from the hot bar at Erewhon. I am devouring it all right when I walk in the door.
7-7:45 p.m.
Isometric arm care: I am tired at this point in the day, but if it’s on my schedule, then I do it. For these 45 minutes, I complete a block of exercises that are isometric in nature and designed to ensure my arm is peaking on Sundays. The focus of my arm-care plan changes slightly based on the weekly schedule, but for the sake of this post, I essentially have three arm-care day types (eccentric/HSR, isometric or dynamic). My isometric day is usually Wednesday, when I return to throwing in practice. I will cover these different types of arm care and their benefits to throwers another day.
7:45-9 p.m.
Downtime: I do my best to wind down an hour before going to bed. This typically entails dim lighting and throwing my blue-light-blocking glasses on (Huberman hack again).
More often than not, I read a book (most recently “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz and “31 Days with a Navy Seal” by Jesse Itzler) or catch up on a “House of the Dragon” episode. I will throw on compression boots if my legs are sore. Lights out around 9 p.m. if all goes to plan, as I aim to get 8 1/2 hours of sleep. Matthew Walker’s book, “Why We Sleep,” sold me on this, and with the physical and mental demands of a “stressed the f— out” Wednesday, I am knocked out 30 seconds after turning off the lights.
"Lose Myself In The Team"
"I just want to lose myself in the team. It's all about winning right now." - Knicks forward Julius Randle
I'm not sure we emphasize how special it is to be a part of a team enough. The dynamic of a team and everything that goes with it - good and bad - is one of the special gifts that sports give you. I don't think we teach our teams enough about the importance of team.
Think about everything that goes into a team. The diversity of your teammates. The discipline it takes just to be a part of it. The commitment. The sacrifice. Teamwork. Working together with people you like, and some you don't like. People who are better than you, some who aren't as good as you. The communication that is necessary. The sheer amount of time you spend together. Everything you learn, good and bad. How to win. How to lose. The connection and investment it takes to be a part of a high-performing team, along with the physical demands of playing a sport, make being a teammate something really special.
I love the phrase Randle used - "lose myself in the team." We've all coached plenty of players who are concerned about the wrong things. Many of them are thinking selfishly - about their minutes, their production, their own situation. What we really want is for everyone to buy into team. And it's interesting, because we really don't teach team anywhere else except for athletics. The best universities in the world don't teach classes in team, yet it's usually teams of people that are going to make great things happen. Cancer research, finding a vaccine for a pandemic, solving hunger problems in the world - whatever major issues need to be addressed, they are usually addressed by teams of really smart people working together. We teach team in athletics, whether we are really emphasizing it or not.
We love to use the word culture these days, and maybe that takes away from the importance of team. But a culture is really just a shared set of beliefs amongst a team. And that shared set of beliefs is what shapes the team and the players, and really has an impact long-term. But without the shared experiences of the players on the team, your culture is just a poster on the wall or a cute phrase on the back of a t-shirt.
We all hear the word team all the time in our lives, but it's not quite the same as being a part of a team. Just about every organization calls themselves or team, or even more impactful, a family. Law firms are teams. We have marketing teams. Our athletic department is a team. The people who work together are teammates. But you can't tell me it's the same. There is no physical pursuit, and no physical sacrifice, when you are working as a lawyer or a marketing executive. You aren't lifting together at 7 AM or running extra sprints together in the summer. You go to work, and you try to work together and come up with the best results. It's just not the same as running suicides together after a 2 hour practice.
I love talking to former players and getting texts from them, and hearing about how much being a part of our team impacted their approach to life after they left college. They recognize how a lot of the hard stuff they did as a team really set them up for success once they graduated. They also always talk about how much they would give to have one more day - one more practice, one more game, one more day in the pre-season - with their team. They realize over time how special it is to be a part of a team. I want my players to recognize it in the moment, while they are a part of the team, so their commitment level reflects it every day.
There's nothing like being a part of a team. The more kids you can get "lost" in team, the better your team will be.
"We Trust Everybody"
Celtics forward Grant Williams after their opening night win.
"Pace is the virtue of this team," Celtics forward Grant Williams said. "We have a bunch of guys that can bring it, a bunch of guys that are playmakers for one another, and we trust everybody. We trust everybody to make the right decision, to make the right read, to make the right play. So that's why we keep the ball ahead and we play freely. That encourages players to be who they are and that allows a lot of freedom and opportunity. It makes everybody a threat."
