Otzelberger gives up control to gain success

MILWAUKEE - After getting the biggest, most important job of his life, T.J. Otzelberger did something extreme.

In a profession where total control is viewed not only as the ultimate goal of the gig but also a necessary personality trait, Otzelberger let the reins loose in a potentially unprecedented manner for a man in his position.

“He gives us the freedom,” Iowa State assistant Kyle Green, who is nearing 30 years as a college coach, said. “That’s what makes it unique.

“Most coaches don’t do that. They have a hard time giving up. What it does do is create that ownership among the staff.”

The archetype for a college basketball coach, one that still largely resonates, is the sun around which the rest of the program operates. Everything in the program emanates from him. Alpha. Omega. The whole deal.

The head coach creates the big-picture strategy and the practice schedule.

He designs the offense and calls the plays. Constructs the defense and deploys it.

Assistants function as, well, assistants. Their job is mostly to support the head coach in carrying out his vision, not acting as managers or innovators on their own.

At Iowa State, though, that’s not the case.

Otzelberger operates more as an empowering 21st-century CEO than a power-mad college coach of yesteryear.

“As a leader, if you want the other leaders in your program to be great you also have to give them the ability to fail and succeed,” Otzelberger told the Register. “You have to allow them to make the choices and the decisions that impact winning and losing. In order to do that as a head coach, you really have to trust those folks.

“When you have that level of trust, it allows you to give them the freedom to decide some of the things we need to do in practice, to decide some of the areas of emphasis in game-planning, but also have impact on the decisions we make in-game and the adjustments we make in-game.”

That philosophy has guided Otzelberger in how he structured his staff. The Cyclones are constructed more like a football team, with assistants assigned to direct the offense and defense, along with its playcalling, while Otzelberger sets the vision and the tone for the program.

The plan has produced a school-record stay in The Associated Press top-10, two Sweet 16s, a Big 12 Tournament championship and a fourth straight NCAA Tournament appearance with Friday’s matchup between the thirdseeded Cyclones and No. 14 Lipscomb.

“For him to give that autonomy,” assistant J.R Blount said, “shows a lot of confidence, security in himself.”

Inside the huddle

The best window into how the Cyclones are structured is to watch their timeout huddle during a game.

For many programs, the huddle looks like a lecture, with the team encircling the head coach, who doles out direction like a general amid battle.

It looks a little different at Iowa State. “I would liken in-game timeouts to a pitstop in a car race,” Otzelberger said, “where one guy’s changing the tires, one guy’s putting the gas in. Everybody’s got a specific responsibility, and they do it on the timeline allotted.

“Our timeout looks different than every timeout in the country.”

The Cyclones’ timeout reflects how they are structured.

Blount and Green are, in essence, the defensive coordinators while Erik Crawford and Nate Schmidt handle the offense.

That makes the Cyclones’ timeout huddle a hive of activity, with coaches taking turns commanding attention and giving direction.

Blount or Green will take center stage, detailing any defensive adjustments or highlighting any issues that arise. Schmidt or Crawford enter to give offensive direction. Otzelberger typically delivers the final remarks, usually focusing on mentality and physicality.

“Each of us have a clear vision and clear plan of what we need to focus on,” Schmidt said, “and it keeps us all in our separate lanes and to work really well together.”

Constructing a staff

The way it works in that huddle on gamedays throughout the winter is really how it works at the Sukup Basketball Complex throughout the year.

“T.J. oversees it and makes sure everything is going to plan,” Crawford said. “He does a good job of talking to us about where he can use his voice and how he can hold guys accountable with what we hope to have happen on the court.

“It is pretty rare.” It’s a rarity born from Otzelberger’s experience both as an assistant for a decade and as a head coach previously to Iowa State at South Dakota State and UNLV.

From those perches he saw that when head coaches would try to dictate everything, it could create gaps. If a coach was all-encompassing in game planning and Xs and Os, he might not have the time or ability to continue to develop relationships with players. It would also lock out his assistants from contributing to game planning to a large degree.

So when he was hired at Iowa State in March of 2021, he set out to build and hire a staff that operated differently.

