July 25, 2007

By Steve Brauntuch

CSTV.com

	Steve Brauntuch Steve Brauntuch is a researcher for CSTV and contributor to CSTV.com. E-mail here!

        ---   Column Archive   --- COACHES Q&A 8/22: Frank Solich 8/15: Sean Miller 8/08: Jerry Moore 8/01: Jeff Capel 7/25: Tim Floyd 7/18: Sylvester Croom 7/11: Paul Johnson 7/3: Kelvin Sampson 6/27: Dave Wannstedt 6/20: Chris Lowery 6/13: Chris Petersen 6/6: Reggie Theus 5/28: Wayne Graham 5/23: Rich Brooks 5/16: A Volunteer Family 5/9: Rich Rodriguez 5/2: Tommy Amaker 4/25: Tim Corbin 4/18: John Beilein option value="javascript:void(0);"> SOCCER 8/23: Short Commute, Big Jump

Tim Floyd once admitted that he wasn't very good at being an NBA coach.  The same cannot be said for his college coaching career.  Now leading his fourth Division I program, Floyd has made a career out of taking schools out of their rebuilding days and into the national spotlight.  His latest challenge was resurrecting the USC basketball program from the depths of the Pac-10, and he has already passed with flying colors.  The Trojans were one of the biggest surprises in the nation last season, making a run in the Pac-10 Tournament and reaching the Sweet 16 in the Big Dance.

Now, the Trojans are poised to make even more noise with the addition of O.J. Mayo, arguably the top incoming freshman in the country.  Floyd, who was a walk-on in his playing days at Southern Miss, finds himself coaching one of the hottest teams in one of the biggest markets in the nation.  He spoke about his coaching career, his prized recruit and his struggles in the NBA.

SB: You've had a really successful college coaching career at four different stops.  What do you think has been the biggest key to your success?

TF: Well, two things.  I had to think nationally in terms of recruiting because of my roots as an assistant at UTEP and developed a recruiting mentality that we had to think about all regions of the country.  And as a result, I've made a lot of contacts.  Secondly, I think the foundation that Don Haskins gave me as far as that discipline is not a bad word, that defense is not a bad word, and having to build teams with different types of players, because at UTEP, we weren't really playing to a system of play.  Because we weren't [North] Carolina or Duke, we had to take the best players we could get, which meant that we'd have to change our offense according to our talent year in and year out.  So it's allowed me to be versatile at different stops in different regions of the country, and different levels, from low-major to mid-major to high-major.  But more importantly, I've had great staffs and I've had great players, too, over the years, and that's how you win games.

SB: When you got to USC in 2005, the program was in a bit of a tailspin.  What was the first step you took to get the program turned around?

TF: Well, when I took the job in January [2005], we had an interim coach [Jim Saia] and we had four players returning from a last place team.  So knowing that you had to have at least 10 to practice, I let [Saia] coach the team the rest of that year and went out and started building it through recruiting.  I was trying to target young players that were freshmen and sophomores and tried to develop relationships with them over a four-year period, much like Billy Donovan did at Florida.  I talked to Billy the first week I was on the job and wanted to know his mentality in terms of building that program, because I was no longer in a place where I had to think in terms of recruiting junior college players or transfers.  We were in a place where kids actually grew up wanting to go to school at USC, and I didn't want to sell this program short.  So I had to put a philosophy in place that kind of revolved around taking young players or high school players, and given that in college basketball, you recruit players over a three or four year period of time, we got started on that early on.

SB: Coaches always seem to talk about facilities being a major key to success in college basketball.  You guys opened the Galen Center last year.  How big of a role do you think that has played in turning the program around?

TF: The Galen Center has been a tremendous asset...It really is the standard for college facilities right now.  I think that really, the bar has been set with this facility.  It's the most expensive facility in the country, and it's all-encompassing in that everything you need to have a program is in this building - from the weight room to the training room to the practice facilities, conference rooms, meeting rooms and a spectacular home court setting on the main floor.

SB: Your team took some people by surprise early on last season by winning some big games, and then you had a successful run in the NCAA Tournament as well.  Were you surprised by how quickly your team jelled last season?

TF: Well, it was a process, and we knew that we had the talent to win at a high level.  And I was not surprised, because of the abilities of Nick Young and Lodrick Stewart and Gabe Pruitt, and we knew that we had added some quality freshmen with Taj Gibson, Dwight Lewis and Daniel Hackett that were going to give us an opportunity compete at the national level.  We just had to learn how to win.  In Gabe's case, Nick's case and Lodrick's case, those guys had never even won a Pac-10 Tournament game, much less been to postseason play.  And we had to go through a process.  We had some difficult losses in the preseason, one to Kansas State, and then some quality wins that helped us gain confidence.  But probably the most important game we had all year was our first conference game against Washington, which we won in double overtime. I think that one gave our team the belief that they could play at a national level.

SB: You have an incredibly strong recruiting class coming in, led by O.J. Mayo.  What do you think you have done at USC that has made it such a more popular school for recruits than it was five years ago?

