Podcasts about NCAA tournament

SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey joins Mizzou sideline reporter Chris Gervino during the Texas A&M game.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

MU's top research priority, the Roy Blunt NextGen Precision Health Building, holds its grand opening on Oct. 19. Dr. Richard Barohn explains how the institute will help Missourians lead healthier lives. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We are officially moving to the true mid-major leagues for this season and who better to start with than the CAA. This is a league with six or seven teams with NCAA Tournament aspirations but who will achieve that success. We break it down and give our picks.

In this edition of In The Circle, The guys take a deep dive into the Sun Belt Conference as they talk with South Alabama Head Coach Becky Clark and Troy Head Coach Beth Mullins. Clark breaks down what to expect from South Alabama in 2022, fresh off NCAA Tournament appearance in 2021. She also discusses building the program from scratch and previews the Sun Belt. Eric Lopez then talks with Mullins about Troy making the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1996 and expectations for 2022. They wrap with a discussion about the growth of softball in the state of Alabama. Also, in the episode, Eric and Victor Anderson discuss Alabama fall ball starting and more.

Hosts Andy Yanez (@AYanez_5) and Da'Yon Dunlap (@DayonDunlap) break down the big points from UH women's basketball's American Athletic Conference media day. Head coach Ron Hughey says his team is eager to get the bad taste of being so close to the NCAA Tournament a season ago, yet missing it. Then, the two focus on the UH men's basketball team and discuss Kelvin Sampson describing what he envisions from his guard group in the upcoming season and break down the AAC preseason rankings and awards. Finally, the two give their midseason MVPs for offense and defense on the UH football team. Be sure to check out Kris Gardner's work on Twitter and YouTube. #GoCoogs #ForTheCity #EverythingMatters Be sure to check out ApolloHOU.com for homegrown Houston sports coverage as well as Astros and Rockets apparel you can't find anywhere else. Use promo code "YANEZ" for 10% off at checkout.

Tiger Talk 10-13-21See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

How do Russians greet wrestlers to an international competition? Mizzou grapplers Rocky Elam and Keegan O'Toole found out first-hand at the Junior World Championships... and talk about it with Matt and Brad on this week's Inside Mizzou Athletics Podcast. The guys also dig into Tiger Football's matchup with the Texas Aggies, how service members and vets can go to football home games FOR FREE, and give some updates on a wild college football season so far.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Steve Prohm has been a head coach at both Murray State and Iowa State, reaching the NCAA Tournament at both schools. He shares insights on developing your playbook, organizing timeouts, balancing work/life, and more.This episode is sponsored by the Dr. Dish Basketball Shooting Machine. Mention "Quick Timeout" and receive $300 off on the Dr. Dish Rebel, All-Star, and CT models.

Mike Randle (@RandleRant) talks with Mike Hopkins (@pcbb1917) of Friars On Scout to preview the Providence Friars for the 2021-2022 season. Mike talks with Mike Hopkins about expectations entering head coach Ed Cooley's 11th season, regaining their defensive identity, why Al Durham could be the key to the season, and can A.J. Reeves and Nate Watson lead this team back to the NCAA Tournament?Follow us @STheSPodcast on Twitter.  Rate and subscribe on Spreaker, iTunes, Stitcher, and TuneIn Radio!Subscribe to our YouTube channel:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0r14k3YJBdOaT9Lz6RJTEwEmail the show StheSPodcast@gmail.

Dan Priest is entering his 12th year as the Head Men' Basketball Coach at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Priest was named NCAC Coach of the Year in 2013 has had 14 players named to All-NCAC teams during his tenure at Kenyon.  Prior to coming to Kenyon, he spent seven seasons as the Head Coach at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas where he inherited a 0-23 team and within three years led the Warriors to a 15-10 mark. Prior to his six seasons at Hendrix, Priest spent five years as head coach at Ohio Dominican University, in Columbus, Ohio. Priest's past coaching experiences also includes seven years as an assistant at Hanover College and brief stints as a graduate assistant at both Indiana State University and Miami (OH) University. As a player, Priest was a three-year letterman at Ohio Northern University and helped lead the Polar Bears to the NCAA Tournament in 1988. He still holds the University's career three-point field goal percentage record at 48.6% If you're looking to improve your coaching please consider joining the Hoop Heads Mentorship Program.  We believe that having a mentor is the best way to maximize your potential and become a transformational coach. By matching you up with one of our experienced mentors you'll develop a one on one relationship that will help your coaching, your team, your program, and your mindset.  The Hoop Heads Mentorship Program delivers mentoring services to basketball coaches at all levels through our team of experienced Head Coaches. Find out more at hoopheadspod.com or shoot me an email directly mike@hoopheadspod.com Follow us on social media @hoopheadspod on Twitter and Instagram and be sure to check out the Hoop Heads Podcast Network for more great basketball content. Get ready to take some notes as you listen to this episode with Dan Priest, Head Men's Basketball Coach at Kenyon College.  Website - https://athletics.kenyon.edu/sports/mens-basketball (https://athletics.kenyon.edu/sports/mens-basketball) Twitter - https://twitter.com/MontyPatel/ (@danpriest2) Email - priestd@kenyon.edu Visit our Sponsors! https://www.drdishbasketball.com/ (Dr. Dish Basketball) Mention the Hoop Heads Podcast when you place your order and get $300 off a brand new state of the art Dr. Dish Shooting Machine! http://www.fastmodelsports.com/ (Fast Model Sports) Use Code SAVE10 to get 10% off the number one play diagramming software for coaches https://gripspritz.net/ (Grip Spritz) Grip Spritz revitalizes and cleans the soles of your basketball shoes to stop you from slipping and sliding on the court! Better Grip, Better Game! Twitter Podcast - https://twitter.com/hoopheadspod (@hoopheadspod) Mike - https://twitter.com/hdstarthoops (@hdstarthoops) Jason - https://twitter.com/jsunkle (@jsunkle) Network - https://twitter.com/HoopHeadsPodNet (@HoopHeadsPodNet) Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hoopheadspod/ (@hoopheadspod) Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hoopheadspod/ (https://www.facebook.com/hoopheadspod/) YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDoVTtvpgwwOVL4QVswqMLQ (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDoVTtvpgwwOVL4QVswqMLQ) Support this podcast

Tyler Badie, Mehki Wingo, and Kris Abrams-Draine join Chris Gervino in the locker room after the Homecoming win against North Texas.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Chris Gervino caught up with #MizzouMade legends Chase Coffman & William Moore during the North Texas game on the Central Bank Tiger Network.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

MU professor Christi Bergin's research shows a new pro-social approach to managing classroom behavior leads to better results for students and teachers.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Please join us in welcoming Coach Dave Cottle to Lacrosse All Stars! His weekly podcast "Coach Cottle's Corner" will shine light on the game like never before thanks to unfiltered, off-the-cuff 1v1 discussions with the greatest minds in lacrosse. Cottle, currently president of Legendary Sports Group, has achieved 4 professional lacrosse championships, 22 NCAA Tournament appearances, and 5 NCAA Final Four appearances in his storied career as a lacrosse coach and innovator of the game. Coach Cottle's first three episodes go deep with legendary NCAA Division I lacrosse coach Bill Tierney who currently leads the University of Denver men's program. With seven national championship as a head coach, Coach Tierney knows more than a thing or two about recruiting, winning, and educating the best lacrosse players. We hope you enjoy part 1 of the show! Got a question for Coach T or Coach C? Drop us a line at info@laxallstars.com or hit us up on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/going-offsides/message

Please join us in welcoming Coach Dave Cottle to Lacrosse All Stars! His weekly podcast "Coach Cottle's Corner" will shine light on the game like never before thanks to unfiltered, off-the-cuff 1v1 discussions with the greatest minds in lacrosse. Cottle, currently president of Legendary Sports Group, has achieved 4 professional lacrosse championships, 22 NCAA Tournament appearances, and 5 NCAA Final Four appearances in his storied career as a lacrosse coach and innovator of the game. Coach Cottle's first three episodes go deep with legendary NCAA Division I lacrosse coach Bill Tierney who currently leads the University of Denver men's program. With seven national championship as a head coach, Coach Tierney knows more than a thing or two about recruiting, winning, and educating the best lacrosse players. We hope you enjoy part 1 of the show! Got a question for Coach T or Coach C? Drop us a line at info@laxallstars.com or hit us up on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/going-offsides/message

Matt Manley and Beau Baehman chat with #TigerStyle Head Coach Brian Smith on the season's upcoming schedule - including a big alumni weekend in Columbia December 4th - J'den Cox at the World Championships, and more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Tiger Talk 10-06-21See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What's it like to have a Hall of Fame career? Matt and Brad ask new Mizzou Athletics Hall-of-Famer (and football radio analyst) Howard Richards all about what led him to that honor this week. We also find out how football players compete for jobs when there's no depth chart, and learn Howard is extremely coachable (sometimes, to a fault). Also, Brad's Top 5 List of "mean" things at the end turns into a pro wrestling promo. Enjoy!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Steve Donahue has spent years as one of the top men's basketball coaches in the Ivy League. The Cardinal O'Hara and Ursinus College alum has led the University of Pennsylvania since 2015, winning the Ivy title and taking the Quakers to the NCAA Tournament in 2018. He is the only coach ever to win Ivy titles with two different programs (Cornell is the other).  In Episode #104 of “1-on-1 with Matt Leon,” Matt talks with Donahue over Zoom to discuss his life in basketball, the road to led him to coaching, his success with Penn and much, much more. "1-on-1 with Matt Leon" is a KYW Newsradio original podcast. Follow the show on Twitter: @1on1pod, and follow Matt: @MattLeon1060. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Paul Mills is the men's head basketball coach at Oral Roberts University. For fourteen years from 2003-2017, Mills was an assistant coach with the Baylor Bears under head coach Scott Drew before taking the job with Oral Roberts on April 28, 2017. In the 2020-2021 season, Mills led Oral Roberts on an improbable March Madness run that saw them defeat No. 2 seed Ohio State and No. 7 seed Florida to advance to the Sweet Sixteen before losing to Arkansas 72-70. They were just the second 15 seed to ever advance to the Sweet Sixteen in the history of the NCAA Tournament. Today on the podcast, we talk to coach Paul Mills about his incredible March Madness run, the lessons learned from success and defeat, using the national platform as an opportunity to share the Gospel and his love for the movie Hoosiers. --- Receive our 10-day Sports Spectrum Devotional written by professional athletes for FREE when you sign up for our Sports Spectrum Weekly Email Newsletter. Sign up here.

