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Inside the mind of Brian Grgeory
Inside the mind of Brian Grgeory
Published by Swampy Meadows
06-04-2011
Inside the mind of Brian Grgeory

BEVERLY HILLS (MI) -- It has been two months now since Brian Gregory abruptly left the Dayton Flyer basketball program. That’s enuf distance and now is as good a time as any to do a little analysis on what made the short, intense guy from Mt. Prospect, IL who sounded like Michael J. Fox tick. It figures that it would take someone with little or no knowledge of the Flyer program to unearth the key to psychoanalyzing it’s former Head Coach. In this case, that would be Steve Hummer of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution who wrote this compelling piece shortly after Coach Gregory took the reins of the Georgia Tech basketball team:

http://www.ajc.com/sports/georgia-te...ey-896068.html

Obviously, folks in Hotlanta were as interested to know what GT was getting themselves into as Dayton fans were in who Tim Wabler was going to hire to replace BG. At the same time, we all kinda wondered to ourselves:

What the hell went wrong here for Coach Gregory?

We all knew BG was organized, intense and driven. What we didn’t know was the extent to which he displayed these traits. For that insight, we would need someone who was very close to the UD team. Steve Hummer found that person in J.D. Grigsby, the former Flyer and Chris Wright’s uncle:

“I felt I was close enough to B.G. to ask him things,” said Grigsby, referring to the coach in the informal way that everyone around the Dayton program did. Things like why wasn’t a certain player getting more playing time, or why another wasn’t starting or why wasn’t his nephew on the court every minute?

“And B.G. always said, ‘No problem, you can ask me that.’ Then he took out his books and he ate me alive,” Grigsby said with a chuckle.

Those “books” were files on each player, at least six inches thick, Grigsby said, filled with every percentage, every tendency, every game and practice movement of the young man in question.


I will be the first to admit that I am not the most organized person in the world at my place of work. But I do have a system to keep track of files and accounts, I know where everything is and it works for me. Correct me if I’m wrong, but maintaining and updating a six inch thick dossier on every kid on the UD team? Well, that strikes me as borderline OCD behavior. Coaching isn’t keeping track of every time a kid misses or makes a free throw in practice; it’s teaching him how to make more of the ****ed things. That’s where BG and I differ: he firmly believes that keeping track of all of this minutia is “coaching”; it’s not -- it’s useless information overkill.

Coaching is coaching, not recordkeeping.

The one area that probably drove more Flyer fans crazy than any other was UD’s inability to win in conference play. Why couldn’t BG win in the Atlantic 10? More than anything else, it was because he was gonna run his system and wasn’t gonna change come hell or high water. When you are that predictable, even a knucklehead like Chris Mack can come up with a defense to stop Gregory’s charges from doing what he wants them to do, as well as an offense that can consistently score on BG’s “we don’t need no stinkin’ zone” defense.

Conversely, one of the bright spots on BG’s UD resume was his record against BCS schools. West Virginia in the NCAAs; Pitt at UD Arena; Louisville twice; UC, Illinois, Ole Miss and UNC in the NIT Championship run. Why could he beat the big guys, but struggle against freakin’ St. Bonaventure or LaSalle in A-10 play? Because the coaches at those BCS schools were just as stubborn as he was. Huggy wasn’t gonna change anything to prepare for UD. Hell, I’d be surprised if Bobby even bothered to watch film of Dayton before we played them. UD could sneak up on BCS squads and surprise them with our athleticism. No such luck with our A-10 brethren, as it was readily apparent they knew UD’s tendencies better than we knew them ourselves.

Where did this stubbornness in BG come from? Well, last time I looked MSU is a BCS school, ain’t it? Izzo had probably his most trying season in his career this past year. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

I remember reading a post by a UD fan either here, on FlyerHoops.net or on the A-10 MB. They were sitting near the UD bench and heard BG’s assistant coaches shouting out numbers and thought they were calling plays.

They weren’t.

