Davyeon Ross on Building a Winning Program in the NIL Era
What it takes to facilitate a competitive basketball program in the NIL era
Any college basketball fan who knows their Elliot Cadeau from their Emeka Okafor can tell you a little about the bygone days of college basketball. Senior-laden squads. Hoops icons making their bones on college campuses. Some of sports’ biggest attractions, from Phi Slama Jama to the Flyin’ Illini to the Fab Five. It was a different time.
Today, we have social media and superstar recruits. College agents. NIL budgets and the transfer portal. And while the pendulum has swung too far, according to some, players are finally getting the louder voice and the bigger slice of the pie that they long deserved. Better? Worse? It all comes down to your perspective. But one thing is certain: College basketball has changed.
Programs now face annual rebuilds. Not the unlucky ones, those coming off sanctions or breaking in a new coach. All of them. One-and-done no longer refers only to players leaving college early for the NBA. It’s shorthand for any player who dabbles with a program for a year and, whether seeking more playing time, better developmental opportunities, or additional NIL money, decides after a season to move on to yet another.
What college basketball is left with is an annual bidding war for talent, yearly program reboots and pro-style budget and “free agency” concerns that require modern coaches to operate as team-building CEOs as much as Xs-and-Os gurus. The shift has happened almost overnight, and college basketball’s open secret is that the programs and coaches that have thrived under the new rules typically have one thing in common.
Data has become modern college basketball’s great equalizer
There is a golden rule that has always determined the contours of college basketball’s landscape from its earliest days up to this moment: Talent wins out. Yet some programs have far greater resources than others to acquire talent, and certain athletic departments that lack other tentpole sports, namely football, can go all in funding a basketball program. And because a player or two can turn strong teams into immediate national championship title contenders (think Darius Acuff Jr. at Arkansas or Bennett Stirtz at Iowa), the margins matter. Identifying players who fit into a particular scheme, who mesh with one another, who provide value well above the “investment” in their acquisition – these are the factors that determine the difference between the pack and contenders, and between contenders and champions.
Most coaches adhere to a philosophy. Adaptability will be a superpower for college hoops programs in the NIL and transfer-portal era, but programs can’t simply change their stripes every season. The best coaches and staffs know what they want to be, and they recruit to optimize their personnel for a given approach. But in the past, a program’s head coach and an assistant or two would discuss these nuances and mostly trust the eye test when evaluating talent. Now, programs are building teams around data analysts and player personnel specialists, with general managers orchestrating the overall strategy behind the scenes. Programs are leaving nothing to chance, leveraging information and advanced tech, including artificial intelligence, to gain an edge on the court while also winning the race to develop their players. They are digging into those margins, finding the hidden values. Call it Moneyball on the hardcourt.
Data technology is leading the way in college basketball
It’s almost impossible to overstate how AI and available advanced technologies have empowered today’s college basketball programs. We aren’t just talking about a spreadsheet with shooting splits, or individual player shot charts. Coaches now have access to next-level information highlighting not only individual player strengths and weaknesses but also performance data, program fit and NIL information. Coaches can evaluate players in combination with one another, weighing the quality of theoretical rosters and discovering values that may not have been obvious to the naked eye.
With the untold hours of work put in by college basketball coaches and staff, the piles of resources funneled into programs and the agonizing sweat labor poured into preparation by players, getting ahead in college basketball today may seem more difficult than ever. But we have witnessed schools such as Loyola Chicago, San Diego State and Florida Atlantic break into the Final Four in recent years. We have seen Houston, Iowa State and Nebraska break through; watched Gonzaga and Virginia become annual college basketball stalwarts. Guess what? Blue bloods now have to watch their backs.
All of this aggregation and algorithm analysis may sound like the stuff of insurance adjustors and NASA scientists, but in college hoops’ brave new world, coaches and support staff are diving into the deep end of data points and coming away with definitive results. Basketball, as it turns out, has never been a linear equation. But with the right sort of predictive technology and the numbers crunchers in place to make sense of the data produced, coaches now have the freedom to make educated recruiting decisions, move forward with optimized rosters, and avoid the steep price of signing players who aren’t the right fit. Then it gets down to the brass tacks of coaching, no differently than John Wooden or Dean Smith before them.
Davyeon Ross is co-founder and CEO of ShotTracker, a basketball analytics platform used by more than 75 men’s and women’s college basketball programs.
