MBB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[Pat Coleman]

Does anyone here have a winning/losing percentage for the teams that use the "system?"   It would be interesting to know if it is, in fact, successful . . . or just a funny experiment, a kind of fanciful and bizarre outlier. 

I surely don't ever claim "Hall of Fame" status here, so will leave all the details and knowledge of the "system" and its recent history to all of you.  I only dip in and out of the board randomly and infrequently now.

Happy holidays to all.  Let's hope somehow we have a season starting in January, though it looks extremely unlikely to me.

IWU'70

On D3hoops.com it's very easy to find year-by-year W/L records, and position in conf standings, for Grinnell and Greenville.

Greenville finished 2nd in the SLIAC last year. 

Grinnell finished 4th in the MWC.

And even so, rather than just a raw finish, consider whether those programs would be as successful if they didn't use The System.

[SpringSt7]

Does anyone here have a winning/losing percentage for the teams that use the "system?"   It would be interesting to know if it is, in fact, successful . . . or just a funny experiment, a kind of fanciful and bizarre outlier. 

I surely don't ever claim "Hall of Fame" status here, so will leave all the details and knowledge of the "system" and its recent history to all of you.  I only dip in and out of the board randomly and infrequently now.

Happy holidays to all.  Let's hope somehow we have a season starting in January, though it looks extremely unlikely to me.

IWU'70

On D3hoops.com it's very easy to find year-by-year W/L records, and position in conf standings, for Grinnell and Greenville.

Greenville finished 2nd in the SLIAC last year. 

Grinnell finished 4th in the MWC.

And even so, rather than just a raw finish, consider whether those programs would be as successful if they didn't use The System.

This is really the whole point of The System. Equate it to the service academies running the option in college football, or maybe some of the schools that run the Air Raid. Trying to find a way to get more out of your team than the individual talent allows for.

[Ryan Scott (Hoops Fan)]

If you talk to System coaches who've really committed to it, the point is maximizing fun.  They get as many guys as they can onto the floor for meaningful minutes and guys get to take (and sometimes make) shots.  Both Greenville and Grinnell had some real success early on - the question is, once the conference adjusts and figures out how to play against it, does that success continue.  With Grinnell, they sort of regressed a bit.  After the initial wave, they had their best success when they had above average talent.

The challenge for a top team to switch to something like this is depth.  If you've got five guys who are significantly better than the rest (and most of their opponents), you'd like them to play as many minutes as they can.  When Grinnell had John Grotberg and Dave Arseneault Jr playing, those guys got significantly more than "typical" System minutes (closer to 30 per game than 20).  They were taking extra shifts and basically getting on the floor as soon as they had caught their breath.

The System works best with 15 relatively interchangable guys - which lends itself to programs that aren't typically in the running for the very best basketball players.

[hickory_cornhusker]

If you talk to System coaches who've really committed to it, the point is maximizing fun.  They get as many guys as they can onto the floor for meaningful minutes and guys get to take (and sometimes make) shots.  Both Greenville and Grinnell had some real success early on - the question is, once the conference adjusts and figures out how to play against it, does that success continue.  With Grinnell, they sort of regressed a bit.  After the initial wave, they had their best success when they had above average talent.

The challenge for a top team to switch to something like this is depth.  If you've got five guys who are significantly better than the rest (and most of their opponents), you'd like them to play as many minutes as they can.  When Grinnell had John Grotberg and Dave Arseneault Jr playing, those guys got significantly more than "typical" System minutes (closer to 30 per game than 20).  They were taking extra shifts and basically getting on the floor as soon as they had caught their breath.

The System works best with 15 relatively interchangable guys - which lends itself to programs that aren't typically in the running for the very best basketball players.

This led to the cliche on MWC webcasts: "Another line change for Grinnell."

[Gregory Sager]

Does anyone here have a winning/losing percentage for the teams that use the "system?"   It would be interesting to know if it is, in fact, successful . . . or just a funny experiment, a kind of fanciful and bizarre outlier. 

I surely don't ever claim "Hall of Fame" status here, so will leave all the details and knowledge of the "system" and its recent history to all of you.  I only dip in and out of the board randomly and infrequently now.

Happy holidays to all.  Let's hope somehow we have a season starting in January, though it looks extremely unlikely to me.

IWU'70

On D3hoops.com it's very easy to find year-by-year W/L records, and position in conf standings, for Grinnell and Greenville.

Greenville finished 2nd in the SLIAC last year. 

Grinnell finished 4th in the MWC.

