The Introductory Press Conference
The ultimate breakdown of this year's buzzwords, promises and concepts.
Introductory press conferences never disappoint.
If you have only recently started following Hoop Vision, some quick context: two years ago, we put together a couple supercut videos highlighting just how often new coaches said the word “culture” or something about how they intend to “play fast.”
Both videos caught on and went viral within the basketball world, combining for nearly 600k views on Twitter.
Fast forward to 2021. I didn’t know if we could come up with a new montage to top those two, but we put our heads down, bought into the process, and realized anything is possible when you do things the right way.
Of the 35 press conferences we combed through, the head coach used “the right way” phrase — usually more than once — in 28 of them.
Why is the phrase so popular?
Georgia Tech assistant coach Eric Reveno had some interesting thoughts on that question.
The popularity of the phrase seems to imply that there is at least a subset of coaches and/or programs doing things the wrong way — otherwise why even make the distinction?
The Culture Leaderboard
Back in 2019, Southern Illinois head coach Bryan Mullins topped the inaugural culture leaderboard — using the word “culture” seven times in his introductory press conference.
Before taking the SIU job, Mullins was an assistant for Porter Moser at Loyola Chicago. Given Moser’s now-famous “wall of culture,” I was expecting a big performance from the new Oklahoma coach in his introductory press conference earlier this month.
Moser rose to the occasion.
The word “culture” was used 20 times during the 42-minute Oklahoma press conference — the most of any coach in our (very serious) database.
Amazingly, the word was not even used a single time during Moser’s Loyola Chicago press conference back in 2011. So it appears the term entered his lexicon at some point during his time in Chicago and really stuck.
This year, Chris Beard was the only other coach in double digits. “Culture” was uttered 14 times in his Texas press conference.
(Sidenote: the YouTube video of that Chris Beard presser has over 1,300 dislikes, presumably thanks to some angry Texas Tech fans.)
This year’s bronze medal belongs to Micah Shrewsberry, the new head coach at Penn State. Culture was uttered eight times in his opening press conference.
On the other end of the spectrum, there were just two coaches that pitched “perfect games” in our statistical database; these two did not say “culture” nor “the right way” in their entire introductory press conferences:
Texas Tech’s Mark Adams and Northern Illinois’s Rashon Burno.
Congratulations to both on achieving press conference immortality!
Style of Play
Fittingly, it seems newly-hired coaches have started to become more self-aware of coachspeak.
When discussing style of play, we found six coaches who acknowledged that “everyone” says they are going to play an uptempo style of basketball:
Tim Miles (San Jose State), Richard Pitino (New Mexico), Craig Smith (Utah), Ryan Ridder (Tennessee Martin), Josh Schertz (Indiana State), Matt Figger (UTRGV).
The video below contains snippets of all six coaches:
To be fair to this group, style of play is a hard to thing to succinctly explain in a minute or two.
When Arizona’s Tommy Lloyd was asked about style he started off by saying “we could do an X & O session later.”
On a serious note: I think this is a great long-term idea for educating both the fanbase and media members on how to watch your team. Several programs run pregame “chalk talk” sessions for season ticket holders or donors, where an assistant comes into the reception area before a game and gives a brief scouting report and overview. It would be interesting to see that sort of access opened up for all fans.
On the flipside, there is always the Mick Cronin route…
Chris Beard took a page out of Cronin’s book in his presser, ignoring the style of play question altogether.
I'll be really clear here: our style of play and our philosophy is one thing: Winning. And we're going to do what it takes to win.
Interestingly, Texas Tech’s new head coach Mark Adams talked about moving away from the motion-style offense of his former boss. It appears we may see an offense focused on ball screens in Lubbock next season.
We're going to play faster getting down the floor. We'll have a little bit more purpose, I think, with our movement and what we're doing. Maybe a little more more European style.
If you’d like to really dive in and listen to how the other top coaches discussed style of play, we have links down below which are timestamped directly to that portion of the press conference. Coaches are ordered by kenpom program ratings.
So there you have it, the definitive breakdown of the 2021 introductory press conference circuit.
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