Not A Spur
We think that great performance can make up for bad behavior. This belief is WRONG.
Studies show that the benefits of high-performance jerks almost never outweigh their cost to the group’s performance.
Zero-tolerance policies work because they send a flashing-neon belonging cue:
NOBODY, NO MATTER HOW TALENTED, is more important than THE TEAM.
The San Antonio Spurs evaluate 100’s of players each year for consideration in the NBA draft, assessing & measuring every factor (shooting %, speed, defensive skills, etc.).
At the bottom of Spurs evaluation is a single line with a box next to it:
🔲 NOT A SPUR
… The New Zealand All Blacks rugby team, one of the most successful sports teams of all time, has a mantra: “NO DICKHEADS.”
⁃ from Daniel Coyle’s book:
The Culture Playbook.
Too Much Confidence
Sometimes the confidence you have in your team can work against you.
I'm a Yankee fan (born and raised 20 minutes from the Stadium, don't @ me). I like Aaron Boone. I don't think he should be fired, regardless of their post-season results this year. But I think he made a mistake managing game 3 against the Astros, and its one I've made as a head coach. I've seen situations where other coaches have done the same thing.
They Yankees were down 2-0 in the series and 2-0 in the game in the sixth inning with their best pitcher, Gerrit Cole on the mound. Cole gave up a leadoff double, a walk, and then a bloop single and had thrown over 90 pitches. After he loaded the bases, Aaron Boone came to the mound and took him out. He brought in Lou Trivino out of the bullpen, who is at best the Yankees 4th best relief pitcher. Trivino allowed all 3 runners on base to score and the Yankees lost 5-0.
I've lost games as a head coach where I had a ton of confidence we were going to win, really believed in my team, but in looking back I realized I hadn't been prepared or thinking clearly when things didn't go our way. I think something like this happened to Boone in game 3. The Yankees were the second best team in the AL this year and won 99 games. I'm sure Boone fully expected them to win this series, and expected it to be very competitive and hard-fought. Being down 2-0 after losing a couple of close games, I'm sure he thought the script would change in New York. Our ace is on the mound, he's going to mow the Astros down, and we need him to go deep in the game. When he gets us through 7 or 8 innings we can go to our best relief pitchers to close the game.
I know I've coached games where I haven't made the right adjustments, just because I fully believed we were the better team and we would win. It's not like it's just dumb confidence that we won't get beat. But you feel like you are prepared, you are in control of the game and it will go as expected. When a few things don't go your way you make some adjustments, but you aren't making wholesale changes.
Too much confidence can impact the adjustments you make as a coach. You don't have to take certain guys out, you don't have to go to the bench unexpectedly, you don't have to change defenses. You coach the game, but you are just expecting your team to take over the way you expected and win the game. Then you are stuck looking at a box score and shaking your head, wondering how it was possible you lost. I've absolutely lost games because I was waiting for my team to "snap out of it" and be themselves, and I knew we were good enough to win.
I thought about this when I watched the Yankees lose game 3. I don't think anything that happened in that 6th inning had really even crossed Boone's mind prior to the game. There was no scenario for Boone where he'd have to take his ace out early and try and come from behind. When he was put in that situation, he didn't really respond to the moment. He went to his fourth best relief pitcher, and ended up losing the game without using his best pitchers. He was hit with a scenario he never expected because of the confidence he had in his team and his ace starter.
It was a reminder to not get fooled by the confidence you have in your team. You absolutely have to believe in them and expect to win. But don't let that impact the way you prepare for different scenarios that might come up. You may very well be in an unexpected situation and just expecting your team to come through because you believe in them won't be enough.
First To Worst
An interesting perspective on mistakes made when taking over a first-place program.
"Knowledge is knowing that tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing that it doesn't go into a fruit salad."
- Miles Kington
Eraser
"As a young coach, Tom Osborne gave me a piece of advice I never forgot," a longtime offensive coordinator said. "He said, 'When times get tough -- and they will -- get out your eraser, not your pencil.'"
This is a great quote from former Nebraska football coach Tom Osborne. Granted, as a head coach, it's a lot more easier said than done. But there is a lot of wisdom in it if you take the time to process and plan for how you will handle adversity.