Instead of dictating and implementing every aspect of game play, Otzelberger instead would set the blueprint of a mentality and empower his assistants to implement the means to achieve it.

The mentality piece was especially central to what Otzelberger wanted to achieve given that he had to remake a program that was coming off its worst season in modern history, going 2-22 overall and 0-19 against Big 12 opponents.

By giving responsibility of the nutsand-bolts of the gameplay to assistants, Otzelberger could prioritize the philosophy powering the entire operation. The assistants could devise what to do while Otzelberger would stress how to do it. It also frees up Otzelberger to have time to continue develop relationships off the court with players, an important piece when he is so demanding of them on the court.

“We aim and have since we have come in that we want to be better than our opponents in the effort-based, doable things,” he said. “I feel like when I’m able to keep my focus on those things, that shows the players. The things you say as a head coach, the things you put your voice on, the things you put your attention to are the things they know you value and matter to you.

“For me, the ball pressure, the rebounding effort, sharing the ball on offense – there’s those certain things year in, year out we try to put our voice and our attention on. It keeps more focus on those things from our guys because when they hear my voice, they hear it in those areas.”

Defense leads the way

The linchpin to that mentality and to the Cyclones’ rebuild was its defense.

Given the struggles the Cyclones were coming from, attracting high-level offensive recruits and transfers would be an uphill and potentially unwinnable battle. Instead, Otzelberger hypothesized, they would target players capable of implementing an aggressive, physical style of defense that relied more on mentality, work and willingness than God-given talent or finely honed skills.

“So, naturally, we said we have to turn people over a lot and turn that into points, score off our defense,” Otzelberger said.

The word that kept surfacing in those initial meetings between Otzelberger, Blount and Green was “disruption.” If you could dislodge an offense from what it wanted to do, your ability to turn them over and go the other way would increase.

So the trio landed on a version of the trendy no-middle defense that ramped up ball pressure and incorporated aggressive trapping. “Coach Blount has been like the (defensive) line coach,” Otzelberger said, “where he’s making sure we’re always blitzing, we’re always accounting for the quarterback, we’re always coming after the basketball.

“Coach Green may be more like a secondary coach with the backline, making sure rotations and help defense and rim protection and things along those lines there.”

It’s all worked together to produce a top-10 defense in all four of Otzelberger’s seasons at Iowa State. The Cyclones had the country’s No. 1 defense in 202324 with Blount and Green devising and employing the scheme.

Moving the offense forward

While the Cyclones’ defense has been the epitome of consistent excellence, the offense has been a work in progress.

The first two seasons were undoubtedly a bit of a slog. While the defense could rely on effort and energy, those two attributes don’t do much to put the ball in the basket. The team-wide skill level offensively those first two years simply was low.

As that changed last year, so did the offense’s success. After being unable to field a top-100 offense the first two years, the Cyclones shot up near the top-50 last season. This year, they’re in the top-25 after spending a bulk of the year in the top-10 until injuries took some of their best and most important players off the floor.

“What’s been important as we started out with the defensive habits is we move the offense forward every year,” Otzelberger said, “and doing that without giving up much of what we do defensively.”

Schmidt and Crawford have been central to that improvement as they’ve been able to find ways to develop players in their time on campus and unlock their skills with their offensive philosophies.

“Just from the way coach Schmidt and I see the game, in terms of more of the modern game where it’s less sets,” Crawford said. “It’s more read-based, let the players make decisions as they’re going. In order to do that, you have to have guys with decent IQs. You have to have guys that can dribble, pass and shoot.”

Crawford is the team’s shooting coach and has been central in the development of its guards. In games, he’s diagnosing how defenses are reacting to the Cyclones and what adjustments might need to be made.

Schmidt, meanwhile, is a more conspicuous presence on the sideline. When Iowa State has the ball, he’ll often be off his feet, signaling to the offense what to run on that possession. He’s also calling the plays out of timeouts, one of the areas a coach can have the most influence on a game.

“I don’t think there’s many head coaches in the country that give that up,” Schmidt said. “I look at all the other teams we play, and their head coach is running it and he’s focused on offense.