The coaches were yelling how many minutes each player had seen action. So, instead of thinking about how to beat Chris Mooney’s “crash one and drop four back” approach to transition defense that effectively throttled UD’s running game, BG has his assistants keeping track of minutes played.

BG had always said that UD wanted to run. Defend, rebound, run…in that order. What happens against a team like Richmond is that UD couldn’t run and was forced to set up in its half-court offense. Goodbye athleticism, hello shooting ability. Unfortunately, as we all found out, last year’s squad couldn’t shoot worth a ****.

Another anonymous statement I recall reading from a courtside poster was this telling quote from Associate Head Coach Billy Schmidt. After disagreeing with BG about what play to run, Billy turned and said within earshot of the crowd “He never f*ckin’ listens.” What’s the sense of having assistant coaches if you aren’t gonna listen to them?

Oh yeah…to keep track of the minutes played.

The essential flaw in subbing guys based on minutes played is that you ruin an individual player’s and the team’s collective flow. In most programs, when a guy screws up you will see him looking sheepishly over at the bench, waiting to get yanked for the error of his ways. Not with BG. Under his regime, you make a couple jumpers or snag a few boards and you look up to see you are being subbed out. Sorry, dude…time’s up!

Yet another unsourced quote I read recently was from a player BG was recruiting for UD. He had decided to go elsewhere and he said one of the things that worked against the Flyers was that he didn’t feel that he could “get into the flow.” Gee, where do you think he got that idea? Could it be that BG’s unwavering, ****-the-torpedoes, devotion to hockey-like substitution patterns was being used against him in recruiting by opposing coaches?

Ya think?

Speaking of recruits, let’s take a look at the two recently departed members of the Class of 2010, Juwan Staten and Brandon Spearman. Juwan is headed to parts unknown, despite leading the Atlantic 10 in assists as a freshman. Why? Because he wanted to score more. Spearman is going the JUCO route. Why? Because he wanted the ball in his hands.

Staten is a PG. A PG’s primary job is to distribute. Spearman is a SG. A SG’s primary job is to shoot. Yet each wanted to do the exact opposite of what their respective position dictates. Even more confusing, each player states emphatically that BG told them that they would do what they dreamed of – Staten would score and Spearman would handle the ball – when Coach Gregory recruited them.

How does that happen? Did BG recruit them under false pretenses or did the two of them not bother to watch a minute of film on UD? Because if they had they would see that in BG’s system the PG (London Warren) distributes and the SG (Marcus Johnson) scores.

Either way, the disconnect is on BG. And it is that communications breakdown that led to Staten’s discontent, to his not being invited back, to Spearman asking to transfer and to BG heading down I-75 to Georgia Tech.

I remember when OP left UD for Clemson, my YMCA hoops buddy Jim Spadafore of The Detroit News told me that Brian Gregory really wanted the UD job and Izzo was helping him. When I asked Spad (who was covering UM hoops at the time) his opinion of BG, Spad said he thought that Gregory was a little too confident for his own good. That cockiness came out in the GT Press conference when BG said that anyone who questions his recruiting ability just has to look at his wife Yvette. The story that Steve Hummer relates in his AJC article concerning BG’s courtship of his wife is quite telling. Napoleon complex? I don’t know…I’m only 5’7” myself.

Looking forward, two things that will not be part of the UD basketball lexicon now that BG is gone will be the “warrior drill” and the running drill that Paul Williams described in the DDN a while back. The running drill sounded like the “Herbies” that the 1980 US Olympic hockey team had to endure, minus the ice skates. The “warrior drill” is the one where in practice a player goes in for a layup and the managers hit him with pads, supposedly so he learns how to take a hit during the game. Whenever I saw Chris Wright driving towards the hoop, that’s what I saw --the “warrior drill.” The problem with it is that it doesn’t teach you how to make a layup. And UD was one of the worst teams I have ever seen around the basket. And if the hit doesn’t come, what happens then? The player flinches and misses, that’s what! Good riddance, “warrior drill.” As for the running drill, running without a purpose is just that – running. And when the Atlantic 10 team you are playing doesn’t allow you to run, what good does it do you?

