Penn State deep-dive immediately pays dividends for basketball
Penn State head coach Micah Shrewsberry already had a system in place.
Dividing the season into five-game segments, Shrewsberry gets a report of the team’s performance. New trends to compare with prior trends, the picture brings into focus what his Nittany Lions are doing well against what needs improvement.
Last month, that tradition took on new meaning.
Coming off an 80-64 loss at Michigan State, the Nittany Lions’ progress through the 2021-22 campaign took an abrupt stop. Shutting down team activities due to COVID-19 infections and prevention, Penn State’s game at VCU was canceled Dec. 18, then against Quinnipiac back at the Bryce Jordan Center Dec. 22, and finally, an outbreak for Delaware State closed the calendar year with a cancellation.
The gap between games, 22 days in all until Penn State’s 61-58 win over Indiana on Sunday at the BJC, wasn’t a complete loss, however.
Revisiting his typical approach, Shrewsberry and the Penn State staff went deep on the first 10 games of the season.
“I had an extended amount of time,” Shrewsberry said. “Instead of the normal couple of days that would have been off… if we would have played VCU then Quinnipiac, we would have only had about three days. So we would have gotten the numbers of how to fix some certain things, but maybe not the time to really deep dive into it.”
Shrewsberry’s experience was just the opposite.
With nothing but time to break down the film as the team remained apart, the normally condensed process took on a much broader scope.
“I got a chance to go back and watch all 10 games,” Shrewsberry said. “Even though I’ve seen them, maybe there’s something I’m missing. Maybe there’s something that we can get better at. So I watched all 10 games. I went through all the numbers.”
That process, he went on to explain, included taking the time to assign ownership for every point allowed defensively.
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A group now ranked No. 100 nationally (of 350 teams) allowing 65.2 points per game against 66.7 ppg scored, Shrewsberry said he sought to determine more deeply what went into the numbers.
“I went through and every point that the other team scored on us, I did an accountability sheet about who gave those points up. And why did they score?” he said. “If you had a bad closeout and it led to a drive and kick, open three, you got those points. I kind of went through that whole thing. You get a chance to see everything.”
On the back side of the effort, then, Penn State held the Hoosiers to just 58 points in the win.
The third-lowest points allowed by the Nittany Lions this season, topped only by a 54-point game for Wagner and Oregon State’s 45-point afternoon in Florida, the effort also represented the Hoosiers’ lowest output of the year. Against their 75.7 points scored per game, Indiana managed nearly 18 points less than their typical production.
Reflecting on the lengthy layoff, and the opportunity for introspection that came with it, Shrewsberry said the time was well-spent.
“Without the amount of time, I wouldn’t have been able to do that as deeply to look at that,” he said. “It was I guess a blessing and a curse in some ways that you don’t normally in the middle of the season get to go that deep into your team.
“You get a chance to do some things and look at some numbers, but to do the numbers and the film and everything else. I was making projects up, I was that bored.”
Penn State returns to action Wednesday when it faces Northwestern in Evanston (9 p.m. BTN).
