The Significance of College Coaches with Chris Croft

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Hi and hello. We are here with Kareem Kalil, previous guest, and Chris Croft from Southern Mississippi, a professor there. And Chris, if you could do us the honor of introducing yourself, give us a little background of who you are.

First of all, Kareem and Adam, thank you very much for the opportunity to come on today and visit with you guys. So I'm currently Associate Professor of Sport Management at the University of Southern Mississippi. in our College of Business and Economic Development. Grew up big basketball fan, played high school, asked for raises in college, scholarship didn't quite work out.

Did the next thing, I became a student manager at Southern Miss. I kind of got in on the deal, advanced up, graduate assistant. And then like I like to say, I played coaching Monopoly. I coached 20 years in college basketball, 18 Division I.

I think I had 8 spots, 8 moves in 20 years. So if you win, you move and get a better one. If you don't win, then you're going to go down the— you got to go down on the elevator and get to Ziggy, as Dick Vitale says, and go get fired and go figure it out from there.

So that's part of it. So moving around, did that, kind of made the— I like to say the donut— came back to Southern Miss. But I spent time at Oklahoma State University with Coach Eddie Sutton, University of Nebraska, Washington State, Maryland Eastern Shore, UTEP.

I was the head NAIA coach for a couple of years at Martin Methodist. So just kind of, you know, coach will work, will move. And I came back here, was doing things. And when I came back to Southern Miss, we Kind of walked into an NCAA investigation that we had to deal with.

We struggled with some stuff, obviously, and had a chance to jump over to academia. This is my alma mater and jump back in and put the professor hat on and kind of help coaches more and teach coaching and sport business classes. So I kind of made the transition from then.

So as I like to say, I had my fun, my coaching life. I'm on my second life now. I'm trying to figure out what I want to do in my third life later. But, but I do teach the sport business and some coaching classes here now.

Great. So the reason we reached out was an interesting study, and we were curious as like why you made the jump and where did like this question originate from to study the effect coaches have on like win-loss and player improvement?

Yeah, no, great question. Like I said, you know, I kind of made the jump again coaching. You know, we all know coaching is really fun and hard. It's about getting players on the college level and about coaching them, motivating them and chasing that championship.

We all know the great college basketball coaches have great success. Some years maybe not quite so much success for different reasons. And so kind of as I got out and transitioned that, I have obviously some colleagues on this paper. I obviously didn't do it by myself, but I know we were looking at some things.

I'll just recognize them. Courtney Paulson, Sarah Stokowski, David Berry, and Mike Mandola. David Berry is a Southern Utah guy, did a lot of stuff on statistical stuff with some WNBA and NBA teams and kind of a formula that he came up. We were kind of looking at the question was, Does the player make the coach, like recruiting, or does the coach make the player, which is management, leadership, player development?

And so, you know, it's a story that debate goes back and forth how you do it. I think high school coaches, some of the best coaches in the world, they coach who they have. College coaches try to recruit the best they can, but then you have to coach them.

And then let's go on to the NBA. They draft them and free agents and have to coach and motivate those as well. So it kind of came back to let's take a step back and Let's do some statistical analysis and maybe look at how much players are improving through the course of their career at a school.

Now, albeit this is kind of before COVID and before the new rules, we'll get into some of that stuff later. But that's kind of where we were looking at. What's the impact of these coaches? Are they recruiting players and winning games because the players are good, maybe pros?

Are they really coaching them and getting them better, developing them basketball-wise, physically, mentally, all those things? Where they're improving them. And so that was kind of the gist of how we started.

Okay, so let's just get into the study itself. What were the variables that you used to do this quantitative analysis? And what results actually emerged from the study?

Yep. So kind of going through that again. So kind of 2 parts again, we have the coach makes the player, which basically is he managing? Is he coaching improving? Or does the player make the coach? Is he— is it about the recruiting or the deal?

Those are 2 main questions. This was based off NCAA Division 1 men's basketball. Kind of going through analysis. So we went through all the stats and stuff, and obviously all my team— this is a big project, 2 or 3 year long project to take, to be honest.