Chip Kelly always says "Make your tough decisions in air-conditioned rooms." You should plan your approach to adversity, stressful situations, and in-game scenarios when the pressure is on. If you do that, you can handle the heat because the stress of winning and losing isn't impacting your decision. You've figured out your approach ahead of time, now all you have to do is execute.
One of those things to think about in the off-season is how you are going to handle when your team isn't playing well. What is the best way to get your team out of a slump or change the approach to spark your group? Naturally when things aren't going well we try and do more. We change the line-up, we tweak the offense, we try a different defense. We run more sets to try and get certain people the ball, or we shorten the rotation to keep our best players on the floor longer. When we are struggling, we want to do more.
Sometimes the best approach is to do less. Maybe your team isn't executing because you are trying to do too much. You might be over-coaching them. I know I've been guilty of that before, and it took my team to teach me how to get away from that approach. Even if your team is struggling for no apparent reason, your thinking needs to be 'how can I get the most out of them?' Is it to add more stuff, to give them more to work on and think about? That's something you really have to think about.
This isn't to say that change is a bad thing. Many teams will just need a shake-up, something different to spark a fire or at least let them know that change is coming. But how you change and what you change are worth thinking about. Simplification is a form of change, even though it's not adding anything new technically. There are ways to implement change while getting your teams to think less.
Most of the time I've had a struggling team that is under-performing, it's because I've been giving them too much. Even when I thought what we were doing was simple and easy to understand, it's really how they process it that matters. And I've gone down that rabbit hole where I keep trying new things to shake my team out of it, only to dig the hole deeper. It's a very uncomfortable feeling, one where you know what you are doing isn't working but for some reason you can't stop.
I love the idea of taking out the eraser rather than the pencil. When your team is really struggling, give them less. Simplify everything and see if they start to grow. So often less is more, and a team on a bad run usually needs some room to breathe.
Ability Over Experience
Value ability more than experience, and put people in roles that require more of them than they know they have in them.
- Robert Iger, Former Disney CEO, The Ride of a Lifetime
(Good advice for a coach)
College Basketball Analytics
How men’s college basketball teams are using outside analytics firms to find an edge
By CJ Moore
September 29th, 2022 - The Athletic
During the Big 12 tournament semifinals, Kansas guard Remy Martin took a mid-range fadeaway from about 17 feet. How the coaches on each bench felt about that shot when it left his hand varied, based on their reliance on analytics.
If they subscribed to the website hoopmath.com, for instance, they would know that a 2-point jumper from Martin went in at a 47.1 percent clip. If they were on Synergy, which tracks every shot and play type in each game, they’d know that Martin made 49.2 percent of his jumpers off the dribble and shot 50 percent on jump shots from 17 feet to the 3-point line. Since the jumper occurred in a Big 12 game, the Jayhawks coaches could assign a value to it using ShotTracker. That company, which is located in Merriam, Kan., has a chip in the ball and inside the jersey of every player. At ShotTracker headquarters, the game plays out with the players showing up as dots on a screen. Kansas coach Bill Self helped come up with what statistics — like paint touches and ball reversals — that the company tracks.
The KU coaches also had at their fingertips analysis from Jam Basketball Intelligence, a third-party analytics company, which provides opponent and self scouts. JBI’s report on Martin said he made 55 percent on those type of shots last season and was 13 percent better on contested looks verse uncontested. And if the coaches subscribed to ShotQuality, which gives an expected value of every shot taken in a basketball game, they’d know that shot was worth about 0.58 points.
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Simon Gerszberg, the creator of ShotQuality, used that Martin field-goal attempt as part of his presentation for prospective clients this offseason. On the video, you see a bubble over Martin that shows the expected value of the shot, and at the top of the key you see teammate Christian Braun wide open with a 35 percent bubble over his head. The video freezes, and lines point to both Martin and Braun, showing that while Martin’s shot was worth 0.58 points, had he passed to Braun, that shot would have generated 1.05 points on average.
And had Kansas coaches later tried to tell Martin he should have actually passed, they would have had the power of film and math behind their message.
This is college basketball in 2022.
Over the last decade there has been an analytics boom in basketball. In the NBA, teams have built their own analytic staff and keep their data in-house. On the college side, few programs have the budgets to copy the NBA model, which has created a market for outsiders to cash in.
The Godfather of college basketball advanced stats is Ken Pomeroy, whose site kenpom.com is gospel for some and recognized by most who work in the game. Pomeroy’s site became so popular that he was able to quit his job as a weatherman in 2012 and focus entirely on hoops. But he’s no longer alone in the space. Not only is there a demand for data, but there’s also a market for explaining it in actionable terms.