I really liked BG. He cared about the program, about his players and he represented the university with nothing but total class. He did things the right way, even to the point of refusing to talk to Iowa about their vacant coaching job while UD was in the middle of its NIT run last season. The first time I met him after a game he told me I needed to get a new picture because I didn’t look anything like the one on UD Pride. He busted my chops at the Red & Blue game this past year when I told him that Kevin Dillard was “rockin’ the Jacob Pullen beard” reminding BG of the PG recruit that he woulda, coulda, shoulda had for UD, were it not for that snake oil salesman, Bobby Huggins. My favorite BG memory is from the UD/Toledo road game a few years ago, which was a homecoming of sorts for BG, who spent a year at UT working under his good friend Stan Joplin. When he finished his press conference he was walking out the door, glanced over at me, smiled and said “See ya, Swamp.”

See ya, Coach.

That’s it “From the Swamp.”
You can email me at: swampy@udpride.com
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  #1  
By Gazoo on 06-05-2011, 09:49 PM
"Correct me if I’m wrong, but maintaining and updating a six inch thick dossier on every kid on the UD team? Well, that strikes me as borderline OCD behavior. Coaching isn’t keeping track of every time a kid misses or makes a free throw in practice; it’s teaching him how to make more of the ****ed things. That’s where BG and I differ: he firmly believes that keeping track of all of this minutia is “coaching”; it’s not -- it’s useless information overkill.

Coaching is coaching, not recordkeeping."

WOW, that explains / confirms a lot in my mind. It confirms that BG really doesn't have a feel for game coaching and probably never will. Great assistants have this mentality. You want THAT guy feeding you information on which you can base decisions. But leading. . . coaching, in a real game "under fire" requires you to read the situation more than statistics can explain, certainly more quickly than statistics can explain.

It really appears to me that BG is trying to solve the coaching riddle in the same way that a gambling addict tries to "time" the decision on when to change slot machines. He's using the wrong tool for the job.
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  #2  
By Bat'71 on 06-06-2011, 10:01 AM
It's fascinating to me the level of disdain so many posters have for BG; to read some of the remarks about the guy on this board (during his tenure and even now that he's gone) you'd think he had a losing record and recruited ex-felons and other neer-do-wells to play for the Flyers. What's up with that? Some people just can't let go of their disappointment we weren't a top 25 program yea-in and year-out when he was here...get over it.
Why do people take it literally that he maintained "six-inch" files on each kid...who knows how thick the files were and who's to say what were in those files? Perhaps the files contained everything about the kid, from the time he was being recruited up through the present day (including class records, grades, whether or not each kid was on track to graduate on time, medical records, training program outlines, match-up problems each player might have against each A-10 opponent, along with specific strengths and weaknesses and what was being tailored by the staff to correct them,etc.) It appears that the praise heaped on him by Jud Heathcoat and others is simply brushed aside to focus on the "gotcha" moment...he's got OCD and therefore he had to fail and that's why he sucked and had to go. You'd think we got 'blown-out" in every game, or at least every A-10 game we played. For crying out loud, a few free throws here and a few less turnovers there and we would have/ could have been ranked and gone to the Dance most years of his tenure.
As far as JS is concerned, he admitted he screwed up on that one and swore he'd never go through that again. Who knows, maybe he intimated to BS that if JS came to UD, he'd give BS access to practices and allow him to have some input into JS's development and team/game strategy. If so, BS probably assumed that BG would implement a lot of what he suggested and, when that didn't happen, BS went ballistic and started to undermine BG with both his son and his son's roommate...who knows...but it's plausible. Can't anyone make some mistakes and live to tell about it?
I can understand the disappointment members of the this board have in how we performed, especially in the A-10, and BG was far from perfect and deserves some criticism for not achieving some important goals, but his tenure was far from the disaster many people seem to want to portray it as and I think we're better off from his being here over the past eight years. Now as so many have said under so many different circumstances...can't we all just "move on" and give it a rest. OK, let the slings and arrows begin again. I'm done with this subject...it's been beaten to death.
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