But we went through 17 seasons. We started with the 2002-03 season and we went through 2018-19. Notice that was right before the crazy COVID time and everything. And we kind of came up with 80 coaches in our skill set. We had just south of 29,000 player observations for that.

Obviously from the study, from the report, you can look at a little bit more in depth. It's a really complex formula. Of how that's looking at, but looking at games played, minutes played, obviously you're looking at their scoring, uh, you look at their rebounding, assists, all those positive stat lines that we think that people get from the data analysis.

So we kind of came back and crunched that stuff in, uh, got the numbers. There's some different things from the article, several tables. But in the end, we came back and looked at where the coaches, how they were doing it. And there's some different coaches that were at the top, different significant deals.

Jay Wright, obviously Coach Jay Wright, formerly retired from Villanova, Hall of Fame coach, national championship, but obviously the top on the productivity and everything too. Not taking anything away from Coach Wright, but he also on that team coincidentally had 5 future NBA players and won the national championship.

So in that study, there has some different breakdowns, but the general part of that, it said 2/3, 65%, about 2/3 of the coaches did not make a significant And when we say significant means they didn't mean to say they didn't help, but significant alter player performance in the deal.

The results had some different levels there. There were 13 coaches that had a significant of less than 5%, 5 more coaches there around that 5 line, and 6 coaches 10%, 4 negative. So there were some different various deals. Again, we're going off these teams, these coaches, these guys who played for them.

Note, they also, they would have had to play multiple seasons because we had to compare, like in Kareem's deal, we'd have to compare his Season 1 as a freshman to season 2 as a sophomore. So we'd have to have multiple seasons with the same team.

If you just had the one year, then you're out. We'll talk about that a little bit now with the current college basketball flow there. So we kind of looked at all that and how that did. But again, the results overall, there was no substantial effects on the productivity.

Some coaches increased the productivity, but it kind of reaffirmed the deal. Recruiting is very, very important in college basketball. It's the lifeblood of the program. We know, again, before some of these past roles that everybody's chasing those top 100 players in the country.

They're doing the AAU events, they're trying to get them on campus. Going back to Coach John Calipari, all the success at Kentucky, he's trying to get the highest level players. Bill Self at Kansas, they're getting a lot of one-and-done guys who are coming in and playing well that one year and going to the pro.

Even those guys wouldn't factor in this deal because you didn't have the second season to compare. But that was the main gist of it. Again, there is some, but it's not a high substantial— significant is the big word— to show a big gap in that coaching part.

Thanks for sharing that, Chris. I think like reading the study, there's like 2 possible directions or ways you could interpret it, right? Like, of course there's more than 2, but like 2 maybe like sects. So there's the one sect that says like, as a coach, like all that matters is recruiting, right?

And like, I can't Well, whoever I'm going to get, they're going to be who they are, right? And that's like what matters. And the other way you could kind of view this is like, well, there's actually a huge opportunity in the coaching space because a lot of even the highest level college coaches like are missing the mark on development.

And there's like this opportunity that hasn't been capitalized on. How do you see, like, where would you place yourself? on those 2 ends of the spectrum?

Great question. Again, no right answer. Again, you want to get the best player you can. And again, I'm back to my days in coaching. We try to recruit the best players that we can and get them, and you got to go get them.

The other thing though too is like, you don't want to go— if you go and get 2 great point guards, okay, what are you going to do? There's one basketball too. So it's a lot of different things that are variable that are kind of different in basketball than football or baseball because other sports— because think about in basketball, everybody's going to— all 5 are going to play offense, all 5 are going to have to play defense.

And that's where we kind of got away from positions. It's kind of one's the point, then you got the wing, you got the bigs, and they can be 6'5 to 6'10, whatever you got. But it's everybody's playing both sides. And so totally different maybe in football, just the wide receiver or the running back, or in baseball, just the big guy that's the left fielder who hits home runs.

And so I think it's a combination. You got to get the best players. I mean, you think about, obviously wouldn't name names. Let's all think about some coaches who maybe do a great job recruiting. They kind of rolled the ball out there with their team.