Complete recap of #MNF which included a lightning day in a domed stadium, incredible quarterback play from the reigning #NFLROY and all of it done with the #Chargers having yet another road-home game; plus Tony & Ronn take a first look on MLB's version of the #NCAATournament play-in games #Yankees #RedSox #Cardinals #Dodgers

Today's guest is newly hired Merrimack College head coach Brian Murphy. Coach Murphy is the seventh head coach in Merrimack program history. The Massachusetts native returns home to North Andover after he had four 30-win seasons with William & Mary, five CAA-Tournament appearances and the school's first NCAA Tournament at-large bid.

Greg chats with Jonathon Warrnier of MakingTheMadness.com about how the balance of power in college basketball involves a large crop of teams behind Gonzaga that all could emerge for massive seasons & how many of the big mid-major conferences might get more NCAA Tournament bids than normal & Greg recaps Monday's college basketball news & notes. Podcast Highlights 6:34-Interview with Jonathon Warrnier 24:20-Recap of the Monday's college basketball news & notes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mizzou and MoDot are using plastic waste while they pave part of Columbia's Stadium Blvd. MU engineering professor Bill Buttlar explains how. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The guys check in with two more members of the #TigerStyle team that traveled to the Junior World Championships in Russia: Rocky Elam and Assistant Coach Kendric Maple.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

NashvilleBanner.com Steve Cavendish and Braden Gall talk Nashville sports, media and business. Our guest this week is Belmont Athletic Director Scott Corley. Why leave the OVC now? The most important factors in making this decision What is the penalty fee and other costs of leaving the OVC? Making a tough phone call to a local conference HQ What other opportunities did Belmont have? Advertising the Belmont brand all over the Midwest for free How does realignment process begin? Who is in the room for both sides making the final decision? How to keep it quiet and staying faithful to each other Belmont's meteoric rise over the last 30 years The future of the NCAA Tournament long term Not having football at Belmont

This edition of In The Circle is part two of our "Big 4 Classic" preview in Iowa. Next, we talk with Iowa's Head Coach Renee Gillispie and Iowa State's Head Coach Jamie Pinkerton. First, Eric Lopez talks with Gillispie about the Hawkeyes in 2022 with a young pitching staff, and could softball have a Field of Dreams in Softball like MLB did this summer? Also, Eric talks with Pinkerton about the Cyclones making the NCAA Tournament in 2021 for the first time since 1988. Pinkerton discusses 2022 and life after Sami Williams and his thoughts on Houston, UCF, and BYU joining Big 12 in a couple of years. Eric and Victor Anderson recap the second season of Athletes Unlimited with Alesha Ocasio winning the top award and Cat Osterman announcing her retirement.

This edition of In The Circle is part two of our "Big 4 Classic" preview in Iowa. Next, we talk with Iowa's Head Coach Renee Gillispie and Iowa State's Head Coach Jamie Pinkerton. First, Eric Lopez talks with Gillispie about the Hawkeyes in 2022 with a young pitching staff, and could softball have a Field of Dreams in Softball like MLB did this summer? Also, Eric talks with Pinkerton about the Cyclones making the NCAA Tournament in 2021 for the first time since 1988. Pinkerton discusses 2022 and life after Sami Williams and his thoughts on Houston, UCF, and BYU joining Big 12 in a couple of years. Eric and Victor Anderson recap the second season of Athletes Unlimited with Alesha Ocasio winning the top award and Cat Osterman announcing her retirement.

In this episode, we go team by team breaking down maybe the best league in College Basketball, the Big Ten. We discuss which team should be the favorite, and how many of these teams should make the NCAA Tournament.

Tiger Talk 09-29-21See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hope & Rauf presented by Heat Check CBB: Connor is joined by Lukas Harkins to discuss their takes on the Big East in the next edition of the conference preview series. Topped, as always, by Villanova, how many teams in the Big East have legitimate NCAA Tournament dreams? And who do Lukas and Connor view as the other Top 25 caliber squads?Listen to their projected standings and break down all 11 teams, before they give their bold predictions for the season. Who does Lukas think will be Seton Hall's next big star? What surprising name does Connor believe will be in the conversation for Big East Player of the Year?Find out in the latest episode of Hope & Rauf presented by Heat Check CBB!

Matt and Brad dig into Mizzou Football this week with a review of the Tigers through four games, and Blake Toppmeyer of USA Today joins for preview of the showdown with Tennessee. The guys also confirm the existence of the Inside Mizzou Athletics Bump for one recent podcast guest, and play the timeless trivia game, "Tennessee Fact or Tennessee Myth"!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Colts ARE going to beat Jacoby Brissett this Sunday! Mike Woodson is going to win at IU this winter - and the Hoosiers will return to the NCAA Tournament! IU Football provides a smart investment opportunity Saturday! The Pacers are deep where injuries have hot them! Optimism Wednesday is the day when all good things transform from possible to likely! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/the-kent-sterling-show/support

Guest: Joe Mazzulla, Boston Celtics Assistant Coach Boston Celtics assistant coach Joe Mazzulla joins the Basketball Podcast to discuss simplified principles of play and the teaching process. Mazzulla coached the 2021 Boston Celtics summer league team. He joined Boston's coaching staff in 2019-20 after guiding Fairmont State University to a 43-17 record over two seasons as the program's head coach from 2017 to 2019. His Falcons went 22-9 in 2018-19 to claim the program's fifth NCAA Tournament bid over the last seven years. In joining the Celtics organization, Mazzulla returns to the Northeast where he served as an assistant coach for the Maine Red Claws of the NBA G League during the 2016-17 season. In addition to his two years as a head coach in the collegiate ranks, Mazzulla brings five years of assistant coaching experience between Fairmont State (2013-2016) and Glenville State College (2011-2013). Mazzulla attended West Virginia University, where he played collegiately for all four seasons under head coaches John Beilein and Bob Huggins. He advanced to the NCAA Tournament all four years and was named to the Big East Academic All-Star Team three times (2007, 2009-10) with the Mountaineers. Breakdown1:00 - Interviewed For a Head Coaching Job4:00 - Takeaways From Successful Coaches6:00 - Preparations for Summer League Coaching Job9:00 - Player Development12:30 - Retrieval Practice Leads to Retention16:30 - Feedback20:00 - Cold Calling23:00 - Communicating Players26:00 - Game Film29:00 - Explaining to Players his Process32:30 - Game Context36:00 - Switching Situation39:00 - Getting Back into Gameplay43:00 - Recreations47:00 - Concept of Positive Framing51:00 - Building Player's Self Advocacy54:00 - Measurement Phase57:00 - Giving Postgame Debriefs1:01:00 - Situational Basketball1:03:30 - Scripting1:05:00 - Giving Advice to Other Coaches1:06:00 - ConclusionJoe Mazzulla's Bio:Bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_MazzullaTwitter: https://www.instagram.com/coachmazzulla Basketball ImmersionWebsite: http://basketballimmersion.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/bballimmersion?lang=enYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/basketballimmersionFacebook: https://facebook.com/basketballimmersionBetOnline Website:Website: www.betonline.agBest in the West Video SeriesBest in the West Website: http://bestinthewestclinic.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Brianne Reed is a Professional Soccer player currently playing overseas in Denmark and also is a member of the Dominican Republic National Team.  Collegiately, she played at Rutgers from 2012-2015 and helped them reach the Final Four in 2015.  Brianne talks about growing up in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, how she got into soccer, her club career highlights, and her great soccer and track & field career at Red Bank Catholic High School.  She discusses the recruiting process, why she chose Rutgers, the transition from high school to college soccer, and what it was like to play in 3 different conferences in 4 years.  Brianne details her great career at Rutgers, playing the important position of Center Back, getting to the NCAA Tournament all 4 years, and the run to the Final Four her Senior year in 2015.  She then talks about getting drafted into the NWSL in the 2016 Draft, her time playing with FC Kansas City, and her decision to go overseas to play.  Brianne explains her time in Sweden, the different style of soccer that is played, her current career in Denmark, how & why she decided to join the Dominican Republican National Team, and how she balances both.

On this episode Dos interviews Coach Matt Shaw of the University of Denver.  Shaw oversees the UD's strength and conditioning program with an emphasis on men's hockey and men's soccer, while also managing team monitoring and the department's staff education. Since his arrival in 2012, he has trained and consulted with athletes from the NHL, KHL, MLS, MLL and PLL.   During Shaw's time with the Pioneers, he has helped the hockey team to the 2017 National Championship, three Frozen Four appearances and seven NCAA Tournament appearances

UCLA's Mick Cronin is blocking out all outside noise as the Bruins enter the new season with high expectations. Why he believes they could be better than they were last year. The importance of a full offseason regiment. Winning in a variety of ways. Managing a talented and deep rotation. How to get more eyes on the ultra-competitive and talented Pac-12. And does he give any thought to a potential #1 seed in the NCAA Tournament? Plus, we're talking about practice?! The preseason is officially here as teams begin workouts and practice... Jon gives you his quick hits.

In this edition of In The Circle, Eric Lopez and Victor Anderson Focus on the "Big 4" in Iowa as they head to the Big 4 Classic. First, Eric talks with Northern Iowa Head Coach Ryan Jacobs about UNI's NCAA Tournament appearance in 2021, Breaking down the team's outlook in 2022 and replacing All-American SS Sammey Bunch. Eric also talks about Drake's Head Coach Rich Calvert about the history of the Big 4 Classic Fall tournament, Drake in 2022, and the MVC. Calvert also talked about Nicole Newman and the national attention Newman brought to the program in 2019. Also, in the episode, Eric and Victor react to more college realignment news as reports of Belmont moving from the OVC to the MVC and Texas A&M Commerce moving from the Lone Star Conference (DII) to the Southland Conference (DI).

In this edition of In The Circle, Eric Lopez and Victor Anderson Focus on the "Big 4" in Iowa as they head to the Big 4 Classic. First, Eric talks with Northern Iowa Head Coach Ryan Jacobs about UNI's NCAA Tournament appearance in 2021, Breaking down the team's outlook in 2022 and replacing All-American SS Sammey Bunch. Eric also talks about Drake's Head Coach Rich Calvert about the history of the Big 4 Classic Fall tournament, Drake in 2022, and the MVC. Calvert also talked about Nicole Newman and the national attention Newman brought to the program in 2019. Also, in the episode, Eric and Victor react to more college realignment news as reports of Belmont moving from the OVC to the MVC and Texas A&M Commerce moving from the Lone Star Conference (DII) to the Southland Conference (DI).