Closer to home, since the CCIW women's basketball board is the other board that iwu70 follows, is the fact that North Central's women's basketball team used the Arseneault System under former head coach Michelle Roof from the 2012-13 season thru the final season of her NCC tenure in 2017-18.

Those were the days when Lucas's voice would be worn out by constantly making "THREEEEEE!" calls over the P.A. in the airplane hangar on a Saturday night before the men's game had even started.

[GU1999]

Does anyone here have a winning/losing percentage for the teams that use the "system?"   It would be interesting to know if it is, in fact, successful . . . or just a funny experiment, a kind of fanciful and bizarre outlier. 

I surely don't ever claim "Hall of Fame" status here, so will leave all the details and knowledge of the "system" and its recent history to all of you.  I only dip in and out of the board randomly and infrequently now.

Happy holidays to all.  Let's hope somehow we have a season starting in January, though it looks extremely unlikely to me.

IWU'70

Greenville's league record in the 5 seasons prior to implementing the System from 2010 - 2015:  43 - 41 with zero top two finishes
Greenville's league record in the 5 seasons subsequent to implementing the System from 2015 - 2020: 66-24 with 5 top two finishes (including ties)

Is it fun? Yes.  Is player participation way up? Yes.  Does the tiny school hoops program have more eyeballs on it?  Absolutely, Yes.  Is any of this good for the small school in Southern IL?  1000% yes.
 
But, from a pure basketball perspective, it was the undoubtedly right strategy in order for more winning in Greenville.  It even led to GU's first NCAA appearance.

[Gregory Sager]

Greenville's league record in the 5 seasons prior to implementing the System from 2010 - 2015:  43 - 41 with zero top two finishes)
Greenville's league record in the 5 seasons subsequent to implementing the System from 2015 - 2020: 66-24 with 5 top two finishes (including ties)

Is it fun? Yes.  Is player participation way up? Yes.  Does the tiny school hoops program have more eyeballs on it?  Absolutely, Yes.  Is any of this good for the small school in Southern IL?  1000% yes.
 
But, from a pure basketball perspective, it was the undoubtedly right strategy in order for more winning in Greenville.  It even led to GU's first NCAA appearance.  Although the 95-96 team (still on probation with dIII) and the 97-98 team (didn't send conf tourney winner) would go under current rules.

Yes, but Ryan's take on the effect that implementing the Arseneault System has on a program is accurate:

If you talk to System coaches who've really committed to it, the point is maximizing fun.  They get as many guys as they can onto the floor for meaningful minutes and guys get to take (and sometimes make) shots.  Both Greenville and Grinnell had some real success early on - the question is, once the conference adjusts and figures out how to play against it, does that success continue.  With Grinnell, they sort of regressed a bit.  After the initial wave, they had their best success when they had above average talent.

Grinnell's run the System for almost thirty years now, so the Pioneers as a program have a track record that is more indicative of the long-term success (or lack thereof) of the System than does Greenville. Also, since each league has different dynamics -- what works or doesn't work for Grinnell in the MWC doesn't always correlate to Greenville in the SLIAC -- it's best to expand the comparisons beyond those two schools when examining the long-term results of System use. That's one reason why I brought up Michelle Roof's use of the System as the coach of the North Central women's program. (The other reason is that the Illinois Wesleyan fan who brought up the subject here in the first place also frequents the CCIW women's board.) You can see Michelle Roof's results running the System at North Central here, in the year-by-year records of the Cardinals.

She took a program that for a decade and a half had typically hovered around .500 overall, with a few dead-end seasons here and there, and (once she had the System up and running after a couple of mulligan seasons of constructing the necessary jumbo-sized roster and training her players) ... kept them hovering around .500 overall. The exception was one glorious season of success, 2014-15, in which the Cardinals went 22-6, finished second in the CCIW to Wheaton in both the regular season and in the CCIW tourney, and then qualified as a Pool C entrant to the dance, where the Cards lost in the opening round to UW-Oshkosh by five on a neutral court. That season remains one of only two instances over the past three decades in which North Central has finished above .500 in CCIW play in women's basketball, the other outlier being an 8-6 record in 1999-00.

By the end of her time at NCC, the rest of the CCIW's coaches had learned how to effectively deal with the System, and, since Coach Roof wasn't seeing the dividends of the alleged appeal that the System has for attracting prospects in terms of her actual recruiting results, NCC regressed to mediocrity for two years and then, with her roster depleted by injuries and an insufficient recruiting inflow, she modified it dramatically in terms of who got how much floor time in her final season, in which NCC went 5-20. Then she was gone, and the new coach immediately abandoned the System altogether.