You watch them one game, they're great, they win 20. Next game, they're just a mess. And you're like, well, he's not coaching them very much. You still have to coach the team and put them together like Legos have to fit to build a big Lego project.

The second part in the coaching deal, and been around some teams and stuff, you could coach all you want. You can run the play, you can run the play right and set the screen, you can make the pass. If the guy never makes a shot, you don't get any points.

You're not going to move the scoreboard. You're not going to win. And so it's one of those things where you got to execute. You got to have the team do some similar stuff together, get them better through the season. We all know when you start the season, you want to be ready to go the first game.

November is important, but let's be real. February is an important month in college basketball to be gelling, to be in position, to be in position, as John Rothstein says, to make the move in the NCAA tournament. Because once you get in the NCAA tournament, regardless of your seed or your record, you got a shot.

If you go and start hoop, I mean, you can make a run and get to the Final Four. And we've seen that with some great stories from the Butlers to George Mason to Wichita State to Laulas, all those greats in the Florida Atlantic, all those great stories.

And so it is a combination of both. And so obviously coaches try to get the best players they can. You still have to recruit them. And obviously we talked a little bit before we went live here is, you know, dynamics are different now.

Because of the change in the NCAA and some things that are allowed or not allowed anymore with the transfer portal and also name, image, and likeness. And again, players should have every opportunity to make decisions. They should have opportunities to make some money and everything.

But NIL was really based on name, image, and likeness, not kind of a pay-for-play deal that's going on right now that the states started and the NCAA hasn't stopped. So now let's be real, players are changing schools. So like, you know, we talked about What could you do next on this study?

Well, I don't know that you can do this similar study now because again, we want the player playing for the same coach 2 years in a row. And it is what it is. Now players are leaving for another position, another school, more money.

None of us can blame them. That's the American dream. But they're not playing for the same coach. And so you got that going on with the transfer portal. So it's interesting concept, interesting times. We'll have to see where the NCAA is going down the road.

But probably back to kind of summing up, Kareem, it's a combination. You want to get the best players, the highest level players that you can recruit, but you also have to coach them. And then we know now in the NIL and the portal now in the COVID years and different things, some of the best teams are the older teams, the older teams, because they're getting 24, 25-year-olds that are on their team.

And I'll relate this role back to when I coached college basketball and basketball camp. If we had an 8-year-old and we had a 13-year-old, we wouldn't have them on the same court at basketball camp. That's too big an age difference. The 13-year-old is going to be really good.

He's going to be physically stronger, more mature, better player. He's going to beat the 8-year-old. So the 8-year-old is not going to have a fun camp. More importantly, his mom and dad are not going to be happy that little Chris did not have a good time.

Well, let's translate that 8-year-old to an 18-year-old. Let's translate that 13-year-old to a 23-year-old. That's what's happening now is because guys are staying in college, maybe because of the NIL, obviously the COVID year, maybe they can't go pro, so they do stay. Well, now you put the 23-year-old and the 18-year-old on the floor.

I'm not saying the 23-year-old is going to win every time, but he has more experience. He's going to be physically stronger. He's going to be mentally more prepared. Think about all the games he's been through, the practices. He knows how to handle the coach, the motivation.

He knows how to handle the opposing crowds. He knows how to handle adversity a lot more than an 18-year-old does. So there's a great chance when they play, if they're guarding each other, again, not every possession, but over the course of a 40-minute game, that 23-year-old is probably going to have a better chance to have success.

And so you got a lot of dynamics going on since this study, even because of COVID the transfer portal, and the name, image, and likeness. And college basketball is still very, very healthy. It's a great game. Watched some games last night. Watched our team here.

It's very, very healthy when you watch the games. It's all the other stuff going on between the games that's changing some things kind of, kind of from the study.

Thanks for sharing that, Chris. I know in the study you found that like, I think 65% of coaches did not make a significant impact and 35% did, right? You know, how would you theorize or explain the difference between the 35% who did and the 65% who didn't?

Great question. Really good question. And so we went off, obviously this is analysis, statistical analysis. So we went off the stats from those coaches. And those players. So we weren't able to go watch those practices. We weren't able to interview folks. So do I have a definite answer for that?