Greg chats with Andy Dieckhoff of Heat Check CBB about the ways teams that had a departing star player will look to replace them, how the middle of the Mountain West being strong could help the top teams compete for NCAA Tournament bids, & how dangerous the Oregon Ducks can be this season! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

#MizzouMade wideout Danario Alexander talked with Chris Gervino on the sideline during the game at Boston College See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

MU research scientist Gretchen Carlisle has found that not only does adopting a cat help lower stress levels for families with children with autism, it's also good for the cat. She explained how on the latest Brad's Bites.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Mizzou Wrestling Tiger Style Report - 2021-22 Schedule PreviewSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode, we break down the Big East heading into this season. We break down why Villanova is the favorite, and which teams are true competitors to make the NCAA Tournament.

On the latest episode of the Rex Chapman Show with Josh Hopkins, the guys are joined by Kentucky Wildcats royalty, Jeff Sheppard. The 2x Champion and 1998 Outstanding Player of the 1998 NCAA Tournament discusses how he wanted to follow in Rex's footsteps at Kentucky, and going on to win championships with both Rick Pitino and Tubby Smith.  7:00 - Jeff professes his admiration for Rex Chapman and a tough start to his career as a Kentucky Wildcat, settling on his iconic #15 jersey. 13:00 - Rex shares the first time he played pickup with Jeff, and how impressed he was even before his first practice at Kentucky. 16:30 - How did a Georgia boy end up at the University of Kentucky? Jeff talks about a dream he had to play in the Final Four for the Wildcats that goes back to the 6th grade. 21:00 - How Rex and Jeff remember their biggest moments around basketball, from starting in high school to beginning their careers with Kentucky.  25:30 - Jeff's son Reed is one of the most sought out basketball recruits for the class of 2023, already with an offer from John Calipari.The guys speak about the pressure around Lexington and Wildcat nation for Reed to follow in his father's footsteps. 29:00 - How Rex and Jeff spoke about the pressures they had to fulfill expectations they had as they came up with through college basketball. There's so much visibility on Reed and other high school recruits in the social media age. 35:30 - How Name, Image and Likeness has become a focal point of college athletics and how Jeff sees a changing landscape from when he starred at Kentucky. 43:00 - After talking about the experience it takes to establish a culture and to make a deep NCAA Tournament run, Jeff talks about how at 23 years old, he was ready to win another Championship. 53:00 - Comparing great Kentucky coaches, Jeff describes playing for Rick Pitino and Tubby Smith, and how both led their storied basketball careers. 58:00: Rex thinks Jeff and Immanuel Quigley are two of the most mature people to ever go through the Kentucky program 60:00: Remembering the reaction Rex got when he announced he was going to Kentucky 1:04:00: Rex remembering Jeff bring too nice at first and that he was always learning from Sheppard Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rob Phinisee has had an interesting, and in may ways contradictory, three years in Bloomington.• He arrived as a headline member of one of the most celebrated IU recruiting classes of the post-Knight era … but is now the only one left and still hasn't played in an NCAA Tournament game.• He burst onto the scene as a freshman point guard with the kind of production that gave IU fans dreams of the next Yogi … but has struggled to recapture that efficiency and consistency since.• He's earned a reputation as a clutch shooter with a handful of memorable shots that decided games … but has been a part of three straight backcourts that notoriously couldn't shoot the ball well enough to space the floor for talented interior scorers.• His IU teams have struggled to just get their head above water in Big Ten play … but notched three straight wins against top-10 Michigan State teams.It hasn't really made a lot of sense.But what does seem to make sense, at least IU fans hope, is that Rob and the entire IU program will have a chance to be reborn under the direction of a new staff and with a rebuilt roster.In this wide-ranging conversation with Rob we discuss the many contradictory elements of his time at IU and look forward to what his fourth season may bring. Among the topics we get into:• How he's approaching his option to play a fifth year• That time he scored 50 points in a high school game … and could have scored more• Why he chose to leave Lafayette for Bloomington• What Indiana needs to do to finally beat Purdue again• The ups and downs of the Marquette and Arkansas games freshman year• The game-winner against Butler and the anointing of “Big Shot Rob”• Hypotheses for why he's been able to come through more consistently in clutch situations than regular ones• The ongoing relationship he developed with the young man who wrote him a letter after the Butler game• What guarding Cassius Winston was like• The toughest players he's had to guard (his final answer on this one will stun you)• What he learned about the impact of crowds during the COVID season• What the experience of playing for Archie Miller was like• The role does he expect to play this season• What will be different about Indiana's defensive approach this season• What he wants to do after his basketball playing career is overAnd so much more. We cover a ton while reliving some of his most memorable moments as a Hoosier.

The Memphis basketball team won a postseason tournament championship (the NIT) in March. It won an offseason championship – in a manner of speaking – by signing the No. 1 recruiting class in the country and adding Hall of Famer Larry Brown and former NBA All-Star Rasheed Wallace to the coaching staff.  Will the Tigers make it three in a row with a national championship next spring?  Penny Hardaway's team will officially begin its pursuit of the program's first NCAA Tournament title Tuesday. That's when the Tigers will hold their first full-fledged practice ahead of the 2021-22 season.  So, what are the most intriguing storylines for Memphis ahead of practice No. 1? On this week's episode of the Memphis Basketball Podcast, Commercial Appeal beat writer Jason Munz and columnist Mark Giannotto preview the possibilities.

