For Houston and Baylor, rebounding is downright offensive — and devastating
By CJ Moore Apr 2, 2021
It was sometime in the early 1980s. Kelvin Sampson doesn’t remember the name of the team or the coach, but the rest of the memory is vivid. Montana Tech was playing in a tournament in La Grande, Ore., and its opponent sent all five players to the offensive glass. “I thought that was the darnedest thing I’d ever seen,” Sampson says. “It never left my mind. It was just always there.”
These days college basketball coaches have a similar experience when they play Sampson’s Houston Cougars. The Cougars don’t send five to the glass — usually it’s only four — but the ferocity of their pursuit of misses is a rare sight at any level of basketball. In the space-and-pace era, a premium has been put on transition defense, and many coaches believe sending fewer players to the offensive glass is the correct mathematical decision. Over the last 15 seasons, the offensive rebounding rate in college basketball has dropped gradually, from an average of 35.6 percent in 2006 to 28.0 percent this season. The exceptions are some old-school coaches, including Sampson, Bob Huggins, Tom Izzo and newly retired Roy Williams, along with a coach obsessed with numbers: Baylor’s Scott Drew.
“You see the success — Baylor’s had success for a long time as have Kelvin Sampson’s teams,” says Jeff Van Gundy, an NBA TV analyst and former coach. “Now that those two schools are in the Final Four, both competing against each other, I think most college coaches and high school and NBA coaches come playoff time, everybody is going to continue to reevaluate their stance on who should go.”
It makes sense to want more shots and more possessions. Houston, a lifeless program when Sampson took over in 2014, wouldn’t be two wins from a national championship if it weren’t for Sampson’s obsession with offensive rebounding, and Drew, whose Bears square off against the Cougars in a Saturday semifinal, used it as one of the pillars of building what was once one of the worst major-conference programs in the country. They became outliers. In a copycat game, prioritizing offensive rebounding has become a market inefficiency.
Sampson went all-in on offensive rebounding when he was at Oklahoma from 1994 to 2006. The first time he remembers realizing it was an equalizer was on Jan. 7, 2002. The Sooners played a game at Connecticut, which featured three future lottery picks: Caron Butler, Emeka Okafor and Ben Gordon. Not one OU player would make the NBA. The Huskies shot 48.1 percent that day; Oklahoma shot 36.6 percent. And yet the Sooners won, 69-67, by grabbing nearly as many offensive rebounds (28) as UConn had total rebounds (32).
From that point, it became a way of life.
“Our saving grace was offensive rebounding,” Sampson says. “The way we were recruiting and the way we were trending, we had to find something that was our niche.”
Sampson had always coached effort, and offensive rebounding fit with his team’s DNA. The Sooners got back 40.7 percent of their misses that year, and it took off from there, peaking in his final season at OU in 2006 when the Sooners ranked No. 1 in offensive rebounding rate.
When he took over at Houston, he had an even bigger disadvantage on the recruiting trail. Even when the school massively upgraded its facilities and made basketball a priority, Sampson still wasn’t going to be able to recruit at the level he did at OU or Indiana.
His plan was to build around skill in the backcourt and bruisers up front, essentially the throwback garbage guys who weren’t as valued as they once were. “If the kid is not going to be a stretch four and not going to make a living on the block, where does he help you?” Sampson says. “I see a lot of high school teams with 6-2, 6-3, 6-4 really athletic kids who can’t shoot. High school coaches will ask, ‘Coach, what would you do with this guy?’ Turn him into an offensive rebounder. People just don’t think about offensive rebounding as a weapon.”
This is how Sampson’s mind works when he’s evaluating talent. His staff recruits guys who have the gene. He watched redshirt freshman Juwan Roberts, for instance, lead Peach Jam in rebounding and blocked shots, but he couldn’t shoot outside 10 feet. “So most people are not going to recruit him because of that,” Sampson says. “I looked at what he can do. We can develop his shot.”
Although Sampson plays two bigs, size is less important to him than quickness and effort. It’s also a lot about the mentality. The work starts in training camp when Sampson throws a bubble over the rim and the Cougars go at it. The players compete by position group. The first one to get three rebounds wins and the rest have to run. Over the course of the season, the bubble is used as a threat. “If we have an off night,” senior forward Justin Gorman says, “Coach Sampson is not afraid to pull that bubble out.”
The last time it appeared was the day after a Feb. 18 loss at Wichita State, a game in which the Shockers grabbed 20 offensive rebounds. (Defensive rebounding is a non-negotiable too.) Houston has won every game (and rebounding battle) since and kept its season alive simply by taking more shots. In an NCAA Tournament second-round game against Rutgers, a game-changing play occurred when Fabian White got a finger on a Quentin Grimes free throw miss, leading to a Grimes 3-pointer. Then the game-winning basket in the 63-60 win, shocker, was on a remarkable one-handed tip-in by Tramon Mark. The Cougars attempted nine more shots from the field than Rutgers, 10 more shots than Syracuse in the Sweet 16 and 15 more shots than Oregon State in the Elite Eight.
