What makes a basketball program consistently great?

Like most everyone else on the Inside Texas message board, I was struck with the first round performance by the Drake Bulldogs in the NCAA Tournament and glowing report by a rival coach on their head basketball coach Ben McCollum.

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For me, this was what really stood out:

“Point guard development: Ben McCollum is to college basketball what Andy Reid is to NFL football. Reid is widely considered the best QB coach developing Donovan McNabb, Alex Smith, and Pat Mahomes. If you think Bennett Stirtz is good for Drake, you should have seen McCollum’s point guard Trevor Hudgins (2x National POY) who signed and played with the Houston Rockets. Before Hudgins was National POY Justin Pitts. Simply put, McCollum always has the best point guard in the country. He develops them and they play the entire game.”

Andy Reid! I’ve heard of him!

You name a good Texas team from yesteryear that played compelling basketball and I’ll almost always name a corresponding point guard who made that team enjoyable to watch and effective on the floor. Obviously TJ Ford and DJ Augustin stand out in particular but even this last year’s team almost made something of themselves once Rodney Terry moved Tramon Mark to point guard in order to get better leadership at the head of the offense.

While future professional wings and big freaky forwards tend to get a lot of the headlines and interest, college basketball is ruled by teams who consistently churn out reliable guards.

The offensive line of college basketball

There are no consistently good programs in college football who don’t have a knack for developing and maintaining good offensive line play. Your offensive line sets the floor for what’s possible on offense, usually with their ability to execute consistent run blocking but often also with their capacity for pass protection and ensuring the quarterback can make a credible attempt down the field before being buried by pass-rushers.

The program could be recruiting freakish prospects like Kelvin Banks and Cameron Williams or they could be relying on evaluation and development like Mike Gundy used to do with Joe Wickline and Rob Glass at Oklahoma State. One way or another, every top program that sustains relative success year over year has a system for ensuring the big boys up front are always good enough to make the trains run on time offensively.

In college basketball that role is filled by the smallest guys on the floor, the guards and the point guard in particular.

Without good dribbling, passing, play-creation, and overall decision-making at the point you cannot be consistently good in college basketball. Even programs that routinely recruit NBA caliber basketball players who don’t hang around that long in the college game before going pro, such as Kansas, Duke, UCONN, or North Carolina, tend to rely on upperclassman guards of varying pro potential.

This year’s Duke Blue Devils have a pair of juniors in the backcourt helping to set the table for Cooper Flagg. It’d be easy to credit everything good about Duke to the highly hyped Flagg, but the veteran guard play is essential. Head coach Jon Scheyer knows it too, as he was the point guard for a National Championship team in 2010 when he was a senior on a team loaded with future pros.

UCONN has senior Hassan Diarra, who waited his turn the last few years behind upperclassmen Tristen Newton on the back-to-back championship teams.

Texas has not had good point guard play very often over the last decade plus.

A lost decade of point guard play

TJ Ford averaged 10.8 ppg as a freshman in 2001 for the Longhorns while adding 8.3 assists per game. In 2002 as a sophomore his scoring load increased to 15.0 ppg while he still dished out 7.7 apg for a team that went to the Final Four.

DJ Augustin came in for the 2006-07 season and scored 14.4 ppg while dealing 6.7 apg, often to freshman phenom Kevin Durant. In the following season, sans Durant, Augustin scored 19.2 ppg and averaged 5.8 apg on an elite eight team.

Here’s how point guard has looked since Shaka Smart took over for the 2015-16 season.

Year	Point guard	PPG	APG	Madness
2016	Isaiah Taylor (JR)	15.0	5.0	1st round exit
2017	Andrew Jones (FR)	11.4	3.5	Missed
2018	Matt Coleman (FR)	10.2	4.1	1st round exit
2019	Matt Coleman (SO)	9.8	3.4	Missed
2020	Matt Coleman (JR)	12.7	3.4	N/A
2021	Matt Coleman (SR)	13.2	4.0	1st round exit
2022	Marcus Carr (SR)	11.4	3.4	2nd round exit
2023	Marcus Carr (SR+)	15.9	4.1	Elite Eight
2024	Max Abmas (SR)	16.8	4.1	2nd round exit
2025	Jordan Pope (JR)	11.0	1.7	Play-in exit

In many of these seasons Texas actually split point guard duties between multiple “combo guards.” A combo guard is usually a player who isn’t a true point guard but is also not big or skilled enough to do consistent damage off the ball and on the wings. “Shortest guard” has too often been a more accurate descriptor for who was the primary on-ball facilitator for the Longhorns.

While some of the assist numbers for these guys were respectable, especially for the upperclassman Isaiah Taylor Smart inherited from Rick Barnes, the numbers never approached what Ford or Augustin offered. The actual on-court playmaking in key moments was always considerably short of that high standard.

During this lost decade of Texas basketball, the Longhorns had multiple NBA prospects at the center, forward, and wing positions. None of them did much for Texas in terms of consistent winning, particularly in the NCAA Tournament, because the point guard play wasn’t there to set a high floor.

McCollum’s knack for developing great point guards at Northwest Missouri State and now Drake makes him a pretty interesting option for the Longhorns. Any coach who’d effectively prioritize point guard evaluation, recruiting, and development would be a great choice for replacing Terry and produce a much more exciting on-court product than what Texas fans have endured for the last 10 years.

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Set a floor and you’ll see how high a Tre Johnson can take you.