There's a place where sports and data meet, and it's as powerful a collision as on any football field!  Jeff Sagarin has been a figurehead in the sports analytics realm for decades, and we're thrilled to have had the chance to have him on to talk about his data journey!  There's a fair mix of math AND sports geek out time in this episode.  And, did we mention that Dr. Wayne Winston is sitting in on this episode as well? References in this Episode: 2 Frictionless Colliding Boxes Video Scorigami Episode Transcript: Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello, friends. Today's guest is Jeff Sagarin. Is that name familiar to you? It's very familiar to me. In my life, Jeff's work might very well be my first brush with the concept of using data for any sort of advantage. His Power Ranking Columns, first appeared in USA Today in 1985, when I was 11 years old. And what a fascinating concept that was. Rob Collie (00:00:29): It probably won't surprise you if I confess that 11-year-old me was not particularly good at sports, but I was still fascinated and captivated by them. 11-year-old kids in my neighborhood were especially prone to associating sports with their tribal identity. Everyone had their favorite teams, their favorite sports stars. And invariably, this led to arguments about which sports star was better than the other sports star, who was going to win this game coming up and who would win a tournament amongst all of these teams and things of that sort. Rob Collie (00:01:01): Now that I've explained it that way though, I guess being an adult sports fan isn't too terribly different, is it? Those arguments, of course, aren't the sorts of arguments where there's anything resembling a clear winner. But in practice, the person who won was usually the one with the loudest voice or the sickest burn that they could deliver to their friends. And then in 1985, the idea was planted in my head by Jeff Sagarin's column in USA Today, that there actually was a relatively objective way to evaluate teams that had never played against one another and likely never would. Rob Collie (00:01:33): I wasn't into computers at the time. I certainly wasn't into the concept of data. I didn't know what a database was. I didn't know what a spreadsheet was. And yet, this was still an incredibly captivating and powerful idea. So in my life, Jeff Sagarin is the first public figure that I encountered in the sports analytics industry long before it was cool. And because it was sports, a topic that was relevant to 11-year-old me, he's really also my first brush with analytics at all. Rob Collie (00:02:07): It's not surprising then, that to me, Jeff is absolutely a celebrity. As a guest, in insider podcasting lingo, Jeff is what we call a good get. We owe that pleasure, of course, to him being close friends with Wayne Winston, a former guest on the show, who also joined us today as co-guest. Rob Collie (00:02:28): Now, if none of that speaks to you, let's try this alternate description. He's probably also the world's most famous active FORTRAN programmer. I admit that I was so starstruck by this that I didn't even really push as hard as I normally would, in terms of getting into the techniques that he uses. I didn't want to run afoul of asking him for trade secrets. At times, this conversation did devolve into four dudes sitting around talking about sports. Rob Collie (00:02:59): But setting that aside, there are some really, really interesting and heartwarming things happening in this conversation as well. Again, the accidental path to where he is today, the intersection of persistence and good fortune that's required really for success in anything. Bottom line, this is the story of a national and highly influential figure at the intersection of the sports industry and the analytics industry for more than three decades. It's not every day you get to hear that story. So let's get into it. Announcer (00:03:34): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please? Announcer (00:03:39): This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive podcast with your host, Rob Colley and your co-host, Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element. Rob Collie (00:04:02): Welcome to the show, Jeff Sagarin. And welcome back to the show. Wayne Winston. So thrilled to have the two of you with us today. This is awesome. We've been looking forward to this for a long time. So thank you very much gentlemen, for being here. Jeff Sagarin (00:04:16): You're welcome. Rob Collie (00:04:18): Jeff, usually we kick these things off with, "Hey, tell us a little about yourself, your background, blah, blah, blah." Let's start off with me telling you about you. It's a story about you that you wouldn't know. I remember for a very long time being aware of you. Rob Collie (00:04:35): So I'm 47 years old, born in 1974. My father had participated for many years in this shady off-the-books college football pick'em pool that was run out of the high school in a small town in Florida. Like the sheets with everybody's entries would show up. They were run on ditto paper, like that blue ink. It was done in the school ditto room and he did this every year. This was like the most fascinating thing that happened in the entire year to me. Like these things showing up at our house, this packet of all these picks, believe it or not, they were handwritten. These grids were handwritten with everyone's picks. It was ridiculous. Rob Collie (00:05:17): He got eliminated every year. There were a couple of hundred entries every year and he just got his butt kicked every year. But then one year, he did his homework. He researched common opponents and things like that or that kind of stuff. I seem to recall this having something to do timing wise with you. So I looked it up. Your column first appeared in USA Today in 1985. Is that correct? Jeff Sagarin (00:05:40): Yeah. Tuesday, January 8th 1985. Rob Collie (00:05:44): I remember my dad winning this pool that year and using the funds to buy a telescope to look at Halley's Comet when it showed up. And so I looked up Halley's Comet. What do you know? '86. So it would have been like the January ballgames of 1986, where he won this pool. And in '85, were you power ranking college football teams or was that other sports? Jeff Sagarin (00:06:11): Yes. Rob Collie (00:06:12): Okay. So when my dad said that he did his research that year, what he really did was read your stuff. You bought my dad a telescope in 1986 so that we could go have one of the worst family vacations of all time. It was just awful. Thank you. Jeff Sagarin (00:06:31): You're very welcome. Rob Collie (00:06:39): I kind of think of you as the first publicly known figure in sports analytics. You probably weren't the first person to apply math and computers to sports analytics, but you're the first person I heard of. Jeff Sagarin (00:06:51): There is a guy that people don't even talk about very much. Now a guy named Earnshaw Cook, who first inspired me when I was a sophomore in high school in the '63-'64 school year, there was an article by Frank Deford in Sports Illustrated about Earnshaw Cook publishing a book called Percentage Baseball. So I convinced my mom to let me have $10 to order it by mail and I got it. I started playing around with his various ideas in it. He was the first guy I ever heard of and that was in March of 1964. Rob Collie (00:07:28): All right, so everyone's got an origin story. Jeff Sagarin (00:07:31): The Dunkel family started doing the Dunkel ratings back I believe in 1929. Then there was a professor, I think he was at Vanderbilt, named [Lipkin House 00:07:41], he was I think at Vanderbilt. And for years, he did the high school ratings in states like maybe Tennessee and Kentucky. I think he gave Kentucky that Louisville courier his methodology before he died. But I don't know if they continue his work or not. But there were people way before me. Rob Collie (00:08:03): But they weren't in USA Today. Jeff Sagarin (00:08:04): That's true. Rob Collie (00:08:06): They weren't nationally distributed, like on a very regular basis. I've been hearing your name longer than I've even been working with computers. That's pretty crazy. How did you even get hooked up with USA Today? Jeff Sagarin (00:08:23): People might say, "You got lucky." My answer, as you'll see as well, I'd worked for 12 years to be in a position to get lucky. I started getting paid for doing this in September of 1972 with an in-house publication of pro football weekly called Insider's Pro Football Newsletter. Jeff Sagarin (00:08:45): In the Spring of '72, I'd written letters to like 100 newspapers saying because I had started by hand doing my own rating system for pro football in the fall of 1971. Just by hand, every Sunday night, I'd get the scores and add in the Monday night. I did it as a hobby. I wasn't doing it for a living. I did it week by week and charted the teams. It was all done with some charts I'd made up with a normal distribution and a slide rule. So I sent out letters in the spring of '72 to about 100 papers saying, "Hey, would you be interested in running my stuff?" Jeff Sagarin (00:09:19): They either didn't answer me or all said, "No, not interested." But I got a call right before I left to go to California when an old college friend that spring. It was from William Wallace, who was a big time football correspondent for The New York Times. That anecdote may be in that article by Andy Glockner. He called me up, he was at the New York Times, but he said also, "I write articles for extra money for pro football weekly. I wanted to just kind of talk to you." Jeff Sagarin (00:09:49): He wrote an article that appeared in Pro Quarterback magazine in September of '72. But during the middle of that summer, I got a phone call from Pro Football weekly, the publisher, a guy named [inaudible 00:10:04] said, "Hey Jeff. Have you seen our ad in street and Smith's?" It didn't matter. It could have been their pro magazine or college. I said, "Yeah, I did." And he said, "Do you notice it said we've got a world famous handicapper to do our predictions for us?" I said, "Yeah, I did see that." He said, "How would you like to be that world famous handicapper? We don't have anybody." Jeff Sagarin (00:10:25): We just said that because he said William Wallace told us to call you. So I said, "Okay, I'll be your world famous handicapper." I didn't start off that well and they had this customer, it was a paid newsletter and there was a customer from Hawaii. He had a great name, Charles Fujiwara. He'd send letters every week saying, "Sagarin's terrible, but he's winning a fortune for me. I just reverse his picks every week." So finally, finally, my numbers turn the tide and I had this one great week, where I went 8-0. He sent another letter saying, "I'm bankrupt. The kid destroyed me." Because he was reversing all my picks. That's a true story. Rob Collie (00:11:07): At least he had a sense of humor. It sounds like a pretty interesting fellow on the other end of that letter. Jeff Sagarin (00:11:13): He sounds like he could have been like the guy, if you've ever seen reruns of the old show, '77 Sunset Strip. In it, there this guy who's kind of a racetrack trout gambler named Roscoe. He sounds like he could have been Roscoe. Rob Collie (00:11:26): We have to look that one up. Dr. Wayne Winston (00:11:27): It's before your time. Rob Collie (00:11:28): I don't think I saw that show. Jeff Sagarin (00:11:29): Yeah. Wayne's seen it though. Rob Collie (00:11:31): Yes. I love that. There are things that are both before my time and I have like old man knees. So I've heard this kind of thing before, by the way. It's called the 10-year overnight success. Jeff Sagarin (00:11:47): I forgot. How did I get with USA Today? I started with Pro Football weekly and continued with them. I was with them until actually why don't we say sometime in the fall of '82. I ended up in other newspapers, little by little: The Boston Globe, Louisville Courier Journal. And then in the spring of '81, I got into a conversation over the phone with Jim van Valkenburg, who is the stat guy at the NCAA. I happened to mention that going into the tournament, I had Indiana to win the tournament. They were rated like 10th in the conventional polls. Jeff Sagarin (00:12:23): And so he remembered that and he kept talking behind the scenes to people in the NCAA about that. And so years later, in 1988, they called me out to talk to them. But anyhow, I had developed a good reputation and I gave him as a reference. Wayne called me up excitedly in let's say, early September of 1984. He said, "Hey, Jeff. You've got to buy a copy of today's USA Today and turn to the end of the sports section. You're going to be sick." Jeff Sagarin (00:12:53): I said, "Really? Okay." So I opened to where he said and I was sick. They had computer ratings by some guy. He was a good guy named Thomas Jech, J-E-C-H. And I said, "Damn, that should be me. I've been doing this for all these years and I didn't even know they were looking for this." So I call up on the phone. Sometimes there's a lot of luck involved. I got to talk to a guy named Bob Barbara who I believe is retired now there. He had on the phone this gruff sounding voice out of