New York Times- today-February 25, 2009

[goan]

We are on the Sports section of the New York Times.

[CTWarrior]

Buzz is featured in USA Today, as well.

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/mensbasketball/bigeast/2009-02-24-marquette-buzz-williams_N.htm

[MU in Miami]

We are on the Sports section of the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/sports/ncaabasketball/25marquette.html?_r=1&ref=sports

[spiral97]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/sports/ncaabasketball/25marquette.html?_r=1&ref=sports

Coach Is Marquette’s Minutiae Man

By PAT BORZI
Published: February 24, 2009

MILWAUKEE — Reaching into his back pocket after a game last week, the Marquette men’s basketball coach, Brent Williams, who is known as Buzz, pulled out a thick sheaf of papers, impeccably folded and held together by two large black binder clips. Though Williams carries four bags stuffed with books, scouting materials and personal items wherever he goes, these papers stay on him when he coaches.

The Golden Eagles, coached by Brent Williams, will face teams ranked sixth or higher in their next three games.

Many of the sheets of paper contain statistics; Williams’s obsession with numbers borders on fanatical. Some contain notes from recent conversations. One page contains a list of recruits, coaches and parents he is supposed to call. Another, the names of people he prays for.

The packet is so thick that Williams has his tailor lengthen the back left pocket of his slacks by an inch so it all fits under the vent of his suit coat without drawing attention. Not that Williams is particularly proud of this.

“What it is, is a damnation, to be so consumed like this,” he said.

“I don’t want anybody to see that I’m carrying all kinds of randomness in my pocket. And because I don’t want it sliding around in my pocket, I’ve got to put these clips on it. And I don’t want anybody to ever see that. That’s why I say it’s a damnation.”

Whatever you call it, Williams’s passion and attention to detail have kept the Golden Eagles competitive in the Big East Conference after Tom Crean’s departure for Indiana. With only one starter taller than 6 feet 6 inches, eighth-ranked Marquette enters a rugged final stretch of the regular season at 23-4, its best record at this point since 2002-03, when Dwyane Wade led the team to the Final Four. Before that, the last 23-4 team was in 1977-78 — the season after Al McGuire coached Marquette, then the Warriors, to an N.C.A.A. title before retiring.

Maintaining such a lofty mark will not be easy. Up next for Marquette is No. 2 Connecticut on Wednesday night at the Bradley Center, then games against No. 6 Louisville on the road on Sunday, and at No. 1 Pittsburgh on March 4. The Golden Eagles finish the regular season at home against Syracuse on March 7.

In Williams, 36, Marquette hired a coach who is almost as much a character as McGuire, if McGuire had been from a small town in Texas instead of New York City. Williams drinks sweet tea, usually keeps a tin of chewing tobacco and a spit cup within reach, and arranges items on the desks in his campus and Bradley Center offices with military precision. He frequently begins practice at odd times, like 7:08 a.m. sharp, instead of 7 or 7:15. And his resourcefulness can be, well, peculiar.

Last Tuesday night, after a 79-67 home victory over Seton Hall, Williams’s players devoured almost all the postgame pizza before he could get to it, and left him nothing to eat from. So he loaded the last four cracker-crust slices into the handiest thing he could find: a souvenir dog dish left over by the Milwaukee Admirals, the American Hockey League team that also plays at the Bradley Center.

“They know I have certain issues, some of which they make fun of, some of which they know is just me and they won’t make fun of it,” Williams said. “They just allow me to continue to live with those issues.”

Williams’s players have come to accept his quirks, though some were not sure what to make of him when he joined Crean’s staff as an assistant before the 2007-8 season. Williams had just quit his first head coaching job, at the University of New Orleans, after one season, after stints as an assistant at five colleges in 12 years. (New Orleans is suing him for breach of contract.)

Some players, like point guard Dominic James, thought Williams’s nickname derived from his close-cropped hair. Lewis Orr, the former coach at Navarro College in Corsicana, Tex., for whom Williams worked as a student assistant, began calling him Buzz for his relentless energy around the gym. “He kind of recruited us,” Orr said in a telephone interview from his home in Texas.

Over the summer, Williams began Sunday night meetings with the players. He called them Life Lessons, and he broached nonbasketball topics as a way to build trust. When practice began, Williams’s devotion to numbers and statistics manifested itself almost daily, as he sought to quantify what he saw on video.

Opponents’ scouting reports are based on percentages and probabilities broken down by his staff. Turning to a page in his Seton Hall scouting binder, Williams documented by percentage how often the Pirates ran their favorite play, which player usually took the shot, and whether he shot more often coming around a screen or off the dribble.

“It’s been an adjustment for my players and for my staff even, because everything is number-derived,” he said. “We don’t ever say to our guys, hey now, he’s really good off catch-and-shoot. I want to know. So we have evidence to prove that.”

Orr, whom Williams hired as a consultant, sometimes kids him about this. “He doesn’t sleep much,” Orr said, “so he’s got a lot of time to run these numbers through his head all night long.” And guard Wesley Matthews said he would sometimes question Williams’s figures. “He’ll throw out a number, and then he’ll just come up with a percentage, and I’m like, I don’t think that’s really the percentage,” he said. “But we believe him. We trust him.”

Even critiques of Williams’s own team feature arcane statistics. Lacking height and an inside game, the Golden Eagles counter with tough defense and an up-tempo offense led by Matthews, Jerel McNeal (the team’s career scoring leader) and Lazar Hayward. All average at least 16 points a game.

“Our starting five averages one rebound per 7.7 minutes played,” Williams said. “That’s the only thing that gives us a chance, if we can guard and if we can get defensive rebounds. We can’t just fire up a bad shot, because we’re not getting it back. And we can’t give teams extra possessions when they’re on offense because we can’t rebound the ball.

“For us to be where we are today I think is a blessing. We’ve worked, but I think we’re built on the right things.”