And now, a real scouting report
March 17, 2016 by Mike Casazza
Brad Underwood, seen above prepping Stephen F. Austin for the Southland Conference tournament championship game, has garnered and will continue to garner attention from major programs for his style on offense and defense. Earlier this week, we attempted to comb through what the Lumberjacks do.
But who am I to tell you how it is? I’ll cede the stage to Bob Huggins as he explains the SFA offense.
“I don’t think they spread you out as much as they try to isolate you on the side,” Huggins said. “They try to flood the one side with everybody and play two-man on the other side. I don’t think it’s spread-you-out as much. They’re not going to stand in the corners and try to penetrate and pitch it. That’s kind of penetrate-and-pitch and trying to just play basketball. Brad is very complicated.”
Huggins said Underwood has “about 600” options in his pinch post sets — “It’s pretty impressive all the things they can do out of it,” he said. — but the Lumberjacks do “spread” a defense by forcing it to devote its attention to the entire 47-by-25 in the halfcourt.
“They try to swing it back and forth, sure,” Huggins said. “Basically, what they’re doing is overloading one side of the floor and reversing it and flooding that side of the floor. They want to end up 2-on-2, is what they want to do.”
Huggins uses some familiar ideas in his motion offense, but this is not what Huggins was running at Kansas State in the 2006-07 season, when he was the head coach and Underwood was an assistant — technically, the director of operations — for the first time at a major Division I school and still six years away from his first Division I coaching job.
“Brad’s not smart enough to think up anything on his own,” Huggins said … kiddingly! “I know him pretty well. That’s Tex Winter stuff. Everything he runs is Tex’s stuff. He might add a few wrinkles, but basically it’s Tex’s stuff.”