like a Grade B movie from the film, The War. "What's going on Kitty?" It sounds like he had a cigar in his mouth. Jeff Sagarin (00:13:30): I said, "Well, I do these computer ratings." [inaudible 00:13:33] Said "Well, really? That's interesting. We've already got somebody." He said, "But how would you even send it to us?" I said, "Well, I dictate over the phone." He said, "Dictate? We don't take dictation at USA Today, kid. Have you ever heard of personal computers and a modem?" I said, "Well, I have but I just do it on a mainframe at IU and I dictate over the phone to the Louisville Courier and the local..." Jeff Sagarin (00:13:58): Well, the local paper here, I gave them a printout. He said, "Kid, you need to buy yourself a PC and learn how to use a modem." So I kind of was embarrassed. I said, "Well, I'll see." So about 10 days later, I called him up and said, "Hey, what's the phone number for your modem?" He said, "Crap. You again, kid? I thought I got rid of you." He says, "All right. I'll give you the phone number." So I sent him a sample printout. He says, "Yeah, yeah, we got it. Keep in touch. We're not going to change for football. But this other guy, he may not want to do basketball. So keep in touch. Who knows what will happen for basketball?" Jeff Sagarin (00:14:31): So every month I'd call up saying, "It's me again, keeping touch." He said, "I can't get rid of you. You're like a bad penny that keeps turning up." So finally he says look, after about five of these calls, spreading out until maybe late November, "Look kid, why don't you wait... Call me up the first Sunday of the new year," which would have been like Sunday, January 6 of 1985 I believe. So I waited. I called him up. Sure enough, he said, "You again?" I said, "You told me you wanted to do college basketball." Jeff Sagarin (00:15:04): He said, "Yeah, you're kind of right. The other guy doesn't want to do it." So he said, "Well, do you mind if we call it the USA Today computer ratings? We kind of like to put our own name on everything." I said, "Well, wait a minute. During the World Series, you had Pete Rose as your guest columnist, you want not only gave his name, but you had a picture of him." He said, "God damn it." He said, "I can't..." He said, "You win again kid. Give us a bio." Jeff Sagarin (00:15:32): An old friend of both me and Wayne was on a business trip. He lived in California, but one of the companies he did work for was Magnavox, which at the time had a presence in Fort Wayne. So he had stopped off in Bloomington so we could say hi. We hadn't seen each other for many years. So he wrote my bio for me, which is still used in the agate in the USA Today. So it's the same bio all these years. Jeff Sagarin (00:15:56): So they started printing me on Tuesday, January 8 of 1985. On the front page that day and I got my editor of a couple years ago, he found an old physical copy of that paper and sent it to me and I thought that's pretty cool. And on the front page, they said, "Well, this would be the 50th birthday of Elvis Presley." I get, they did not have a banner headline at the top, "Turn to the sports and see Jeff Sagarin's debut." That was not what they did. It was all about Elvis Presley. And so people will tell me, "Wow! You got really lucky." Jeff Sagarin (00:16:30): Yeah, but I was in a position. I'd worked for 12 years since the fall of '72 to get in position to then get lucky. They told me I had some good recommendations from people. Rob Collie (00:16:42): Well, even that persistence to keep calling in the face of relatively discouraging feedback. So that conversation took place, and then two days later, you're in the paper. Jeff Sagarin (00:16:54): Well, yeah. He said, "Send us the ratings." They might have needed a time lag. So if I sent the ratings in on a Sunday night or Monday morning, they'd print them on Tuesday. They're not as instant. Now, I update every day on their website. For the paper, they take whatever the most recent ones they can access off their website, depending on I've sent it in, which is I always send them in early in the morning like when I get up. So they print on a Tuesday there'll be taking the ratings that they would have had in their hands Monday, which would be through Sunday's games. Rob Collie (00:17:26): That Tuesday, was that just college basketball? Jeff Sagarin (00:17:28): Then it was. Then in the fall of 85. They began using me for college football, not that they thought I was better or worse one way or the other than Thomas Jech who was a smart guy, he was a math professor at the time at Penn State. He just got tired of doing it. He had more important things to do. Serious, I don't mean that sarcastically. That was just like a fun hobby for him from what I understand. Rob Collie (00:17:50): I was going to ask you if you hadn't already gone and answered the question ahead of time. I was going to ask you well, what happened to the other guy? Did you go like all Tonya Harding on him or whatever? Did you take out your rival? No, sounds like Nancy Kerrigan just went ahead and retired. Although I hate to make you Tonya Harding in this analogy and I just realized I just Hardinged you. Jeff Sagarin (00:18:10): He was just evidently a really good math professor. It was just something he did for fun to do the ratings. Rob Collie (00:18:17): Opportunity and preparation right where they intersect. That's "luck". Jeff Sagarin (00:18:22): It would be as if Wally Pipp had retired and Lou Gehrig got to replace him in the analogy, Lou Gehrig gets the first base job but actually Wally Pipp in real life did not retire. He had the bad luck to get a cold or something or an injury and he never got back in the starting lineup after that. Rob Collie (00:18:38): What about Drew Bledsoe? I think he did get hurt. Did we ever see him again? Thomas LaRock (00:18:43): The very next season, he was in Buffalo and then he went to Dallas. Rob Collie (00:18:46): I don't remember this at all. Thomas LaRock (00:18:47): And not only that, but when he went to Dallas, he got hurt again and Tony Romo came on to take over. Rob Collie (00:18:53): Oh my god! So Drew Bledsoe is Wally Pipp X2. Thomas LaRock (00:18:58): Yeah, X2. Rob Collie (00:19:02): I just need to go find wherever Drew Bledsoe is right now and go get in line behind him. Thomas LaRock (00:19:08): He's making wine in Walla Walla, Washington. I know exactly where he is. Rob Collie (00:19:12): I'm about to inherit a vineyard gentlemen. Okay, so Wayne's already factored into this story. Dr. Wayne Winston (00:19:23): A little bit. Rob Collie (00:19:23): A bit part but an important one. We would call you Mr. Narrative Hook in the movie. Like you'd be the guy that's like, "Jeff, you've got to get a copy of USA Today and turn to page 10. You're going to be sick." Jeff Sagarin (00:19:37): Well, I was I'm glad Wayne told me to do it. If I'd never known that, who knows what I'd be doing right now? Rob Collie (00:19:44): Yeah. So you guys are longtime friends, right? Dr. Wayne Winston (00:19:47): Yeah. Jeff, should take this. Jeff Sagarin (00:19:49): September 1967 in the TV room at Ashdown Graduate's House across from the dorm we lived, because the graduate students there had rigged up, we call it a full screen TV that was actually quite huge. It's simply projected from a regular TV onto a maybe a 10 foot by 10 foot old fashioned movie projector screen. We'd go there to watch ballgames. Okay, because better than watching on a 10 inch diagonal black and white TV in the dorm. And it turned out we both had a love for baseball and football games. Thomas LaRock (00:20:26): So just to be clear, though, this was no ordinary school. This is MIT. Because this is what people at MIT would do is take some weird tech thing and go, "We can make this even better, make a big screen TV." Jeff Sagarin (00:20:38): We didn't know how to do it, which leads into Wayne's favorite story about our joint science escapades at MIT. If Wayne wants to start it off, you might like this. I was a junior and Wayne was a sophomore at the time. I'll set Wayne up for it, there was a requirement that MIT no matter what your major, one of the sort of distribution courses you had to take was a laboratory class. Why don't we let Wayne take the ball for a while on this? Dr. Wayne Winston (00:21:05): I'm not very mechanically inclined. I got a D in wood shop and a D in metal shop. Jeff's not very mechanically inclined either. We took this lab class and we were trying to figure out identifying a coin based on the sound waves it would produce under the Scylla scope. And so the first week, we couldn't get the machine to work. And the professor said, "Turn it on." And so we figured that step out and the next week, the machine didn't work. He said, "Plug it in." Jeff can take it from there. Jeff Sagarin (00:21:46): It didn't really fit the mathematical narrative exactly of what metals we knew were in the coin. But then I noticed, nowadays we'd probably figure out this a reason. If we multiplied our answers by something like 100 pi, we got the right numbers. So they were correctly proportional. So we just multiplied our answers by 100 pi and said, "As you can see, it's perfectly deducible." Rob Collie (00:22:14): There's a YouTube video that we should probably link that is crazy. It shows that two boxes on a frictionless surface a simulation and the number of times that they collide, when you slide them towards a wall together, when they're like at 10X ratio of mass, the number of times that they impact each other starts to become the digits of pi. Jeff Sagarin (00:22:34): Wow. Rob Collie (00:22:35): Before they separate. Jeff Sagarin (00:22:36): That's interesting. Rob Collie (00:22:36): It's just bizarre. And then they go through explaining like why it is pi and you understand it while the video is playing. And then the video ends and you've completely lost it. Jeff Sagarin (00:22:49): I'm just asking now, are they saying if you do that experiment an infinite amount of times, the average number of times they collide will be pi? Rob Collie (00:22:57): That's a really good question. I think it's like the number of collisions as you increase the ratios of the weight or something like that start to become. It's like you'll get 314 collisions, for instance, in a certain weight ratio, because that's the only three digits of pi that I remember. It's 3.14. It's a fascinating little watch. So the 100 pi thing, you said that, I'm like, "Yeah, that just... Of course it's 100 pi." Even boxes colliding on a frictionless surface do pi things apparently. Jeff Sagarin (00:23:29): Maybe it's a universal constant in everything we do. Rob Collie (00:23:29): You just don't expect pi to surface itself. It has nothing to do with waves, no wavelength, no arcs of circles, nothing like that. But that sneaky video, they do show you that it actually has something to do with circles and angles and stuff. Jeff Sagarin (00:23:44): Mutual friend of me and Wayne, this guy named Robin. He loves Fibonacci. And so every time I see a particular game end by a certain score, I'll just say, "Hey, Robin. Research the score of..." I think it was blooming to North against some other team. And he did. It turned out Bloomington North had won 155-34, which are the two adjacent Fibonacci, the two particular adjacent Fibonacci. Robin loves that stuff. You'll find a lot of that actually. It's hard to double Fibonacci a team though. That would be like 89-34. Rob Collie (00:24:18): I know about the Fibonacci sequence. But I can't pick Fibonacci sequence numbers out of the wild. Are you familiar with Scorigami? Jeff Sagarin (00:24:26): Who? I'd never heard of it obviously. Rob Collie (00:24:29): I think a Scorigami is a score in the NFL that's never happened. Jeff Sagarin (00:24:32): There was one like that about 10 years ago, 11-10, I believe. Pittsburgh was involved in the game or 12-11, something like that. Rob Collie (00:24:40): I think there was a Scorigami in last season. With scoring going up, the chances of Scorigami is increasing. There's just more variance at the higher end of the spectrum of numbers, right? Jeff Sagarin (00:24:50): I've always thought about this. In Canada, Canadian football, they have this extra rule that I think is kind of cool because it would probably make more scores happen. If a punter kicks the ball into the end zone, it can't roll there. Like if he kicks it on the fly into the end zone and the other team can't run it out, it's called a rouge and the kicking team gets one point for it. That's kind of cool. Because once you add the concept of scoring one point, you make a lot more scores more probable of happening. Rob Collie (00:25:21): Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. You can win 1-0. Thomas LaRock (00:25:25): So the end zone is also... It's 20 yards deep. So the field's longer, it's 110 yards. But the end zone's deeper and part of it is that it's too far to kick for a field goal. But you know what? If I can punt it into the end zone and if I get a cover team down there, we can get one point out. I'm in favor of it. I think that'd be great. Jeff Sagarin (00:25:43): I think you have to kick out on the fly into the end zone. It's not like if it rolls into it. Thomas LaRock (00:25:47): No, no, no. It's