We were not able to. That's one of our things in our discussion. We were not able to elaborate why that was. You can see on the deal there, Jay Wright, Villanova, I mentioned Coach Mark Few, obviously another Hall of Fame legendary coach, Gonzaga, Steve Morrill, recently retired, unbelievable coach at Utah State.

We're kind of at the 3, the 3 highs there on that. So So how they did that, why, that's something that we were not able to answer. It was kind of outside the realm of this study, unfortunately, Kareem. It'd be interesting to know or try to get him on the phone and say, hey, here's a study.

What do you think? You know, what do you think? Because you know your players and everything. But again, we were just able to go off the statistical analysis and not do actual— watch those practices or games, you know, or talk to people.

I guess with those statistics in mind, Chris, like 3 parties would have a big role to play in this, the players, the coaches, and then obviously the administrators who are doing the hiring. Like, what are some of the implications for those 3 parties based off like these 65% is a big number that where it's no significant impact for coaches.

What does that kind of inform practices for those 3 parties?

Great question there. Very, very good. Great question on the deal there, Adam. I think the one thing to note is also you meant significant. So I think to note, there was some adjustments there by all of them. But it wasn't significant. And so I think that's the thing we kept kind of clarifying.

I think it's a reminder to all parties involved, from the administrators and ADs. You want to go and get the best coach you can. You want to have the best environment from the playing field to the conference that you can win in, to how you're doing things from the training table.

Now you can throw in the name, image, and likeness. Are you giving that coach the best opportunity he can to recruit the best players? Obviously, it behooves the coach to try to go get those guys. And obviously keep them now. So recruiting is really important.

You can add another level now to retention. You want to retain guys. Let's be real. If I had a chance to come in and play for you in year one and stay and play for you year two, you would hope that my stats are going to really improve after year two because you're coaching me.

But also I'm wanting our system better. I understand how you want things done. I can think like you on the floor as a coach. And the other thing is on the players. You know, what are the players' ultimate goal? You know, we know mostly in the male side, a lot of those guys are chasing the NBA dream, which is great.

So they're trying to get better. But how much are they getting better? And we used to tell you when I was coaching is sit down guys after the season, pull their stat sheet out and go through it. Let's go look at your stats.

Let's not worry about what you did well. Everybody knows that. Let's talk about what you didn't do quite so well. So if you're not shooting great 3-point percentage, let's look at some things that we can put with you in individual workouts for 3-point, 3-point shots.

Let's maybe work on getting you a little bit stronger with your biceps and triceps. Let's maybe work on shooting some NBA shots. If you can shoot NBA three-pointers in the summertime, we all know the college three-point line is going to look a little easier when we get to our season.

But let's think about some things where we can make you— let's pull the video on your three-point shots and let's evaluate. Did you shoot off the catch? Did you shoot off the dribble? Good shot, bad shot. Let's go back and break down how we can take your— I hate to say weaknesses, but take things that you weren't great at last year.

And then from that March when the season ended to November when the season starts again, how can we make you better, also more confident in those areas where you can have better stats and productivity going forward? So I think it's kind of a mesh there.

It's kind of a moving pot, kind of like a soup or stew. It's kind of a moving part with a lot of things. There's no definite answers on it. But I think, again, significant is the most important word. Every AD is trying to hire the best coach he can.

And we all know the coach is trying to get the best players he can and obviously have to coach them. But a lot of this stuff came back from these statistics. Again, this is over a long stretch here of time-wise of how long that we looked at that over those seasons.

You know, 17 seasons was no significant. And so it's going back to the players come in, their talent level in the end, how good they are, how good they can shoot the basketball, rebound, and get assists. Those are the numbers they're putting up.

That was the most important. So recruiting is the lifeblood of every program. We used to say in coaching, different coaches say it, it's not about the X's and O's, it's about the Jimmies and Joes. And you can add in a couple of pros in basketball.

And I go back and relate, I was at Washington State, we worked and did a good job and tried. It was the All-Pac-10. But when we were in the league, I think there was 35 NBA players over a 4-year period. And there was 2 teams.