“It starts with (Otzelberger). That’s a big step as a head coach and tons of credit to him to allow us to be free, be confident.”

Banishing ego

The Cyclones’ success under this coaching structure is largely dependent on one critical factor.

“The No. 1 thing that can throw our whole deal off,” Crawford said, “is ego.”

A coaching staff is not always all that different from the locker room they coach. There can be rivalries and jealousies. It can be territorial and full of agendas.

But when the head coach relinquishes the type of control that for decades has defined the job, it sets down a marker of what is expected from everyone else on down.

“It starts at the top with T.J.,” Schmidt said. “He lives it every day. Our whole staff, there’s little to no ego in it, and I think that’s what makes it work so well together.

“We all have our clear lane and clear avenue that we focus on, but we work well together because we value each other’s opinion. There’s not a lot of ego in it.”

Otzelberger has instituted subtle but powerful changes to how staffs typically run to foster that kind of cohesion.

Historically, each assistant is responsible for the “scout” of certain opponents. Which is to say a single coach will put together a scouting report of a team and present it to the head coach, with those two then devising a game plan.

“I’ve been on a staff where if it’s not your scout, a player could ask you a question,” Green said, “and you wouldn’t know the answer.”

At Iowa State, an assistant is not tasked with a team scout. Instead, they are all responsible for their own piece of the gameplan, whether if it’s how to defend the ballscreen or how to defuse fastbreaks or how to attack a weak link defensively.

“Everyone knows exactly what they have to do,” Blount said. “That is the best part of it because nobody is like should I be doing this or should I say this?

“I’ve been on staffs that are great staffs, but you don’t say much. That’s pretty normal, and coming here, being able to have that autonomy, it also provides your voice to the players.”

How the Iowa State coaching staff approaches recruiting

The biggest digression, though, is how Iowa State recruits.

Most staffs assign a single assistant to be the “lead” recruiter of a player based off geography or preexisting relationships. That means a player’s recruitment is mostly handled by a single assistant, with the head coach coming in as the closer.

That leads to players becoming an assistant’s “guy.” And when they get on campus, it can lead to agendas.

“Coach has made it clear that’s not how we’re doing it,” Green said. “It’s not your guy. It’s our guy. Everybody’s guy.

“Some staffs have that ego. ‘That’s my guy. I want him to play. I want him to do this.’ We just don’t have that.”

The Cyclones will certainly leverage their assistants’ geographic and relationship strengths, but it is ultimately a group effort. That allows every coach to see and meet recruits, giving both sides a fuller picture of the other by the time they get to campus.

“The guys when they get here, they already know everybody,” Blount said. “T.J. sets that up perfectly.”

Putting it together

Otzelberger’s unorthodox setup has produced some of the best results in Iowa State men’s basketball history.

Given that it has come on the heels of a program low point rather than the highs of the 2010s makes it all the more remarkable what he, his staff and the players have accomplished.

“I’ve really enjoyed how they break it up and how much time they put in investing in us,” Joshua Jefferson, who previously spent two seasons at St. Mary’s, said. “I don’t think a lot of schools do that with how much they pour into us. I really appreciate it.

“(Otzelberger) delegates but he also spends a lot of time overseeing what (the assistants) do and asking his players what they like. He does a really good job motivating us and making us feel like we’re the best players in the world.”

For Otzelberger, giving up the sort of control coaches spend their whole careers trying to amass has given him – and the program – more in return.

“It allows me as a head coach to be a better CEO on a day-to-day basis,” he said, “and a better game manager during the course of the game because there are so many things they’re doing a great job with.

“It allows me to have a much more free mind to make other decisions.”

And while it flows from Otzelberger, it also only works with a staff with this level of cohesion and expertise.

“I’ve not been around (a staff) that’s been stronger,” Otzelberger said.

Which is no small reason why, as Iowa State sets out on its fourth straight NCAA Tournament, the program is as strong as it’s ever been.

Iowa State columnist Travis Hines has covered the Cyclones for the Des Moines Register and Ames Tribune since 2012. Contact him at thines@amestrib. com or (515) 284-8000. Follow him on X at @TravisHines21.