The Hoops Ideology Report

Special reporting by Josh Zembik

Purdue is one of the 59.5 percent of teams that play a three-guard offense, according to our survey. Getty Images Luke Winn's Mailbag Have questions or feedback? E-mail Luke Winn. Name: Email: Hometown: Question: SEND Follow Luke Winn on Twitter

Ideology, in college basketball, is defined by the elements a program can choose: What offense it runs. What defense it plays. From where it hires its head coach. What game-tempo it prefers. What brand of shoes it wears. How many guards it puts in the starting lineup. How many international players it recruits. How many juco or four-year transfers it acquires. How much money it spends on the sport relative to schools of similar stature. In other words, everything that's not dictated by performance.

Because no one-stop clearinghouse for ideological basketball data existed -- and we were curious about it -- we sent a survey to all 341 teams that participated in Division-I men's basketball last season, asking about the things left up to choice. We received 301 responses (for an 88.2 percent success rate), providing us with a solid base of information that shed light on the Ideology of hoops nation in the election year. Below are 50 things we learned, from minutiae to big-picture revelations:

About lineups ...

1. A three-guard starting lineup -- like the ones you'll see at UConn, Purdue and Memphis this season -- is no longer an anomaly. Our results show 59.5 percent of teams plan to start three guards this season, and the average number of starting guards on all teams polled was 2.62.

2. A four-guard lineup, however -- like the one made famous by Villanova's Elite Eight team in 2006, with Randy Foye, Allan Ray, Kyle Lowry and Mike Nardi -- is still extremely rare. Only five schools out of 301 reported plans to use a primarily four-guard attack: Brown, Delaware, Liberty, Navy and VMI. The phenomenon has yet to spread west of the Monongahela.

3. The lone team that reported a likely starting lineup with just one true guard? Air Force. The version of the Princeton offense that Falcons coach Jeff Reynolds runs calls for two "lead guards" -- but this year one of them is a 6-foot-5, 200-pound former three-man, G/F Anwar Johnson (who, incidentally, won a Louisiana state title playing on a team with Glen "Big Baby" Davis in Baton Rouge). Last year's primary ball-handler, Tim Anderson, graduated, and Reynolds needs time to groom a new crop of freshmen guards before he can put Johnson back at his original position. Reynolds calls it an "unusual situation" but also points out that the Falcons have deliberately avoided recruiting small guards over the years. "Because of our system," Reynolds said, "we like our wings and guards to be tall, so we can post them up and so they can pass over the tops of defenses." That shouldn't be a problem for Johnson.

About offenses and defenses ...

4. Air Force was among the 5.3 percent of respondents in the Princeton Club -- those who either reported or are known to be running some version (either pure or modified) of Pete Carril's famed back-cutting, motion offense. The other 15 members (of 301 polled) are Brown, Colorado, Denver, Furman, Georgetown, Nicholls State, Northwestern, Oregon State, Princeton, Richmond, Sam Houston State, Samford, Vanderbilt, Western Carolina and William & Mary. The list does not include Memphis, which runs what coach John Calipari calls "Princeton on steroids." The Tigers' offense was catalogued as Dribble-Drive Motion -- a topic we'll return to later.

5. Is the Princeton Club on the decline? In Grant Wahl's epic piece on the Princeton offense in 2003, he listed 26 (out of 326) Division-I teams running some form of the scheme. That's 8.0 percent, a 2.7 percent difference from our 2008 rate. It's also possible that Princeton principles still exist at the same rate, but the term has acquired negative connotations on the recruiting trail. Vanderbilt and Nicholls State, both of whom run Princeton-y offenses, reported theirs as "motion" and "five-out motion," respectively. And Arizona State, whose coach, Herb Sendek, figures prominently in the lede of Wahl's '03 story (for adopting the Princeton at NC State), made a point to say that Sendek is no longer running Carril's offense in Tempe. Sendek is just a motion-offense/3-2 zone defense guy now.

6. When compared to the national average, the tempo for teams running the Princeton offense is 6.0 possessions slower per game. The Princeton teams in our survey checked in at 62.9 possessions per game -- with Vandy's modified speed-Princeton, at 69.6 possessions, pushing up the average -- while the national median tempo is 68.9.

7. The Dribble-Drive Motion -- the en vogue offense concocted by current UMass assistant Vance Walberg and taken into the national spotlight by John Calipari -- is spreading, but it still has less market share than the Princeton. Seven of our 301 respondents (or 2.3 percent) reported running the DDM. (We're aware of at least two other non-responders running it, which would bump the overall Division-I percentage to, at minimum, 2.6.)

8. Memphis is the hub of the Dribble-Drive Motion, and three former Calipari assistants -- Tony Barbee (UTEP), Derek Kellogg (UMass) and Chuck Martin (Marist) -- have taken it to their new schools. Where else has it spread? Walberg initially ran the offense at Fresno City College, and then at Pepperdine. At least two other California schools -- Cal-State Fullerton and St. Mary's -- are running it. Western Michigan is running it in the MAC. Appalachian State is running it in the SoCon. And we've heard of at least one more mid-major secretly planning on unveiling a Dribble-Drive offense in its opener.