I won't mention the other team, but there's 2 teams that didn't have any pros on that 4-year period. 2 of those coaching staffs, including ours, lost her job. And so again, you got to get the players, you got to coach them. But just think about your favorite play.

You can draw it up, you can run it, you can run it perfect, you can take the shot. If you can't make the shot, or if the defense takes that shot away, if your guy can't go make a play off a dribble and score a basket on that play.

You got zero points. They go down and score and get two. You're behind. Do it again. You're four. Do it again. You're six. You're getting away from winning that game. So the bottom line: you do have to have players. You do have to coach them.

But when the play the coach designs doesn't work, you got to have some players, some talent, Jimmies and Joes, and maybe a pro who can jump up and go make a play, a lot of Steph Curry or whoever, and boom! Ball goes in.

Every fan knows when the ball goes in the hoop. Something could happen. It may just not be off what you coached. I think that's the general summary of that.

I also wonder if another possible explanation of like what, you know, maybe something that would have caused the study to honestly like overestimate the impact of some of those coaches is like, what if Jay Wright, for example, was just really good at recruiting guys who had, who he felt had a lot of potential and were going to naturally progress at a high level?

Right.

So like, oh, you get a kid who's maybe hasn't filled out yet and you're good at recruiting that type of kid who might be overlooked, then that might actually show that you're having a developmental impact when it's really like you're just good at identifying guys who are going to progress through their time in your program.

That's a great point, Kareem. Again, this study did not take any kind of motivation from the coach or from the player, intrinsic motivation. And I'll say this, and it's the hardest thing in coaching back to my days in recruiting is We can go and watch players and look at stats and talk to everybody and do all our homework.

You can never measure the heart. You can never measure the heart. Nobody's come up with that. And so you think about if you bring a player in, he gets a scholarship, is he satisfied? Did he think he made it? And his heart's on it to keep working hard to get better.

Because you think about the high schools, you think about the guy in junior high who's really good. He's great. When he goes 9th grade, he's got to start all over again. Think about the great high school guy. Every high school team has a great player.

If he gets to go play college, he's got to really ramp it up next. Think about the college guys. How many college guys don't keep getting better to get that NBA dream to really have a chance? So I think that's a great point on that.

And that goes back into the individual, something we couldn't measure to get to the individual players. But are they satisfied? Are they happy with their stats or their team success? How hard are they working in the offseason and the season, you know, to craft?

But is there heart in it to get better? Because let's be real, being a college basketball player is not easy. The fans see them for 2 hours on TV a couple of nights a week, but they don't see the early morning workouts. They don't see the conditioning.

They don't see the strength and conditioning. They don't see the training room. They don't see the academic stuff. They don't see the— maybe the psychologist. They don't see the training table. They don't see the sacrifices they're making not doing some college stuff, hanging out with friends and parties and clubs and all that stuff.

You don't see any of that stuff. But how dedicated are those players to being motivated with their heart is in it to get better, but also putting themselves in the best opportunity? Kind of going back to what you said, Adam, too. That's where I think comes in from the administration and the coaches.

What environment do you have to create a championship culture where those guys could come in and get better? And again, I don't know them personally, but Butler— look at what Butler did with Coach Brad Stevens. He came on the deal and started making the runs to the Final Four.

Unheard of.

Yeah.

Then you had some other teams do it as well, but not consistently. But you got to have the administrative support and the commitment financially. Obviously, you get a great coach, but then you got to get the players. But it's a bit like a stew, again, soup to bring everything together.

But it's just hard to measure all those intangibles. Yeah.

And I also think, you know, we've had interviews with Dan Hurley from UConn who's like, hey, if a kid like doesn't have a good support system, he's just not recruiting them. Right. So again, like maybe I know Hurley, I don't know if he was part of, but obviously like the UConn version of Hurley isn't in your study.

Right. And like maybe he would have popped as like a coach who's adding significant impact, but it's really just the type of kid he's bringing in. I think in like the filtering for a kid who has really like a ripe development blueprint. Right.

