Denver Post
air force men's basketball
The Princeton principle
Falcons coach utilizing 'top-secret' tactics learned in his college days
By Bill Briggs
Denver Post Sports Writer
Thursday, February 05, 2004 -
AIR FORCE ACADEMY - It's pretty. It's hypnotic. But admit it: You can't fathom for one buzzer-beatin' second how it's happening.
How a team that has averaged 18 losses a season since its last winning season (during the disco era) has boogied out to a 15-3 mark.
How the Air Force Falcons, fueled by the Princeton offense, are flat-out bamboozling taller and swifter squads.
And that's just how the Princeton fraternity likes it. No offense in sport has been more shrouded in secrecy, more safeguarded by its creators.
But maybe I can help.
I've been handed the keys to the Princeton offense, a giant-killer that bedazzles defenders with a relentless blur of shuffle cuts and backdoor passes, all typically capped by sneaky layups or snappy 3s. Think a bee swarm in baggy shorts.
Sure, you've caught Princeton's low-wire act before - five scurrying brainiacs who could barely grab the net gave tourney tough UCLA the big bounce in 1996, then did it to UNLV in 1998.
Now the sly little offense is stirring this long-yawning sector of the roundball world. Coach Joe Scott, a former Tigers point guard, has airlifted Air Force, while at least four Front Range prep teams are running "The Princeton."
For decades, former Tigers coach Pete Carril kept his invention cloaked like a Klingon spaceship. You knew it was there, you just couldn't get a fix on it. And when fellow coaches called for hints, Carril famously told his colleagues to go dunk themselves.
As Carril's former assistants and players landed head coaching gigs, they too shielded the offense's private parts from prying eyes. They gladly shared game tapes; they just wouldn't hand over the gold - how to link the dizzying array of offensive sets, phases and options.
"It's a tough story for us," says Scott, an assistant under Carril and Bill Carmody until he took the Air Force job in 2000. "People say, 'Ah, those Princeton guys think they're hot stuff.' No, we don't. This is basketball the way we learned it. And we're trying to win.
"Does Microsoft give its secrets away? Why is that lost on the basketball world?" Scott asks. "I've got my own job to do. I'm not trying to keep it from anybody. I've got my own worries and my own problems. I can't be solving yours."
But when Princeton, with its Ivy League academic standards and scholarship-free roster, knocks down the big boys, the secret is bound to get out. Since the late 1990s, two coaches beyond Princeton's inner circle - Jimmy Tillette at Samford University and Jim Burson at Division III Muskingum College - have cracked the code. They did it after devouring hours of videotape and scribbling hundreds of pages of notes.
Now, I needed to get to the chewy center of this hard-coated offense.
Totality key
I began by debriefing Tillette and Burson. Before revealing its core principles, the coaches described the Princeton attack in terms better suited for some Eastern religion rife with mesmerizing mantras.
Tillette: "The value is in its totality."
Burson: "It's like a painting by Michelangelo - you can look at it and copy it but it's always going to be different from the original."
Tillette: "We have achieved harmony. Joe Scott has taken it a step beyond. His offense is a melody."
Burson: "There's almost a mystical belief in it."
Next, I traveled to the Air Force Academy, to sit down with Scott in a windowless room of empty tables and empty chairs. He ran through some of the Princeton tenets - then took my notepad to sketch a low-post set along with its various cutting and passing options.
All told, the three coaches provided me with some valuable blueprints.
Got one week, an overhead projector and a vat of black coffee? I might be able to explain some of it.
Got time for one long paragraph?
"The Princeton" is built on hard cuts and bounce passes. The man guarding the ball typically triggers the entire offensive response. If the defense denies, go backdoor. If the defense slacks, fire the 3-pointer. The instant you get the ball, you must read and react; you typically have three options. The paint stays clear. Timing and court spacing are critical. The center plays high and low post, and must have the ability to shoot, pass and dribble. Sacramento's Chris Webber is the ideal big man for the offense. Shaquille O'Neal is not. All players must be fundamentally crisp, patient with the shot, generous with the ball and, above everything, smart.
Ah, but the true meat of the Princeton story isn't so much the diagrammed squiggles and dotted lines of its playbook. (Not that it has a playbook). The real plot is how the offense broke containment, how it seeped out of New Jersey and spread to dozens of other colleges and high schools, and to at least four NBA franchises. In an article last year, Sports Illustrated listed 101 teams now running the scheme.
Carril, now a Sacramento Kings assistant, told SI that his 50-year-old creation borrows from the five-man weave used at La Salle and Villanova, the shuffle cut first run at Albany and the dribble handoffs Red Holzman employed with the New York Knicks. (Carril declined to be interviewed for this story). But according to Scott, the attack has its deepest roots in the 1950s Boston Celtics offense which tapped center Bill Russell's all-around game.
At Princeton, Carril fused all the philosophies into a single, graceful dance.
And at Princeton it stayed. Until Tillette came along.
Study yields rewards
Months after Princeton stunned defending champ UCLA in the first round of the 1996 NCAA Tournament, the new Samford coach took his stack of scrawled notes north to a lunch meeting with Scott and then-coach Carmody. He had been phoning them incessantly, begging for a meeting - just a few minutes for the insiders to fill in the knowledge gaps Tillette couldn't plug from his desk in Birmingham, Ala.
"I was like a geek bearing fruit to show them I had done my homework," Tillette says.
"I'll be honest with you," Scott says. "He probably thought we were going to say, "Ah, you go over here and do this drill.' But the guy showed up and he had every single game that we ever played. He had stuff written down that maybe we didn't even know. ...
"Should we have given it to him? Should we not have? I don't know," Scott says. "Would the whole thing have spread like wildfire anyway? Probably, because our team was so good. We're the ones who caused all the problems because we gave it to Jimmy."
Tillette, whose Samford team went 24-6 in 1998-99, has been willing to repay that favor if other coaches make the same commitment to first study the system, on paper and in person.
"If someone takes the time to sit in the stands at my practice," Tillette says, "I'm more inclined to help (provide) the missing links, as it were."
Building a roadmap
But the real file-sharer has been Burson, coach of the tiny Muskingum College Muskies in New Concord, Ohio. As Tillette's team honed the offense in Alabama, Burson attended a 1998 basketball camp at Princeton and watched the attack up close. He left with 50 pages of notes but little understanding of what it all meant.
Then Burson unfolded a map of Ohio - Toledo in the northwest corner, Cleveland in the northeast, Marietta in the southeast, Cincinnati in the southwest and Columbus in the middle. It looked like an offensive set. He thought again about Princeton's cuts and passes, but now he thought geographically.
"Within those hundred patterns, I found out there's only three or four things they did. They went to Columbus, they went to Cleveland. I started grouping them together. I noticed they went from Columbus to Cleveland to Toledo, back to Cleveland. I