9. Western Michigan coach Steve Hawkins had no direct connection to Calipari or Walberg. So how did he pick up the Dribble Drive? It's a good story. In September 2006, Hawkins was at what he called an "philosophical crossroads, offensively." He was an up-tempo motion coach who didn't like the fact that a lot of his team's cuts were being made away from the basket. While leaving the MAC's conference meetings in Indianapolis, Hawkins was heading to the airport to fly to a coaches' clinic at Ventura (Calif.) College, when he heard the tail end of a radio interview with Calipari, in which he talked about how he'd adopted Walberg's offense.

After Hawkins arrived in California, he was driving up the Pacific Coast Highway when he received a call from his friend Mike Burns, then the coach at Eastern Washington. Burns said, "Are you still messing around with that four-out, one-in offense? I think I'm getting ready to pull the trigger on Vance Walberg's offense." To that, Hawkins said, "Weird. I just heard Calipari talking about it on the radio."

At the Ventura clinic the next day, Hawkins was on the same speaking roster with Nuggets coach George Karl, who told attendees that he'd always been a North Carolina motion guy, but he was getting ready to do something drastic with his offense. And then he said, "You guys have probably heard of Vance Walberg." For Hawkins, it was the third time in two days.

That night he had beers with Karl and watched Karl diagram the Dribble-Drive Motion with packets of sugar and Sweet 'n' Low on a restaurant table. In a few weeks Hawkins and Burns flew to Denver to watch Walberg give a private seminar for Nuggets coaches. And by the time Western Michigan played its first game of 2006-07, the Dribble-Drive Motion was in place.

10. The Dribble-Drive offense has yet to hit the SEC, but the conference has its own brand of spread attacks. Billy Donovan runs the spread pick-and-roll at Florida -- and has his own DVD of it available. (Just $39.99!) Andy Kennedy runs a four-out, one-in spread attack with screening action in what he calls "waves," constantly trying to free up any of the 3-4 guards on the floor (with speedy sophomore Chris Warren being the focal point). "The premise," Kennedy said, is to take advantage of the Rebels' backcourt athleticism and "always be putting pressure on the paint."

11. The Flex Offense is a heavily east-of-the-Mississippi concept. Maryland has long been the flagship Flex program under Gary Williams, and it's intriguing that only one of the 15 teams (out of 301 respondents) that reported running Flex was in the West. And that team was way West -- Hawaii. Gonzaga, meanwhile, classifies itself as a four-out, one-in motion team but is famous enough for running the Flex that Mark Few has his own Flex For Success DVD. One of his disciples, San Diego coach Bill Grier, also runs some Flex with the Toreros, but not as his primary offense.

12. Wisconsin coach Bo Ryan's Swing Offense (the Hambone on Hardwood, perhaps?) is still in limited release. Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where former Ryan assistant Rob Jeter is the coach, was the only other school out of our 301 respondents to report running the Swing ... and the Panthers only use it on a part-time basis.

13. An obscure offense that popped up in just two places in our survey -- both in the Southland Conference -- was the Buna, a simple, post-focused spread motion that Buna (Texas) High coach M.N. (Cotton) Robinson won seven state titles with in the 1950s and '60s. Northwestern State -- the team of Verne Lundquist's "Northwestern Wins" fame -- used it to post an upset of Iowa in the first round of the 2006 NCAA tournament. And 2008's Southland Conference tourney champ, UT-Arlington, also used the Buna to reach the big dance. (The Mavericks didn't fare as well, losing by 24 to Memphis in their opener.) Both are up-tempo teams that segue their transition games nicely into the Buna, by having their post sprint all the way to one block and a wing sprint to each baseline corner -- all of which are base positions for the offense.

14. Why would two coaches who never worked together -- Northwestern State's Mike McConathy and UT-Arlington's Scott Cross -- be running the same rare offense in the same conference, then? It's not by coincidence. Cross' Mavericks got off to an 8-0 start last season running the Triangle Offense, but lost their second-leading scorer, shooting guard Brandon Long, to a season-ending thumb injury in the next game. After that, said Cross, "we couldn't score with the Triangle, because teams would just sag on us." The solution was to borrow from McConathy, whom Cross calls "the mastermind" of the Buna. "We had some similar personnel," said Cross, "so I started putting in some of the Buna offense to change the tempo. Down the stretch when we started winning again [victories in five of their last seven games helped them reach the NCAAs], we basically just went all Buna. This year, I like it so much that it's going to be our main offense."

15. We're still living in a man-to-man defensive world. Only 30 of 301 teams -- or 10 percent -- stated that their primary defense was some type of zone. Even Syracuse, which is widely thought of as the flagship 2-3 zone program, categorizes its defensive ideology as "man and 2-3 zone."