Colton Houston, who co-founded analytics firm HDIntelligence, uses the example of “Moneyball,“ the best-selling book that later became a movie.
“A lot of people’s takeaway from that was on-base percentage is undervalued,” Houston said. “But that wasn’t the takeaway. That was the example in the book, right? But of course, once the book is written, and everyone knows that, that’s no longer a market inefficiency anymore for those teams. So the takeaway from the book is, what advantage can data analytics help you unearth? What’s undervalued? Where’s the opportunity to have a potential competitive advantage? Data analytics is a continual search for those advantages.”
If this movement has a poster child on the coaching side, it’s Todd Golden, the 37-year-old who was hired last spring at Florida after three seasons as the head coach at San Francisco. Golden has invested in numbers on his own staff. Jonathan Safir, who worked as an assistant at San Francisco, followed Golden to Florida and has the title Director of Basketball Strategy and Analytics.
Golden and Safir are disciples of Washington State coach Kyle Smith who, while at Columbia, came up with a system where he tracked just about everything on the floor, including hustle stats, and assigned values to everything they measured. To this day, both he and Golden use that scoring system to decide playing time.
During the 2019 Final Four in Minneapolis, Golden and Safir met Pomeroy for beers and asked the data guru this question: Was there anything no one was doing in college basketball that the numbers suggested they should be? Pomeroy told Golden that teams should foul at the end of the first half to gain an extra possession.
Nine months later in a game against Pacific, San Francisco put the idea into practice. After Jabaree Bouyea made a free throw to put the Dons ahead by 12 with 11.4 seconds left in the first half, Golden instructed his team to foul immediately. Pacific’s Pierre Crockrell went to the line to shoot a one-and-one. He made the first and missed the second. San Francisco got the rebound, Bouyea attacked the paint and kicked out for a buzzer-beating 3 by Remu Raitanen. So instead of trying to simply get a stop, which would have meant Pacific ended the half by scoring zero to three points, San Francisco got a 3-1 advantage by fouling and pushed its halftime lead to 14.
Two weeks later, Golden put the theory to test at the end of a game. San Francisco held a two-point lead with 22.3 seconds left against BYU, which entered the game as a five-point favorite, according to Pomeroy’s projections. Safir told Golden that he thought the statistical play was to foul Yoeli Childs, a 57.5 percent free-throw shooter. Childs was also BYU’s best rebounder, so the Cougars’ chances of grabbing an offensive rebound would decrease. The Dons executed the plan, fouling Childs, who missed the front end of a one-and-one. Raitanen got the rebound, was fouled, made both free throws to create a four-point advantage. San Francisco went on to win the game by one.
Todd Golden’s innovative use of analytics helped him win at San Francisco and land the job at Florida this offseason. (Trevor Ruszkowski / USA Today)
When COVID-19 shut the world down, Safir asked Pomeroy to help determine the statistically-correct move in those end-of-game scenarios. They created handy charts that help dictate the proper move.
Safir needed Pomeroy because he couldn’t research the topic in a timely fashion without the ability to code. Pomeroy used 11 years of play-by-play data for his research. Pomeroy was willing to help because he knew the San Francisco coaches would value the results of the study, which is available for anyone to see on his website.
“People are just risk-averse and not willing to challenge conventional norms and the way things are always done — or the way things will continue to be done or need to continue to be done — until somebody like us comes and disrupts and continues to disrupt and hopefully has success disrupting,” Safir said. “We think our competitive edge and differential ability is deciphering information that is readily available. We think we’re really good at it and can’t code and can’t create our own data, so we’re relying on the publicly available data and breaking down sites like KenPom or (talking to) Ken himself. Whereas NBA teams have entire front offices working on it.”
The new Florida coaches believe in process over results. They’ve been teaching the ShotQuality method, for instance, with their in-house stats for years. In practice, a mid-range jumper that goes in is worth one point; if it misses, it’s minus-2. A 3 that goes in is worth 3 and minus-1 if it misses. A shot at the rim that goes in is worth two and minus-1 if it misses.
“We don’t ever really discourage or disincentivize (mid-range shots) when we run dummy offense,” Safir said. “Everything is around shooting layups or shooting 3s. So our guys are kind of mindf—ed. They’re not even thinking. They’re just playing. Why would you shoot that shot? That’s a shot we don’t practice.”