like a pop flop. Jeff Sagarin (00:25:50): Yeah. Okay. Rob Collie (00:25:50): If you punt it out of the end zone, is it also a point? Thomas LaRock (00:25:52): It's a touch back. No, touch back. Jeff Sagarin (00:25:54): That'd be too easy of a way to get a point. Rob Collie (00:25:57): You've had a 20 yard deep target to land in. In Canadian fantasy football, if there was such a thing, maybe there is, punters, you actually could have punters as a position because they can score points. That would be a really sad and un-fun way to play. Rob Collie (00:26:14): But so we're amateur sports analytics people here on the show. We're not professionals. We're probably not even very good at it. But that doesn't mean that we aren't fascinated by it. We're business analytics people here for sure. Business and sports, they might share some techniques, but it's just very, very, very different, the things that are valuable in the two spaces. I mean, they're sort of spiritually linked but they're not really tools or methods that provide value. Rob Collie (00:26:39): Not that you would give them. But we're not looking for any of your secrets here today. But you're not just writing for USA Today, there's a number of places where your skills are used these days, right? Jeff Sagarin (00:26:51): Well, not as much as that. But I want to make a favorable analogy for Wayne. In the world of sports analytics, whatever the phrases are, I consider myself to be maybe an experimental applied physicist. Wayne is an advanced theoretical physicist. I do the grunt work of collecting data and doing stuff with it. But Wayne has a large over-viewing of things. He's like a theoretical physicist. Dr. Wayne Winston (00:27:17): Jeff is too modest because he's experimented for years on the best parameters for his models. Rob Collie (00:27:27): It's again that 10-year, 20-year overnight success type of thing. You've just got to keep grinding at it. Do the two of you collaborate at all? Jeff Sagarin (00:27:35): Well, we did on two things, the Hoops computer game and Win Val. I forgot. How could I forget? It was actually my favorite thing that we did even though we've made no money doing the randomization using Game Theory of play calling for football. And we based it actually and it turned out that I got great numerical results that jive with empirical stuff that Virgil Carter had gotten and our economist, named Romer, had gotten and we had more detailed results than them. Jeff Sagarin (00:28:06): But in the areas that we intersected, we had the same as them. We used a game called Pro Quarterback and we modeled it. We had actually, a fellow, I wasn't a professor but a fellow professor of Wayne's, a great guy, just a great guy named Vic Cabot, who wrote a particular routine to insert the FORTRAN program that solved that particular linear programming problem that would constantly reoccur or else we couldn't do it. That was the favorite thing and we got to show it once to Sam White, who we really liked. And White said, "I like this guy. I may have played this particular game," we told him what we based it on, "when I was a teenager." Jeff Sagarin (00:28:46): He said, "I know exactly what you want to do." You don't make the same call in the same situation all the time. You have a random, but there's an optimal mix Game Theory, as you probably know for both offense and defense. White said, "The problem is this is my first year here. It was the summer of '83." And he said, "I don't really have the security." Said, "Imagine it's third and one, we're on our own 15 yard line. And it's third and one. And the random number generator says, 'Throw the bomb on this play with a 10% chance of calling up but it'll still be in the mix. And it happens to come up.'" Jeff Sagarin (00:29:23): He said, "It was my eight year here. I used to play these games myself. I know exactly." But then he patted his hip. He said, "It's mine on the line this first year." He said, "It's kind of nerve wracking to do that when you're a rookie coach somewhere, to call the bomb when it's third and one on your own 15. If it's incomplete, you'll be booed out of the stadium." Rob Collie (00:29:46): Yeah, I mean, it's similar to there's the general reluctance in coaches for so long to go for it on fourth and one. When the analytics were very, very, very clear that this was a plus expected value, +EV, move to go for it on fourth and one. But the thing is, you've got to consider the bigger picture. Right? The incentives, the coaches number one goal is actually don't get fired. Jeff Sagarin (00:30:14): You were right. That's what White was telling us. Rob Collie (00:30:14): Yeah. Winning a Super Bowl is a great thing to do. Because it helps you not get fired. It's actually weird. Like, if your goal is to win as many games as possible, yes, go for it on fourth and one. But if your goal is to not get fired, maybe. So it takes a bit more courage even to follow the numbers. And for good reason, because the incentives aren't really aligned the way that we think they are when you first glance at a situation. Jeff Sagarin (00:30:41): Well, there's a human factor that there's no way unless you're making a guess how to take it into account. It may be demoralizing to your defense if you go for it on fourth and one and you're on your own 15. I've seen the numbers, we used to do this. It's a good mathematical move to go for it. Because you could say, "Well, if you're forced to punt, the other team is going to start on the 50. So what's so good about that? But psychologically, your defense may be kind of pissed off and demoralized when they have to come out on the field and defend from their own 15 after you've not made it and the numbers don't take that into account. Rob Collie (00:31:19): Again, it's that judgment thing. Like the coach hung out to dry. Dr. Wayne Winston (00:31:22): Can I say a word about Vic Cabot, that Jeff mentioned? Jeff Sagarin (00:31:26): Yeah, He's great. Dr. Wayne Winston (00:31:27): Yeah. So Vic was the greatest guy any of us in the business school ever knew. He was a fantastic person. He died of throat cancer in 1994, actually 27 years ago this week or last week. Jeff Sagarin (00:31:43): Last week. It was right around Labor Day. Dr. Wayne Winston (00:31:46): Right. But I want to mention, basically, when he died, his daughter was working in the NYU housing office. After he died, she wrote a little book called The Princess Diaries. She's worth how many millions of dollars now? But he never got to see it. Jeff Sagarin (00:32:06): He had a son, a big kid named Matt Cabot, who played at Bloomington South High School. I got a nice story about Matthew. I believe the last time I know of him, he was a state trooper in the state of Colorado. I used to tell him when I was still young enough and Spry enough, we'd play a little pickup or something. I'd say, "Matthew, forget about points. The most important thing, a real man gets rebounds." Jeff Sagarin (00:32:32): They played in the semi state is when it was just one class. In '88, me and Wayne and a couple of Wayne's professor buddies, we all... Of course, Vic would have been there but we didn't go in the same car. It was me, Wayne and maybe [inaudible 00:32:48] and somebody else, Wayne? Jeff Sagarin (00:32:49): They played against Chandler Thompson's great team from Muncie Central. In the first three minutes, Chris Lawson, who was the star of the team went up for his patented turn around jumper from six feet away in the lane and Chandler Thompson spiked it like a volleyball and on the run of Muncie Central player took it with no one near him and laid it in and the game essentially ended but Matt Cabot had the game of his life. Jeff Sagarin (00:33:21): I think he may have led the game of anyone, the most rebounds in the game. I compliment him. He was proud of that. And he's played, he said many a pickup game with Chandler Thompson, he said the greatest jumper he's ever been on the court within his entire life. You guys look up because I don't know if you know who Chandler Thompson. Is he played at Ball State. Look up on YouTube his put back dunk against UNLV in the 90 tournaments, the year UNLV won it at all. Look up Chandler Thompson's put back dunk. Rob Collie (00:33:52): Yeah, I was just getting into basketball then, I think. Like in the Loyola Marymount days. Yeah, Jerry Tarkanian. Does college basketball have the same amount of personalities it used to like in the coaching figures. I kind of doubt that it does. Rob Collie (00:34:06): With Tark gone, and of course, Bob Knight, it'll be hard to replace personalities like that. I don't know. I don't really watch college basketball anymore, so I wouldn't really know. But I get invited into those pick'em pools for the tournament March Madness every year and I never had the stamina to fill them out. And they offer those sheets where they'll fill it out for you. But why would I do that? Jeff Sagarin (00:34:28): I've got to tell you a story involving Wayne and I. Rob Collie (00:34:31): Okay. Jeff Sagarin (00:34:31): In the 80 tournament, I had gotten a program running that would to simulate the tournament if you fed in the power ratings. It understood who'd play who and you simulate it a zillion times, come up with the odds. So going into the tournament, we had Purdue maybe the true odds against him should have been let's say, I'll make it up seven to one. Purdue and Iowa, they had Ronnie Lester, I remember. Jeff Sagarin (00:34:57): The true odds against them should have been about 7-1. The bookmakers were giving odds of 40-1. So Wayne and I looked at each other and said, "That seems like a big edge." In theory, well, odds are still against them. Let's bet $25 apiece on both Purdue and Iowa. The two of them made the final four. Jeff Sagarin (00:35:20): In Indianapolis, I'll put it this way, their consolation game gave us no consolation. Rob Collie (00:35:30): Man. Jeff Sagarin (00:35:31): And then one of the games, Joe Barry Carroll of Purdue, they're down by one they UCLA. I'm sure he was being contested. I don't mean he was all by himself. It's always easy for the fan who can't play to mock the player. I don't mean... He was being fiercely contested by UCLA. The net result was he missed with fierce contesting one foot layup that would have won the game for Purdue, that would have put them into the championship game and Iowa could have beaten Louisville, except their best player, Ronnie Lester had to leave the game because he had aggravated a bad knee injury that he just couldn't play well on. Jeff Sagarin (00:36:11): But as I said, no consolation, right Wayne? Dr. Wayne Winston (00:36:14): Right. Jeff Sagarin (00:36:15): That was the next to the last year they ever had a consolation game. The last one was in '81 between LSU and Virginia. Rob Collie (00:36:23): Was it the '81 tournament that you said that you liked Indiana to win it? Jeff Sagarin (00:36:28): Wait, I'm going to show you how you get punished for hubris. I learned my lesson. The next year in '82, I had gotten a lot of notoriety, good kind of notoriety for having them to win in '81. People thought, "Wow! This is like the Oracle." So now as the tournament's about to begin in '82, I started getting a lot of calls, which I never used to do like from the media, "Who do you got Jeff?" I said confidently, "Oregon State." I had them number one, I think they'd only lost one game the whole year and they had a guy named Charlie Sitting, a 6'8 guy who was there all American forward. Jeff Sagarin (00:37:06): He was the star and I was pretty confident and to be honest, probably obnoxious when I'd be talking to the press. So they make the regional final against Georgetown and it was being held out west. I'm sort of confidently waiting for the game to be played and I'm sure there'll be advancing to the final four. And they were playing against freshmen, Patrick Ewing. Jeff Sagarin (00:37:29): In the first 10 seconds of the game, maybe you can find the video, there was a lob pass into Ewing, his back was to the basket, he's like three feet from the basket without even looking, he dunks backwards over his head over Charlie Sitton. And you should see the expression on Charlie Sitton's face. I said, "Oh my god! This game is over." The final score was 68-43 in Georgetown's favor. It was a massacre. It taught me the lesson, never be cocky, at least in public because you get slapped down, you get slapped down when you do that. Rob Collie (00:38:05): I don't want to get into this yet again on this show. But you should call up Nate Silver and maybe talk to him a little bit about the same sort of thing. Makes very big public calls that haven't been necessarily so great lately. Just for everyone's benefit, because even though I'd live in the state of Indiana, I didn't grow up here. Let's just be clear. Who won the NCAA tournament in 1981? Jeff Sagarin (00:38:29): Indiana. Rob Collie (00:38:30): Okay. All right, so there you go. Right. Jeff Sagarin (00:38:33): But who didn't win it in 1982? Oregon State. Rob Collie (00:38:38): Yeah. Did you see The Hunt for Red October where Jack Ryan's character, there's a point where he guesses. He says, "Ramy, as always, goes to port in the bottom half of the hour with his crazy Ivan maneuvers