“We’re not going to beat many teams with our first shot,” Sampson says. “We’re not a great shooting team. I wish we were, but we’re not. We have to rebound. I really doubt (Gonzaga) coach Mark Few spends a lot of time in practice on offensive rebounding. They’re a first-shot team. I haven’t had a lot of first-shot teams. Offensive rebounding is part of our culture. I’m sure there’s other teams that do a better job of teaching it than we do, but I’m not sure anybody emphasizes it more than we do.”
His means for emphasizing may differ from what you’d assume. The bubble is the only rebounding-specific drill that Sampson employs, although he argues any time the Cougars are practicing offense, they’re practicing offensive rebounding by going after every ball with the same kind of tenacity they would in a game. Managers chart rebounding effort — in practice and games — and then there is a strategic approach.
Here it is in the most Sampson-ian of terms: “We convince our guys that it takes two people to get an offensive rebound. Somebody has to tip it. That means we’re going to send a kamikaze to fly in there to keep it alive. The second guy now is kind of like a homing pigeon. He sees that the ball’s tipped, and he’s got to go get it.”
This is what that looks like:
“I actually enjoy when they miss a shot,” Van Gundy says, “just to see the carnage that will occur in the next second.”
Sampson is synonymous with rebounding. You could listen to him on the sideline and figure that out. His players fight, because they have no other choice and there’s a little fear of what will happen if they don’t.
But Scott Drew?
“Because he smiles a lot and is always jolly, people don’t really associate that with him,” Baylor assistant Jerome Tang says. “But when you go look at our numbers, we’ve been one of the best offensive rebounding teams in the country in the last 10 years.”
Confirmed. Since 2014, Baylor has never ranked outside the top 10 in offensive rebounding rate in a season. The Bears took a slight dip in 2013 (110th), but they finished 16th, 37th and 21st in the three years prior.
Drew’s delivery might be different, but the emphasis is similar. Baylor charts rebounding effort, and every film session begins with rebounding. He wants his team to see what good rebounding looks like, emphasizing the need to get to the weak side, getting inside position or walking the opponent under the basket. Then he shows the kind of effort it requires.
Drew also gives his team three keys to victory for every game: commit no more than 11 turnovers, hold the opponent below 40 percent shooting and win the rebound percentage war on both ends.
“You have to pick two or three things you care most about, and then you have to spend time and you have to cultivate that,” Drew says. “You have to teach that. You have to demand that, but you can’t demand everything because then you get nothing.”
Drew says he doesn’t recruit to it, but he has had two cheat codes: Rico Gathers and Mark Vital.
Gathers was such a tank and such a gifted pursuer of the ball that the Dallas Cowboys tried to turn him into a tight end. Vital is also built like a football player and says he has studied the tactics of defensive linemen, learning how to swim move and get around someone trying to box him out.
Vital, surprisingly, did not identify as a rebounder in high school. “I was just playing for the Ball is Life (highlight videos),” he says. “I wasn’t even focusing on playing real basketball. I was just getting my highlights, my dunks, making my videos and winning games.”
Offensive rebounding is so ingrained at Baylor that it’s passed down from veterans to newcomers, and for Vital, it was presented to him from wing Ish Wainright as seeing the benefit in playing a role.
Then ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla called Vital “Baby Rodman.”
Vital is a mere 6-foot-5, but he plays much bigger than that. (Christopher Hanewinckel / USA Today)
“That just motivated me to keep rebounding, and then I’d see how it was changing the game,” Vital says. “A lot of guys look at the scoreboard. ‘Man, I’ve got 20 points. I’ve got 15 points.’ I’m like, ‘Man, I’ve only got eight rebounds. Oh, come on. I’ve got to pick it up.’”
Even at 6-foot-5, Vital is one of the best rebounders in the country, although the numbers might not always reflect it because he has competition among his teammates and the focus of every opponent is to block him out. When Drew really got Baylor rolling in the early 2010s, he had huge frontlines and big wings, as his rosters were built to play zone.
Now the Bears go with three guards at all times and sometimes play four with Vital at center. It still works. Why? It’s what the staff preaches.
“You wouldn’t think that Mr. Happy-go-lucky Scott Drew would also have this relentless offensive rebounding team,” Van Gundy says. “It just shows you. It’s not the personality. It’s the demands that both guys bring to the table that minutes are tied directly to rebounding and effort.”