The Florida coaches watch every practice and game together, making sure they all agree upon the numbers that are assigned to each play and player.
It’s a tedious process, a similar exercise that turned Gerszberg into an entrepreneur.
During the 2019-20 season, then-Colgate assistant coach Dave Klatsky tasked Gerszberg with tracking every shot in practice and games and assigning an expected point total based on the quality of it the attempt. Gerszberg had shown up in Klatsky’s office a year earlier, when he had randomly been assigned as freshman roommates with Colgate guard Tucker Richardson and expressed a passion for analytics in sports. Richardson told him to go see Klatsky.
Gerszberg and Klatsky came up with a system where they’d grade the quality of a shot on a 1-to-100 scale. The value was based on the location of the shot, who was taking it, how open it was and whether it was off the catch or the dribble. For instance, a catch-and-shoot 3 from a good shooter might be a 50, which would mean it’s worth 1.5 points. Gerszberg would chart every shot, then Klatsky would go back through the tape and check his work.
“I freaking hated it,” Gerszberg said. “Because I had friends on the team and I wasn’t even watching the game anymore. I was just outputting numbers on this clipboard, like all these data points spinning out of my head. It was so nauseating.”
That Christmas break Gerszberg decided he’d see if he could automate the process, using multiple play-by-play data sets to do the work for him. What his algorithm spit out was nearly identical to what he was tracking by hand. He showed the Colgate coaches his work. “They were totally in shock,” he said.
The rest of that season, Gerszberg continued tracking every shot by hand and cross-checking his automated data. It was always within one point. After the season he learned to program what he was doing on his spreadsheet for every team in college basketball and in the NBA. A business was born.
During the 2020-21 season, 25 teams signed up for ShotQuality in what was basically a proof-of-concept season. Last season, 60 teams paid for the service, along with 500 bettors. ShotQuality spits out a projected score of every game; Gerszberg’s model correctly predicted the over/under in 54 percent of games last season with 15 pushes, and it correctly picked the closing line-adjusted winner 51.4 percent of the time with 30 pushes.
Gerszberg bet on himself by essentially quitting school to run his business. He didn’t enroll in any classes during the first semester of what would have been his senior year and then took only two classes in the spring. He’s now a college dropout, a decision his parents weren’t too pleased with initially. Then this summer Gerszberg received over $3 million in ShotQuality’s first funding round.
“Which is part of the reason my parents are OK with me taking a little bit of a break from school,” he said.
This season he’ll offer a service that will use computer vision to track the players on the floor and extract the same data he’d been tracking from the screen, precisely telling the distance of every shot and how close a defender is to the shooter. Gerszberg hired Neil Johnson from the Washington Wizards to add the computer vision tool to his service. He saw Johnson present at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in 2020, and Johnson convinced him to focus on college and not the NBA. The NBA, Johnson told him, has Second Spectrum, which uses cameras around the arena to track the movement of every player. ShotTracker provides a similar service for college, but only the Big 12 and Mountain West have the technology installed in their arenas.
Johnson argued to Gerszberg that colleges didn’t have anything to measure process-based data; their hope is to allow coaches to change how they deliver information to their players.
“Using analytics to coach is really good, but I think it’s even more valuable when you have film to pair with it,” Golden said. “In my mind, that’s an easier way to teach guys shot selection than trying to do it without having that film to fall back on.”
Colton Houston was the director of operations at Alabama under Avery Johnson when he became fascinated with the analytics movement. Near the end of his Crimson Tide tenure, Alabama started using alumnus Matt Dover as a consultant for scheduling. Dover worked in politics and projecting elections, and he figured his expertise in data modeling could be used in college hoops. Houston later pitched Dover on starting their own analytics firm.
“It seemed inevitable to me that eventually analytics would have the same type of impact in college basketball as it does in the NBA, because it’s a powerful tool if used correctly,” Houston said.
Their company, HDIntelligence, launched in April 2019. The first season, Alabama, Cincinnati, Dayton and Incarnate Word were clients. This season, they will have 11 employees and project to work with 70-80 teams. They also recently signed a deal with the SEC to consult on scheduling for all the league’s teams.
