New coaches prepare for SEC play
Arkansas, A&M meet in league debut for Williams, Musselman
COLLEGE STATION — As with his colleagues at Vanderbilt, Arkansas and Alabama, coaching in the Southeastern Conference is all new to Texas A&M’s Buzz Williams.
That’s why the former Virginia Tech coach politely declined to opine Thursday when asked about the current state of SEC basketball.
“I’m not familiar with trends in years past,” Williams said. “I know bits and pieces, but how it relates to years past or how the media voted in the preseason, I don’t have enough time to study that part.”
Williams and most of his 13 peers crank up league play on Saturday. The most intriguing among the bunch is Vanderbilt, led by former NBA player Jerry Stackhouse.
“We don’t have a lot of upperclassmen on our roster right now,” Stackhouse said of the crew he inherited from the fired Bryce Drew, a former Rocket. “Everybody pretty much started with a clean slate.”
Vanderbilt hired Stackhouse, 45, following his brief stint as a Memphis Grizzlies assistant. Before that, he coached in the NBA’s developmental league and also worked in the broadcast booth following his retirement from the NBA in 2013.
The Commodores, who host SMU on Saturday in one of three non-conference games for SEC squads, are 8-4 in Stackhouse’s first go at coaching collegians.
“They’re a lot better than they were six months ago,” Stackhouse said of his players, 10 of whom are freshmen or sophomores. “There’s still another level we need to try and get to for us maybe to do something special that a lot of people wouldn’t expect us to do.”
Auburn, which made its first Final Four last season, sits atop the SEC standings entering league play with a 12-0 record. Surprising Arkansas, the Aggies’ opponent on Saturday, follows at 11-1 under Eric Musselman, a former NBA coach with Golden State and Sacramento.
Musselman was 110-34 over four seasons at Nevada from 2015-19 and made the NCAA Tournament his last three seasons with the Wolf Pack. Arkansas, which beat Rice 91-43 on Nov. 5, suffered its lone loss at Western Kentucky in overtime on Dec. 7.
Musselman replaced Mike Anderson, fired last year after eight seasons. Kentucky’s John Calipari, dean of SEC coaches, said he’s long admired Musselman’s approach.
“I expected them to play a different way and with a toughness and swagger,” Calipari said of the Razorbacks’ swift start. “He’s given freedom to his guards, who are their strength, and those kids are responding.”
Regarding Musselman’s penchant for playing a small lineup through a dozen games, Calipari said: “They’re playing small ball, but who cares how you play? It’s about winning, and guess what — they’re winning.”
All 14 of the league’s teams own winning records — with the Aggies cutting it closest at 6-5 — entering SEC play, and only No. 8 Auburn and No. 17 Kentucky are ranked about two months into the season.
The Wildcats, picked as usual by media covering the SEC to win the league, have started 9-3 with losses to Evansville, Utah and Ohio State. Kentucky has lost two of its last three games, but is coming off a 78-70 victory over rival and No. 7 Louisville on Saturday in Kentucky’s Rupp Arena, calming the masses in Lexington, Ky., and beyond.
“I coach at this place called Kentucky, where everything is life and death around (basketball),” Calipari said. “This isn’t college football, where, if you lose early, you’re done. What I’m trying to explain to my players is league play is totally different than nonconference play. … You can’t pout. You can’t be a baby here.”
A typically quippy Calipari added: “The great news about this job is we’ve got 4 million coaches, because that’s how many people we have in the state. But that’s all part of this job.”
That’s not the case for new Alabama coach Nate Oats, who took over for the departed Avery Johnson. Basketball is a distant second to football in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and Oats, hired from Buffalo, is under little pressure to win early. That’s good for Oats, considering Alabama is 7-5 and just ahead of A&M with SEC play tipping off.
“At least they just had their last football game (on Wednesday),” Oats half-kidded of the Crimson Tide’s 35-16 victory over Michigan in the Citrus Bowl. “At least while we were losing as many games as we lost, we didn’t have the full spotlight on us.”