and he turns out to be right." And that's how he ends up getting the captain of the American sub to trust him as Jack Ryan knew this Captain so well, even knew which direction he would turn in the crazy Ivan. But it turns out he was just bluffing. He knew he needed a break and it was 50/50. Rob Collie (00:39:08): So it's a good thing that they were talking to you in the Indiana year, originally. Not the Oregon State year. That wouldn't be a good first impression. If you had to have it go one way or the other in those two years, the order in which it happened was the right order. Jeff Sagarin (00:39:22): Yeah, nobody would have listened to me. They would have said, "You got lucky." They said, "You still were terrible in the Oregon State year." Rob Collie (00:39:28): But you just pick the 10th rated team and be right. The chances of that being just luck are pretty low. I like it. That's a good story. So the two of you have never collaborated like on the Mark Cuban stuff? On the Mavs or any of that? Jeff Sagarin (00:39:43): We've done three things together. The Hoops computer game, which we did from '86-'95. And then we did the Game Theory thing for football, but we never got a client. But we did get White to kind of follow it. There's an interesting anecdote, I won't I mentioned the guy who kind of screwed it up. But he assigned a particular grad assistant to fill and we needed a matrix filled in each week with a bunch of numbers with regarding various things like turnovers. Jeff Sagarin (00:40:13): If play A is called against defense B, what would happen type of thing? The grad assistant hated doing it. And one week, he gave us numbers such that the computer came back with when Indiana had the ball, it should quick kick on first down every time it got the ball. We figured it out what was going on, the guy had given Indiana a 15% chance of a turnover, no matter what play they called in any situation against any defense. Jeff Sagarin (00:40:44): So the computer correctly surmised it were better to punt the ball. This is like playing Russian roulette with the ball. Let's just kick it away. So we ended up losing the game in real life 10-0. White told us then when we next saw him, we used to see him on Monday or Tuesday mornings, real early in the day, like seven o'clock, but that's when you could catch him. And he kind of looked at us and said, "You know what? We couldn't have done any worse said had we kicked [inaudible 00:41:14]." Rob Collie (00:41:13): That's nice. Jeff Sagarin (00:41:14): And then we did Mark Cuban. That was the last thing. We did that with Cuban from basically 2000-2011 with a couple of random projects in the summer for him, but really on a day to day basis during a season from 2000-2011. Rob Collie (00:41:30): And during that era is when I met Wayne at Microsoft. That was very much an active, ongoing project when Wayne was there in Redmond a couple of times that we crossed paths. Dr. Wayne Winston (00:41:43): And we worked for the Knicks one year, and they won 54 games. Jeff Sagarin (00:41:47): Here with Glen Grunwald. So they won more games than they'd ever won in a whole bunch of years. And like three weeks before the season starts or so in mid September, the next fire, Glen Grunwald. Let's put it this way, it didn't bother us that the Knicks never made the playoffs again until this past season. Rob Collie (00:42:10): That's great. You were doing, was it lineup optimization for those teams? Jeff Sagarin (00:42:15): Wayne knows more about this than I do. Because I would create the raw data, well, I call it output, but it needed refinement. That was Wayne's department. So you do all the talking now, Wayne. Dr. Wayne Winston (00:42:26): Yeah. Jeff wrote an amazing FORTRAN program. So basically, Jeff rated teams and we figured out we could rate players based on how the score of the game moved during the game. We could evaluate lineups and figure out head to head how certain players did against each other. Now, every team does this stuff and ESPN has Real Plus-Minus and Nate Silver has Raptor. But we started this. Jeff Sagarin (00:42:58): I mean, everybody years ago knew about Plus-Minus. Well, intuitively, let's say you're a gym rat, you first come to a gym, you don't know anyone there and you start getting in the crowd of guys that show up every afternoon to play pickup. You start sensing, you don't even have to know their names. Hey, when that guy is on the court, no matter who his teammates are, they seem to win. Jeff Sagarin (00:43:20): Or when this guy's on the court, they always seem to lose. Intuitively since it matters, who's on the court with you and who your opponents are. Like to make an example for Rob, let's say you happen to be in a pickup game. You've snuck into Pauley Pavilion during the summer and you end up with like four NBA current playing professionals on your team and let's say an aging Michael Jordan now shows up. He ends up with four guys who are graduate students in philosophy because they have to exercise. You're going to have a better plus-minus than Michael Jordan. But when you take into account who your teammates were and who's his were, if you knew enough about the players, he'd have a better rating than you, new Michael Jordan would. Jeff Sagarin (00:44:08): But you'd have a better raw plus-minus than he would. You have to know who the people on the court were. That was Wayne's insight. Tell them how it all started, how you met ran into Mark Cuban, Wayne, when you were in Dallas? Dr. Wayne Winston (00:44:20): Well, Mark was in my class in 1981, statistics class and I guess the year 1999, we went to a Pacers Maverick game in Dallas. Jeff Sagarin (00:44:31): March of 2000. Dr. Wayne Winston (00:44:33): March of 2000, because our son really liked the Pacers. Mark saw me in the stands. He said, "I remember you from class and I remember you for being on Jeopardy." He had just bought the team. And he said, "If you can do anything to help the Mavericks, let me know." And then I was swimming in the pool one day and I said, "If Jeff rates teams, we should rate players." And so we worked on this and Jeff wrote this amazing FORTRAN program, which I'm sure he could not rewrite today. Jeff Sagarin (00:45:04): Oh, God. Well, I was motivated then. Willingness to work hard for many hours at a time, for days at a time to get something to work when you could use the money that would result from it. I don't have that in me anymore. I'm amazed when I look at the source code. I say, "Man, I couldn't do that now." I like to think I could. Necessity is the mother of invention. Rob Collie (00:45:28): I've many, many, many times said and this is still true to this day, like a previous version of me that made something amazing like built a model or something like that, I look back and go, "Whoo, I was really smart back then." Well, at the same time I know I'm improving. I know that I'm more capable today than I was a year ago. Even just accrued wisdom makes a big difference. When you really get lasered in on something and are very, very focused on it, you're suddenly able to execute at just a higher level than what you're typically used to. Jeff Sagarin (00:46:01): As time went on, we realized what Cuban wanted and other teams like the next would want. Nobody really wanted to wade through the monster set of files that the FORTRAN would create. I call that the raw output that nobody wanted to read, but it was needed. Wayne wrote these amazing routines in Excel that became understandable and usable by the clients. Jeff Sagarin (00:46:26): The way Wayne wrote the Excel, they could basically say, "Tell us what happens when these three guys are in the lineup, but these two guys are not in the lineup." It was amazing the stuff that he wrote. Wayne doesn't give himself the credit that otherwise after a while, nobody would have wanted what we were doing because what I did was this sort of monstrous and to some extent boring. Dr. Wayne Winston (00:46:48): This is what Rob's company does basically. They try and distill data into understandable form that basically helps the company make decisions. Rob Collie (00:46:58): It is a heck of a discipline, right? Because if you have the technical and sort of mental skills to execute on something that's that complex, and it starts down in the weeds and just raw inputs, it's actually really, really, really easy to hand it off in a form that isn't yet quite actionable for the intended audience. It's really fascinating to you, the person that created it. Rob Collie (00:47:23): It's not digestible or actionable yet for the consumer crowd, whoever the target consumer is. I've been there. I've handed off a lot of things back in the day and said, "The professional equivalent of..." And it turned out to not be... It turned out to be, "Go back and actually make it useful, Rob." So I'm familiar with that. For sure. I think I've gotten better at that over the years. As a journey, you're never really complete with. Something I wanted to throw in here before I forget, which is, Jeff, you have an amazing command of certain dates. Dr. Wayne Winston (00:47:56): Oh, yeah. Jeff Sagarin (00:47:57): Give me some date that you know the answer about what day of the week it was, and I'll tell you, but I'll tell you how I did it. Rob Collie (00:48:04): Okay, how about June 6, 1974? Jeff Sagarin (00:48:08): That'd be a Thursday. Rob Collie (00:48:10): Holy cow. Okay. How do you do that? Jeff Sagarin (00:48:11): June 11th of 1974 would be a Tuesday, so five days earlier would be a Thursday. Rob Collie (00:48:19): How do you know June 11? Jeff Sagarin (00:48:19): I just do. Dr. Wayne Winston (00:48:23): It's his birthday. Rob Collie (00:48:24): No, it's not. He wasn't born in '74. Dr. Wayne Winston (00:48:27): No, but June 11th. Jeff Sagarin (00:48:29): I happen to know that June 11 was a Tuesday in 1974, that's all. Rob Collie (00:48:34): I'm still sitting here waiting what passes for an explanation. Is one coming? Jeff Sagarin (00:48:39): I'll tell you another way I could have done it, but I didn't. In 1963, John Kennedy gave his famous speech in Berlin, Ich bin ein Berliner, on Wednesday, June 26th. That means that three weeks earlier was June 5, the Wednesday. So Thursday would have been June 6th. You're going to say, "Well, why is that relevant?" Well, 1963 is congruent to 1974 days of the week was. Rob Collie (00:49:07): Okay. This is really, really impressive. Jeff, you seem so normal up until now. Thomas LaRock (00:49:16): You want throw him off? Just ask for any date before 1759? Jeff Sagarin (00:49:20): No, I can do that. It'll take me a little longer though. Thomas LaRock (00:49:22): Because once they switch from Gregorian- Jeff Sagarin (00:49:25): No, well, I'll give it a Gregorian style, all right. I'm assuming that it's a Gregorian date. The calendar totally, totally repeats every possible cycle every 400 years. For example, if you happen to say, "What was September 10, of 1621?" I would quickly say, "It's a Friday." Because 1621 is exactly the same as 2021 says. Rob Collie (00:49:52): Does this translate into other domains as well? Do you have sort of other things that you can sort of get this quick, intuitive mastery over or is it very, very specific to this date arithmetic? Jeff Sagarin (00:50:02): Probably specific. In other words, I think Wayne's a bit quicker than me. I'm certain does mental arithmetic stuff, but to put everybody in their place, I don't think you ever met him, Wayne. Remember the soccer player, John Swan? Dr. Wayne Winston (00:50:14): Yeah. Jeff Sagarin (00:50:15): He had a friend from high school, they went to Brownsburg High School. I forgot the kid's name. He was like a regular student at IU. He was not a well scholar, but he was a smart kid. I'd say he was slightly faster than me at most mental arithmetic things. So you should never get cocky and think that other people, "Oh, they don't have the pedigree." Some people are really good at stuff you don't expect them to be good at, really good. This kid was really good. Rob Collie (00:50:45): As humans, we need to hyper simplify things in order to have a mental model we can use to navigate a very, very complicated world. That's a bit of a strength. But it's also a weakness in many ways. We tend to try to reduce intelligence down to this single linear number line, when it's really like a vast multi dimensional coordinate space. There are so many dimensions of intelligence. Rob Collie (00:51:11): I grew up with the trope in my head that athletes weren't very bright. Until the first time that I had to try to run a pick and roll versus pick and pop. I discovered that my brain has a clock speed that's too slow to run the pick and roll versus pick and pop. It's not that I'm not smart enough to know if this, than that. I can't process it fast enough to react. You look at like an NFL receiver or an NFL linebacker or whatever, has to process on every single snap. Rob Collie (00:51:45): It's amazing how much information they have the processor. Set aside the physical skill that they have, which I also don't have and never did. On top of that, I don't have the brain at all to do these sorts of things. It's crazy. Jeff Sagarin (00:52:00): With the first few years, I was in Bloomington