Patrick Stacy, who runs Jam Basketball Intelligence, has a similar concept. Similar to Gerszberg, he started out as a volunteer during his time as a student at Loyola Chicago. After college he took a job with CDW as a financial analyst but continued his consulting work for Loyola Chicago. After two seasons of taking vacation to travel for his volunteer job, he decided to make it a career. He worked with seven teams last year, most notably Kansas. He signed the Jayhawks when he cold-messaged assistant Kurtis Townsend with a Baylorscouting report he had built the season before.
Both HDIntelligence and JBI send scouting reports before every game and also help with different projects and recruiting work, including tracking transfers. Dover has a system that assigns a value to every player, similar to an overall rating given to players in a video game.
“When I started and wrote the code for my website, it was really laborious and difficult,” Pomeroy said. “Now if you have data and you want to figure out what things matter in certain situations, it’s pretty easy to cut that data up and come up with some meaningful insight in a short amount of time.”
College teams could try to do this work themselves, but Houston argues it’d be more expensive. And if the person in charge of the analytics is good, you run the risk of losing them to the NBA or another team.
It’s not just the data that’s valuable either, Houston contends; it’s being able to explain the data and how to put it into practice. That’s where Houston and Stacy believe they provide real value for coaches who want to use numbers to find an edge.
“There’s probably still a minority of coaches who are anti-analytics,” Houston said. “Ten years ago that might have been the majority of coaches, and now I think it’s a fairly small minority. If we tried to launch this company a decade earlier, we would not have had as much interest as we do now.”
Golden believes most high-major programs will have a staffer dedicated to analytics in the next 10 years, as younger coaches like himself take over programs.
That doesn’t mean the third parties will be eliminated. BYU coach Mark Pope, for instance, hired Keegan Brown three years ago to be his director of analytics and video. In addition to analytics work Brown does in-house, one of his responsibilities is helping Pope decide what outside products he’ll use. Last season BYU contracted with ShotQuality, Synergy, HDIntelligence, Just Play Sports Solutions (a virtual playbook) and Noah (a camera system that tracks the flight of a shot).
Safir sees coaches like Golden and Pope as outliers still, skeptical most coaches are truly bought into allowing analytics to help them make decisions.
“Analytics is a catchy buzzy term,” Safir said. “But it’s also kind of like how talking about religion can be a turnoff to some people. We just try and break it down into simple terms that can be easily applied and provide actionable bits of information and data to our team.”
Arkansas coach Eric Musselman believes there’s more of an investment in analytics in the NBA because the general managers hire those people, not the coaches.
Musselman has long been bought in on the data. Arkansas has its own systems in place — for instance, Musselman still uses a rebounding-per-minute metric that his father, Bill, came up with years ago — and he’s always searching for new ways to use numbers in decision-making. He makes his staff read “Moneyball” and regularly sends them stories about how other teams use analytics. His interest lately is in football’s evolution in the space. He recently went to visit the Los Angeles Chargers to find out more about Brandon Staley’s propensity for going for it on fourth down.
“The reason it works so well with Coach Staley is because he’s the head coach,” Musselman said. “He believes in it, and he’s bought into it. And then there’s other people where there’s a line in the sand and there’s friction between analytics and coaching staffs.”
Musselman has also studied the Baltimore Ravens’ approach to building an offense, investing heavily on the offensive line and tight ends. His interpretation of how to apply that approach to basketball is at the free-throw line. In his eyes, having a high free-throw rate is basketball’s version of controlling the line of scrimmage. An attacking team that gets to the line generates more spacing on the floor.
It’s all about creating an extra point or possession here and there, which in the long run can be the difference between a win or two. When that can be the difference between getting into the NCAA Tournament or going a round further in the tourney, then that makes the investment worth it.
So what’s next? Houston suggests AI-powered programs could pull data from a broadcast, which is similar to what ShotQuality will be doing this season. Safir said he believes rest and recovery are “ripe for disruption.”
“I think we are getting to a really interesting stage where, with so many more products being out there and so much more data being available, that it will take some skill to use that data properly,” Pomeroy said. “We’ve come a long way from just looking at four factors and interpreting what that means. We’ve now got to the point where I think you could actually use data in the wrong way. And so I think understanding maybe the limitations of what is useful and what is not useful, that is going to be kind of how things evolve going forward.
“Simply signing up for these services and thinking that’s just going to be an advantage right off is not the way things are anymore. You’ve got to figure out specifically how you’re going to use this data to give yourself an edge and make your team better.”