Now about transition defense …
Sometimes you can spin numbers to make an argument, but it’s hard to present any kind of challenge to the Baylor and Houston approach, because the transition numbers are favorable. Houston allows 0.909 points per possession in transition, ranking in the 84th percentile according to Synergy. Baylor allows 0.901 points per possession in transition, which is in the 86th percentile and second-best in the Big 12.
“I learned this from Izzo, playing against him,” Drew says. “Same thing against West Virginia. It takes longer to take the ball out than it does not, so if you’re worried about blocking out, you’re not worried about releasing.”
It makes sense. With fewer players to block out, it’s easier for perimeter players to leak out in transition. Sampson also argues that most college teams aren’t committed to running.
Drew’s key to preventing transition is telling his players they have 3.2 seconds to get back after a defensive rebound is secured. If they don’t, they end up on the bench.
The threat of playing time works to both coaches’ advantage in terms of making sure the players stay committed to going to the offensive glass, and the inability to hang that over an NBA player’s head is why they don’t think it would work in the pros.
“You’d have to have it written in their contract,” Sampson says.
The New Orleans Pelicans rank No. 1 in the NBA with an offensive rebounding rate of 27 percent, a figure that would rank 189th in college basketball. Van Gundy, however, says he would prioritize it if he were coaching today, and he gives the Utah Jazz as an example to show if you care about it, the players will buy in.
The Jazz, who have the best record in the league, went from 21st last year in offensive rebounding rate to third this year, and one man with a lot of influence is executive Dennis Lindsey, a Baylor grad whose son, Jake, now works for him and played for Drew.
Van Gundy is fascinated by how these teams approach the offensive glass, so he picked Jake Lindsey’s brain when he and his father came through Houston recently.
Van Gundy, who lives in Houston, also keeps tabs on the Cougars and has had a lot of conversations with Sampson. Van Gundy regrets he didn’t prioritize offensive rebounding in his years coaching the New York Knicks and Houston Rockets, and in his pursuit of knowledge on the topic, he recently discovered what could be the solution for hitting the offensive glass and setting up transition defense: a system called “tagging up” created by Charlotte assistant coach Aaron Fearne.
Fearne, an Australian, created the system when coaching the Cairns Taipans in the National Basketball League. The two teams that dominated the NBL were the Perth Wildcats and the New Zealand Breakers, both physical squads that were relentless on the offensive glass. “Basically the rest of us felt that they were over-physical and we complained about it and that wasn’t getting us anywhere, so you might as well go join them,” Fearne says. “I wanted to come up with a system that would allow us to get on the offensive glass more and impose some physicality but also put us in a position to contain the ball in transition.”
The system requires all five offensive players to find their man as soon as a shot goes up, get on the top side and push their man into the paint. In Aussie fashion, they call this “to scrum.”
“We wanted to create 50-50 opportunities to come up with extra offensive rebounds,” Fearne says. “You can’t run past a non-blockout. We were getting the guys to kind of basically do a 180 with what a majority of us have been taught over a lifetime.”
The system worked. The offensive rebounding numbers and second-chance points went up, and opponents’ transition points dropped. The system was adopted by Australia’s national and junior-level teams, and Fearne now employs it as the coach of the under-19 New Zealand team.
“Over here, we’ll send three back and if three doesn’t work, we’ll send four back,” Van Gundy says. “And if four doesn’t work, we’ll send five back. That’s how I did it. We’re never going to the board, and yet now that I think of it, what he’s talking about, I think it has real value.”
Van Gundy is one of the game’s biggest influencers, so if he thinks it has value, it wouldn’t be surprising to see coaches at all levels adopt the tagging up system or follow the Baylor or Houston approach.
Sometimes a craziest concept — like embracing the 3-point shot, way back when — leads to change throughout the sport if a few people experience success. For Sampson, it was the coach sending five to the glass that inspired him. And to come full circle, he sometimes channels his old Montana Tech opponent.
“We have this thing called a tsunami,” he says, chuckling, “where we send everybody to the boards.”
(Top photo: Jamie Squire / Getty)
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C.J. Moore, a staff writer for The Athletic, has been on the college basketball beat since 2011. He has worked at Bleacher Report as the site’s national college basketball writer and also covered the sport for CBSSports.com and Basketball Prospectus. He is the coauthor of Beyond the Streak, a behind-the-scenes look at Kansas basketball's record-setting Big 12 title run. Follow CJ on Twitter @cjmoorehoops.
5 COMMENTS
Ryder K.
Apr 2, 12:32pm
2 likes
Great article, it's bugged me since I was a kid that broadcasts show total rebounds instead of the percentage rebounded (both offensively and defensively). American sports fans love percentages, and total rebounds tells us virtually nothing.
Ronak P.
Apr 2, 12:32pm