from, let's say, '77 to '81, I needed the money, so I tutored for the athletic department. They tutored math. And I remember once I was given an assignment, it was a defensive end, real nice kid. He was having trouble with the kind of math we would find really easy. But you could tell he had a mental block. These guys had had bad experiences and they just, "I can't do this. I can't do this." Jeff Sagarin (00:52:25): I asked this defensive end, "Tell me what happens when the ball snap, what do you have to do?" I said, "In real time, you're being physically pulverized, the other guy's putting a forearm or more right into your face. And your brain has to be checking about five different things going on in the backfield, other linemen." I said, "What you're doing with somebody else trying to hurt you physically is much more intellectually difficult, at least to my mind than this problem in the book in front of you and the book is not punching you in the face." Jeff Sagarin (00:52:57): He relaxed and he can do the problems in the room. I'd make sure. I picked not a problem that I had solved. I'd give him another one that I hadn't solved and he could do it. I realized, my God, what these guys they're doing takes actually very quick reacting brainpower and my own personal experience in elementary school, let's say in sixth grade after school, we'd be playing street football, just touch football. When I'd be quarterback, I'd start running towards the line of scrimmage. Jeff Sagarin (00:53:26): If the other team came after me, they'd leave a receiver wide open. I said, "This is easy." So I throw for touchdown. Well, in seventh grade, we go to junior high. We have squads in gym class, and on a particular day, I got to be quarterback. Now, instead of guys sort of leisurely counting one Mississippi, two Mississippi, they are pouring in. It's not that you're going to get hurt, but you're going to get tagged and the play would be over. It says touch football, and I'd be frantically looking for receivers to get open. Let's just say it was not a good experience. I realized there's a lot more to be in quarterback than playing in the street. It's so simple. Jeff Sagarin (00:54:08): They come after you and they leave the receivers wide open. That's what evidently sets apart. Let's say the Tom Brady's from the guys who don't even make it after one year in the NFL. If you gave them a contest throwing the ball, seeing who could throw it through a tire at 50 yards, maybe the young kid is better than Tom Brady but his brain can't process what's happening on the field fast enough. Thomas LaRock (00:54:32): As someone who likes to you know, test things thoroughly, that student of yours who was having trouble on the test, you said the book wasn't hitting him physically. Did you try possibly? Jeff Sagarin (00:54:45): I should have shoved it in his face. Thomas LaRock (00:54:49): Physically, just [crosstalk 00:54:50]. Rob Collie (00:54:50): Just throw things at him. Yeah. Thomas LaRock (00:54:52): Throw an eraser, a piece of chalk. Just something. Jeff Sagarin (00:54:56): I'll tell you now, I don't want to name him. He's a real nice guy. I'll tell you a funny anecdote about him. I had hurt my knuckle in a pickup basketball game. I had a cast on it and I was talking to my friend. And he had just missed making a pro football team the previous summer and he was on the last cut. He'd made it to the final four guys. Jeff Sagarin (00:55:18): He was trying to become a linebacker I think. They told him, "You're just not mean enough." That was in my mind. I thought, "Well, I don't know about that." He said, "Yeah, I had the same kind of fractured knuckle you got." I said, "How'd you get it?" "Pick up [inaudible 00:55:32]. Punching a guy in the face." But he wasn't mean enough for the NFL. And I heard a story from a friend of mine who I witnessed it, this guy was at one point working security at a local holiday inn that would have these dances. Jeff Sagarin (00:55:47): There was some guy who was like from the Hells Angels who was causing trouble. He's a big guy, 6'5, 300 whatever. And he actually got into an argument with my friend who was the security guy. Angel guy throws a punch at this guy who's not mean enough for the NFL. With one punch the Jeff Sagarin tutoree knocked the Hell's Angels guy flat unconscious. He was a comatose on the floor. But he wasn't mean enough for the NFL. Rob Collie (00:56:17): Tom if I told my plus minus story about my 1992 dream team on this show, I think maybe I have. I don't remember. Thomas LaRock (00:56:24): You might have but this seems like a perfect episode for that. Rob Collie (00:56:27): I think Jeff and Wayne, if I have told it before, it was probably with Wayne. Dr. Wayne Winston (00:56:31): I don't remember. Rob Collie (00:56:32): Perfect. It'll be new to everyone that matters. Tom remembers. So, in 1992, the Orlando Magic were a recent expansion team in the NBA. Sometime in that summer, the same summer where the 1992 Dream Team Olympic team went and dominated, there was a friend of our family who ran a like a luxury automotive accessories store downtown and he basically hit the jackpot. He'd been there forever. There was like right next to like the magic practice facility. Rob Collie (00:57:09): And so all the magic players started frequenting his shop. That was where they tricked out all their cars and added all the... So his business was just booming as a result of magic coming to town. I don't know this guy ever had ever been necessarily terribly athletic at any point in his life. He had this bright idea to assemble a YMCA team that would play in the local YMCA league in Orlando, the city league. Rob Collie (00:57:35): He had secured the commitment of multiple magic players to be on our team as well as like Jack Givens, who was the radio commentator for The Magic and had been a longtime NBA star with his loaded team. And then it was like, this guy, we'll call this guy Bill. It's not his real name. So it was Bill and the NBA players and me and my dad, a couple of younger guys that actually I didn't know, but were pretty good but they weren't even like college level players. Rob Collie (00:58:07): And so we signed up for the A league, the most competitive league that Orlando had to offer. And then none of the NBA players ever showed up. I said never, but they did show up one time. But we were getting blown out. Some of the people who were playing against us were clearly ex college players. We couldn't even get the ball across half court. Jeff Sagarin (00:58:33): Wayne, does this sound familiar to you? Dr. Wayne Winston (00:58:35): Yes, tell this story. Jeff Sagarin (00:58:38): Wayne, when he was a grad student at Yale, and I'm living in the White Irish neighborhood called Dorchester in Boston, I was young and spry. At that time, I would think I could play. Wayne as a grad student at Yale had entered a team with a really intimidating name of administration science in the New Haven City League, which was played I believe at Hill House high school at night. So Wayne said, "Hey Jeff, why don't you take a Greyhound bus down. We're going to play against this team called the New Haven All Stars. It ought to be interesting." Rob Collie (00:59:14): Wayne's voice in that story sound a little bit like the guy at USA Today for a moment. It was the same voice, the cigar chomping. Anyway, continue. Jeff Sagarin (00:59:25): They edged this out 75-31. I thought I was lined up against the guy... I thought it was Paul Silas who was may be sort of having a bus man's holiday playing for the New Haven all-stars. So a couple weeks later, Paul Silas was my favorite player on the Celtics. He could rebound, that's all I could do. I was pitiful at anything else. But I worked at that and I was pretty strong and I worked at jumping, etc. Jeff Sagarin (00:59:53): So a few weeks later, Wayne calls me up and says, "Hey Jeff, we're playing the New Haven All-Stars again. Why don't you come down again and we'll get revenge against them this time?" Let's just say it didn't work out that way. And I remember one time I had Paul Silas completely boxed out. It was perfect textbook and I could jump. If my hands were maybe at rim level and I could see a pair of pants a foot over mine from behind, he didn't tell me and he got the rebound and I'm at rim level. Jeff Sagarin (01:00:24): We were edged out by a score so monstrous, I won't repeat it here. I'm not a guard at all. But I ended up with the ball... They full court pressed the whole game. Rob Collie (01:00:34): Of course, once they figure out- Jeff Sagarin (01:00:36): That we can't play and I'm not even a guard. It was ludicrous. My four teammates left me in terror. They just said, "We're going down court." So I'm all alone, they have four guys on me and my computer like my thought, "Well, they've got four guys on me. That must mean my four teammates are being guarded by one guy down court. This should be easy." I look, I look. They didn't steal the ball out of my hands or nothing. I'm still holding on to it. They're pecking away but they didn't foul me. I give them credit for that. I was like, "Where the hell are my teammates?" Jeff Sagarin (01:01:08): They were in terror hiding in single file behind the one guy and I basically... I don't care if you bleeping or not, I said, "Fuck it." And I just threw the ball. Good two overhand pass, long pass. I had my four teammates down there and they had one guy and you can guess who got the ball. After the game I asked them, I said, "You guys seem fairly good. Are you anybody?" The guy said, "Yeah, we're the former Fairfield varsity we were in the NIT about two years ago." Jeff Sagarin (01:01:39): I looked it up once. Fairfield did make the NIT, I think in '72. And this took place in like February of '74. It taught me a lesson because I looked up what my computer rating for Fairfield would have been compared that to, let's say, UCLA and NC State and figured at a minimum, we'd be at least a 100-200 point underdog against them in a real game, but it would have been worse because we would never get the ball pass mid-court. Rob Collie (01:02:10): Yeah, I mean, those games that I'm talking about in that YMCA League, I mean, the scores were far worse. We were losing like 130-11. Jeff Sagarin (01:02:19): Hey, good that's worse than New Haven all-stars beat us but not quite that bad. Rob Collie (01:02:24): I remember one time actually managing to get the ball across half court and pulling up for a three-point shot off of the break. And then having the guy that had assembled the team, take me aside at the next time out and tell me that I needed to pass that. I'm just like, "No. You got us into this embarrassment. If I get to the point where like, there's actually a shot we can take like a shot, we could take a shot. I'm not going to dump it off to you." Thomas LaRock (01:02:57): Not just a shot, but the shot of gold. Rob Collie (01:03:00): The one time we did get those guys to show up, we were still kind of losing because those guys didn't want to get hurt. It didn't make any sense for them to be there. There was no upside for them to be in this game. I'm sure that they just sort of been guilted into showing up. But then this Christian Laettner lookalike on the other team. He was as big as Laettner. Rob Collie (01:03:25): This is the kind of teams we were playing against. There was a long rebound and that Laettner lookalike got that long rebound and basically launched from the free throw line and dunked over Terry Catledge, the power forward for the Magic at the time. And at that moment, Terry Catledge scored the next 45 points in the game himself. That was all it was. Rob Collie (01:03:50): He'd just be standing there waiting for me to inbound the ball to him, he would take it coast to coast and score. He'd backpedal on defense and he would somehow steal the ball and he'd go down and score again. He just sent a message. And if that guy hadn't dunked over Catledge, we would have never seen what Catledge was capable of. So remember, this is a team th

Preston Spradlin is the men's head basketball coach for Morehead State. In 2021, he led the Eagle program to prominence winning the program's first Ohio Valley Conference Tournament championship in 10 years and leading his club to the NCAA Tournament with a 23-8 record. He was named OVC Coach of the Year.  Spradlin joined Morehead State in 2014 as an assistant coach and became the head coach in 2016. Prior to his time with the Eagles, he spent 5 seasons with the University of Kentucky basketball program and head coach John Calipari. He spent two campaigns (2009-11) as a graduate assistant with the Wildcats before three years as the assistant director of operations (2011-14).  His duties included film breakdown, creating and maintaining playbooks, assisting with opponent scouting and day-to-day operations. Today on the podcast, we talk to Preston about his historical 2021 season, his testimony of faith in Jesus, how Christ guides him as a coach, coming to work with Kentucky and the impact John Calipari has had on his life.  --- Receive our 10-day Sports Spectrum Devotional written by professional athletes for FREE when you sign up for our Sports Spectrum Weekly Email Newsletter. Sign up here.