I've heard him say that. I don't know him personally. He was not in this study, obviously, you know, starting off with his success and obviously really done great. But that's a great point. And I see that because you think about anybody— life is hard.

Life is hard. College is hard. College basketball is hard. And so when you have those tough moments, when they're calling back to their families or whoever they're calling, that's where you got to have some great support. Because we all know the best coaches tell people the truth.

They tell people no. They tell people what you have to get better at. They probably yell a little bit. They maybe say some not so good words sometimes too. Not condoning that, but it happens. But you better have that family support where they say, hey, look, I know you had a tough day, Kareem.

I'm listening to you, but you got to get back in there and do what coach says. You got to get back in there and go in there and watch the tape. You got to get back in the gym. Coach is trying to help you.

And even though you're mad at him or he's— you're upset with him, he's trying to make you better. Nobody's going to give you this. He's trying to have you be in the most successful situation where you get on the floor, where you can have some personal success.

And team success later. And in today's society, not everybody wants to hear that. We don't always realize this: the people that were the hardest on you and told you no or to do better, they really helped you better in life. But we think it's the opposite.

We think the people that said, "Okay, yeah, that's great," or did this and didn't push you, we're happy with them. We're comfortable. Coaches, college basketball coaches, and obviously Coach Hurley, the success he's had is unbelievable. The two national championships. You have to make people uncomfortable.

I worked with Coach Eddie Sutton, was great at that. The day after we won a game was really tough on all coaches and players because he went back and found 10 things that we didn't do good, and we're going to get that corrected today.

Never mind we won yesterday. You got to make people uncomfortable to make them better because the next game is just going to be bigger.

Yeah, it's a tough line too, because I think that's where, you know, you can fall into a lot of traps of like abusive coaching who are like, you know, I'm going to yell at you and scream at you because You know, that's just like what will make you better when it's really like, if that comes without care, like it's pretty harmful.

Right. So yeah, it's like, there's so much going on here that your study brings up, but it's really fun to start just, you know, picking through it and what it means for like the people in our coaching space.

Different dynamics for sure. Obviously different times coaching now with social media has changed that because everything is seen, right? Everything is on TV and visible and coaches should never verbally abuse anybody. We know that used to happen a lot. Hopefully it doesn't happen a lot anymore, but even when a coach shows his anger or yells at a player, we all know how that gets magnified now.

So coaches have to get their message across to people, but in a positive, in a professional way where they're not talking down or demeaning people. And that's very, very important. And a lot of pressure on everybody. And let's be real, back to the deal.

Everybody is chasing success. March Madness, conference championships, national championships, a lot of money. And so there's a lot of pressure from the top-down administration. to players, to coaches. And now you throw in the transfer portal and name, image, and likeness, and you have a lot of things where I like to say everybody wants it right now.

Everybody wants to pull into McDonald's and have a medium-well steak with a baked potato with the butter and the sour cream and have it ready in 2 minutes. And it doesn't always work like that, but that's just the society that we're in today.

And we could go on so many different— I'm curious, like when I read the study and the results and I was thinking about like those 3 different parties, I immediately jumped to like admin and like, how are we budgeting for recruiting? What is our setup?

How are we going to attract these great recruits? But then Kareem comes in and thinks like, well, also at the same time here, it's the right recruits. It may not be necessarily all 5-star guys. Maybe it's, you know, some 4 and 3-star guys that have a little bit more room to grow and stuff like that.

But I'm going to leave that for potentially another discussion. And last question I want to ask is, I was curious, like, Once you got the results, once you finished up the study, what were some questions that emerged as soon as you finished up the study and where you would want to kind of take this moving forward?

Great question. We looked at it and you don't know where it's going to take you. Look at the list of all the coaches there, a lot of Hall of Fame coaches, a lot of great coaches, and they coach, they do a great job.

Again, I think the key thing we kept talking about was not significant, was not significant. So that's going back on the players, the stats we were looking at. I looked at those coaches. You got all kind of coaches. I mentioned Coach Pitino. Rick Pitino's on here.