TF: Well, one, we have the benefit of this building, of the Galen Center.  I think previous coaches literally had to go into home visits in recruiting apologizing for the commitment to basketball.  It was perceived as strictly a football school, and we were very proud of football.  But in our case, we no longer have to apologize.  There really is no reason for a great prospect not to consider USC at this point, given that we're in the second largest market in the United States, we have maybe the finest facility in college basketball, we've got a tremendous academic institution, and there's a wealth of talent in the Los Angeles area.  We have just really tried to target this great young talent that we have in the L.A. area, knowing that we've got great competition for those players - it's the most heavily recruited area in the United States - and make sure they're aware of what we have out here and give them a reason to stay.

SB: What do you expect to get from O.J. Mayo in his freshman season?

TF: I think people need to remember that he is a freshman, that there will be some growing pains along the way.  But I think that what I'm witnessing already is leadership, a guy who is trying to rally all of our guys to get in the gym, lift, work in periods when the coaches can't work with them in the weight room or individual skill-wise, making sure that guys get to classes on time and where they need to be.  In addition to that, [he has] a very talented, very mature game, a guy who can play multiple positions, a guy who has great poise and tremendous skill level.

SB: Your school made a lot of headlines when Dwayne Polee, a freshman at an L.A. high school, verbally committed to USC before even playing a high school basketball game.  Are you concerned in some ways about the direction that recruiting is going, courting kids at younger and younger ages?  Is that the direction that college basketball should be going at this time?

TF: Well, in a perfect world, all of these young players would make their decisions in the fall of their senior years.  But it's not the world that we're in.  We didn't invent taking young players.  Bob Knight took Damon Bailey 20 years ago as an eighth grader.  Chris Leak was offered by Wake Forest as an eighth grader and went to Florida as a football player.  Our competition across town (UCLA) took a commitment from an eighth grader, Taylor King.  Last fall, there were two freshmen that committed in their first week of school to Illinois and Marquette.  It's where it is.  I think that we all recognize that young people can have great talents, and if those players have dreamed about going to your school, they tend to ask you if they're being offered a scholarship by your school.  And if you don't tell them that you are, then you offend them.  If you tell them you've offered, sometimes you have to be prepared for them to accept it, and that's just the nature of recruiting in the world that we live in right now.

I think it all started, or it really started accelerating, when these high school players were allowed to go to the NBA.  After [Kevin] Garnett went in 1995, kids started thinking. Sophomores started thinking about declaring for the NBA in two years.  So we've seen a 14-year-old golfer in Michelle Wie play on the LPGA Tour and play on the men's tour.  We've seen a 12-year-old girl this year quality for the U.S. [Women's] Open.  I'm seeing it in all sports, and I think athletes are bigger and stronger, and it's something that's talked about at an earlier age than it was 15 years ago because of the cost of college tuitions and educations.  At supper tables with the parents, they're talking about saving for college, and they want their kids in that place.  All I know is that any commitment that we make to a young player, we will honor.

To me, one of the biggest benefits of taking a young player is I think the NCAA has done a poor job of educating high school counselors on Form 48H.  I think it's why so many young prospects are in prep schools right now, because counselors merely have most of these kids on degree tracks to graduate from high school with no awareness of the 16 core course requirement and the GPA requirement that is needed at the college level.  But when you identify prospects early, we then have a chance to interact with those counselors and let them know what classes that these young players should be in.  And as far as the two young guys that we have taken commitments from, there's absolutely no reason why they should have every opportunity to qualify at the point when they make their graduation from high school and get ready to move on to the college level.

SB: Do you think recruiting is the biggest change you've seen in college basketball since you started coaching back in the 1970s?

TF: It absolutely is.  In the 70's, it was strictly contacting a player on the phone with an unlimited calendar.  You spent the money that was in your budget.  If a prospect didn't have any interest in you, he didn't have to return your phone calls.  So there was no worry about how many phone calls were made.  If a prospect was interested, he would return your phone calls, and you were literally talking to high school coaches and counselors and parents along with the prospect.  Now, there are more third parties involved, and as a result, it's become more complicated.

SB: Why do you think you weren't able to have the same success as an NBA head coach that you have had at the college level?

TF: Well, you know, like the other college guys who went to the NBA, we all went to bad teams.  In Chicago, we had the youngest teams in the history of the NBA.  One team, we had seven guys who should still have been in college.  We also had the lowest salary cap teams in Chicago, and I think if you're either of those two, you have a great chance to finish last.  With the Hornets, we had a little bit better players and we won more games.  I don't really feel like I failed in the pros.  I think to fail, you have to have the tools to be successful.  And in the case of the Bulls, we really did not have enough talent.  We were in a building process, trying to build through the draft, and we were trying to be bad so we could draft high, because the biggest trap in the NBA is being mediocre and having to draft from 12-18 rather than drafting 1-3.  And it was all part of the plan.

SB: When did you decide to attach the string to the back of your eyeglasses and wear those on the court?

TF: That was a mistake!  You just caught me in one game where I left them out there.  I don't normally do that. I think that happened twice.  I'm 53.  I need glasses to read the stat sheet at halftime.  I walked out after halftime and left the string on by accident.  But no, that's not something that I do by design.