University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Scouting It Out
March 23, 2014 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
SAN ANTONIO—At 5:30 a.m. Central time on Saturday morning, Steve Robinson finally called it a night. The Tar Heel assistant coach has scouting responsibilities for Iowa State, and after watching the Cyclones live last night, he returned to the hotel to finish the scouting report that was distributed to the Carolina players this morning.
Roy Williams is fond of saying he has the best coaching staff in the nation. This is the time of year when they, like coaches across the nation, are tested. A one-day turnaround to get ready for an unfamiliar opponent like Iowa State is a challenge. But the process actually begins much earlier.
As soon as the brackets were released last Sunday, the Tar Heel coaches met in Williams' living room and divided the scouting responsibilities for the three opponents in Carolina's portion of this weekend's bracket. That begins a long night for video coordinator Eric Hoots.
Although the basketball program has access to the Synergy video system, which has almost an endless supply of game tape, Hoots records virtually any televised game—from any conference, involving any team--during the season just to be safe. He already knew he had a library of approximately a dozen Providence and Iowa State tapes, and he downloaded the games of the Friars onto one computer for C.B. McGrath, and the games of the Cyclones onto another computer for Robinson (Hubert Davis drew the assignment for North Carolina Central, which was eliminated last night).
Sunday night and Monday morning, the coaching staff begins calling friends from other programs who faced the opponent in question to get a first-hand perspective. Maryland, for example, had played Providence, so the Terps got a call from the Tar Heels; the Friars were playing very differently at that point in the season, so it was difficult to draw conclusions.
It's different than preparing for a conference opponent, when the coaches usually go into the scouting process with a working knowledge of the basic system and personnel.
"With a team like Providence, you don't know anything about them, so you're learning as you go," McGrath said. "Say we're playing a team like NC State—I'm still going to watch four or five games to see if they're doing anything different. But with Providence, everything they do is new to me."
Sometimes it's a good kind of new, and other times it's a little different. McGrath knew early in the week that the Friars were not a typical 11 seed.
"Watching those Providence tapes from the Big East tournament was kind of scary," McGrath says. "Some guys, you've heard about them and then you watch them on tape and they're not that good. We hadn't heard much about Bryce Cotton, but when I watched him, he was really, really good."
Scouting a new team often means using a common frame of reference to explain some of their tendencies. Davis, for example, wanted to know if Cotton was as good using ball screens as Miami's Shane Larkin in 2013, so McGrath outlined some similarities and differences between the two players.
While much of the attention on tomorrow's game has focused on the impact the season-ending injury to Iowa State's Georges Niang might have, it poses another problem for Robinson—he has no idea how the Cyclones might compensate for Niang's absence. All the tapes he watched until the wee hours on Friday night and Saturday morning included Niang, who started every Iowa State game this year.
Robinson and Davis attended Friday night's ISU-Central game in person, but by then most of their scouting report was already finished. The main reason for the in-person scouting is to pick up on offensive or defensive calls that might not be evident on television, or watching certain individuals to see how big or athletic they might be.
After returning to the hotel and watching more game film, Robinson added a couple of Iowa State sets the Cyclones ran against Central to his approximately seven-minute clip tape. That video was shown to the Tar Heels at a meeting this morning, which was the first time most of them had seen Iowa State. Players were also given the usual one-page scouting report with personnel and tendencies on the front side of the page, and some favorite Iowa State sets on the back.
Williams consistently says he wants his team to worry more about their own principles than every facet of an opponent's attack. Since roughly 1961, when Dean Smith first occupied the head coach's office, the Tar Heel philosophy has been that if they execute their own attack proficiently, there's a high probability of winning the game. It's proven to be an effective approach, as Carolina is 11-7 in ACC and postseason games with a one-day turnaround or less over the past four seasons. For the sake of reference, Iowa State is 4-7 in that same scenario, with two of those wins coming in this year's Big 12 tournament.
Once the information is handed to the players, it's up to them to apply it in the most effective way possible.
"I tend to want to know their strengths rather than their weaknesses," said Brice Johnson. "Anything to have an advantage, and if I know the scouting report, I want to be able to use that to avoid letting them play to their strengths."
Adam Lucas is the editor of CAROLINA.