Coach Jim Boeheim. Coach Krzyzewski. Coach Rory Williams. They all coached and did an unbelievable job, but it was not significant in that deal. So again, I think the importance reminder, recruiting is the lifeblood. And that's changed. You know, before you were going to a lot of games during the season, high school, AAU, and trying to get guys, spend a lot of time cultivating them.

Now with the transfer portal, that's still being done by a lot of people. But a lot of people are waiting to see who puts their name in the portal. Let's go pull up their stats. Let's see if we can get them. Let's be real, on the smaller leagues, like, you know, we're in the Sun Belt Conference or the Southland Conference.

If somebody, whoever's the freshman of the year in the league, they're probably going to have a chance to go to a bigger school, a Power 4, and get a better NIL deal. You can't blame them for doing it. So you're not able to measure the success of that player here because he wasn't playing for that same coach 2 years in a row.

It's not just the world that we live in today, but I think it is a reminder for all of you, all of us, is how are you getting the players? Again, now they're getting more visits to take and you're doing a lot of recruiting after the season.

And I think it's important for players, for coaches to realize to make sure those guys fit. There's a leading scorer on every last place team in the country in our league right now. And I don't mean that negative, but you go through all the 20, 35, 30 leagues, there's a team in last place.

Yeah.

There's also going to be a guy on that team that's the leading scorer that's averaging 15 to 20 points. Not saying you don't take him, but what if you take 2 or 3 of those guys and bring them in? They were getting their stats and getting their points.

Were they really being a team player? How can they function with one basketball? You go and talk about getting, you know, 5 5-stars and put them on the floor. There's only one ball. This isn't like it in football. I can be on offense, you can be on defense.

We're playing baseball. You know, Kareem can be in left field, you can be at shortstop, I can be— the third base, we all get to go up and hit a home run. All right. It doesn't work that in basketball. If you're shooting, that means me and Kareem aren't shooting.

We're not getting that shot. If you're getting 20 shots, you're not going to get 20— me, we're not going to all get 20 shots in a game. So you got so many moving parts because it's basketball, it's a shared game. So I think it kind of makes it special.

I don't know where the study on the replication goes. I think we got to get some more answers on the NCAA of how we are. If people started staying at schools 2 years a little bit more, Maybe come back and do this story, do this after deal.

Maybe do a smaller deal. Maybe add some institutional review board policy, some interviews. If you can get access to interview some players and back to your though, Kareem, you're talking about their motivation. If those players would reveal the amount they're making in NIL and you can see their stats, are their stats going up with the ROI return on investment through that money they're getting paid?

Because let's be real, there's guys making $1 million back. But can you get to those players and those coaches to get that data to do that? And so you got a lot of moving parts that you'd have to work through. But obviously interesting.

We know, again, college basketball, great sport, really healthy. And again, obviously thanks to the team that did it, David Berry, unbelievable deal. Obviously in the study we mentioned several NBA stuff that he's done on this with NBA deals too, and has some similar studies where NBA coaches were not making significant either.

And so again, I want to keep using that word significant because that's huge. Again, all coaches make their team better in lots of different ways, but significant was the word that I think is very important to understand.

All right, Chris, we're going to wrap it up. We'll certainly attach the study in the podcast transcript. And if you could just leave us some contact information, if people want to get ahold of you, want to learn more about the study and kind of the work you're doing, what's the best way to get ahold of you?

Yeah, no doubt. Would love to. Again, thank you guys both for having me on today. I really appreciate talking about it. You can tell I'm not coaching anymore, but I'm still very passionate about college basketball. But feel free to reach out to me.

You can contact me. My email is chris.croft@usm.edu. Also on social media, I'm on Twitter, X. It's just going to be @CoachChrisCroft. Also on LinkedIn, you can just type in my name and pull up there as well. So be glad to reach out. Any questions you have, I think we— I mean, I really appreciate you guys giving us some positive publicity on this article and promoting it, which is a really fun study to look at.

Again, how does it come together? Again, you got to have players, you got to coach them, and you got to bring it all together as we all get excited about this stretch run of college basketball in the next 2 months and the Final Four in San Antonio.

Thanks, Chris.

Thank you guys so much.

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