As is the case with Greenville, the NCC women's basketball program used the System for less than a decade, so that has to qualify any conclusions that one draws about its success or lack thereof as a result. Again, Grinnell and the thirty years it's used the System under the Arseneaults is the gold standard for long-term analysis of the System's relative success.

For further comparison purposes, I would look at Redlands and its use of the System under Gary Smith (who spent a year as Dave Arseneault's assistant at Grinnell) back in the 2000s. Again, it was in place for a relatively short period of time and saw a limited amount of success in the W-L department (although the Bulldogs annually challenged Grinnell during that era in terms of who would lead D3 in scoring every season). The Olivet Nazarene women's program used the System for a long time as well.

The more data points you have, the more informed your conclusion.

[GU1999]

My conclusion was "But, from a pure basketball perspective, it was the undoubtedly right strategy in order for more winning in Greenville."

The best facts to support my conclusion are the facts directly attributable to the before and after success of the actual program at issue.  I say that Greenville's recent league success is directly related to its shift to the System.  No review of Gary Smith's Redlands teams or Porter's ONU teams or even Arseneault's Grinnell teams would be more helpful to my conclusion than the Greenville data that features the same head and assistant coaches for all ten year, roughly the same budget amount, same conference opponents, and a clearly defined switch in playing philosophy.  My point stands as previously enunciated. 

If my "conclusion" was that the implementation of the System will always be the best for Greenville because it has worked for five years OR that everyone should run the System because Greenville has had five years of success, your condescending point about more data equals better analysis, might make sense. 

As for Ryan's point, I didn't disagree with him at all.

[lmitzel]

Does anyone here have a winning/losing percentage for the teams that use the "system?"   It would be interesting to know if it is, in fact, successful . . . or just a funny experiment, a kind of fanciful and bizarre outlier. 

I surely don't ever claim "Hall of Fame" status here, so will leave all the details and knowledge of the "system" and its recent history to all of you.  I only dip in and out of the board randomly and infrequently now.

Happy holidays to all.  Let's hope somehow we have a season starting in January, though it looks extremely unlikely to me.

IWU'70

On D3hoops.com it's very easy to find year-by-year W/L records, and position in conf standings, for Grinnell and Greenville.

Greenville finished 2nd in the SLIAC last year. 

Grinnell finished 4th in the MWC.

Closer to home, since the CCIW women's basketball board is the other board that iwu70 follows, is the fact that North Central's women's basketball team used the Arseneault System under former head coach Michelle Roof from the 2012-13 season thru the final season of her NCC tenure in 2017-18.

Those were the days when Lucas's voice would be worn out by constantly making "THREEEEEE!" calls over the P.A. in the airplane hangar on a Saturday night before the men's game had even started.

Ah yes... my prime. That, or possibly the greatest team-PA announcer combo ever (because The System was right in my wheelhouse. I think one year I got 159 THREEEEEEEEE calls. That I still have a voice is nothing short of a miracle.

[mThat's one reason why I brought up Michelle Roof's use of the System as the coach of the North Central women's program. (The other reason is that the Illinois Wesleyan fan who brought up the subject here in the first place also frequents the CCIW women's board.) You can see Michelle Roof's results running the System at North Central here, in the year-by-year records of the Cardinals.

She took a program that for a decade and a half had typically hovered around .500 overall, with a few dead-end seasons here and there, and (once she had the System up and running after a couple of mulligan seasons of constructing the necessary jumbo-sized roster and training her players) ... kept them hovering around .500 overall. The exception was one glorious season of success, 2014-15, in which the Cardinals went 22-6, finished second in the CCIW to Wheaton in both the regular season and in the CCIW tourney, and then qualified as a Pool C entrant to the dance, where the Cards lost in the opening round to UW-Oshkosh by five on a neutral court. That season remains one of only two instances over the past three decades in which North Central has finished above .500 in CCIW play in women's basketball, the other outlier being an 8-6 record in 1999-00.

By the end of her time at NCC, the rest of the CCIW's coaches had learned how to effectively deal with the System, and, since Coach Roof wasn't seeing the dividends of the alleged appeal that the System has for attracting prospects in terms of her actual recruiting results, NCC regressed to mediocrity for two years and then, with her roster depleted by injuries and an insufficient recruiting inflow, she modified it dramatically in terms of who got how much floor time in her final season, in which NCC went 5-20. Then she was gone, and the new coach immediately abandoned the System altogether.

That 2014-15 team is probably my favorite out of all the teams I've gotten to announce for. The chemistry of that group was probably the best I've ever been around, but that was combined with the best collective talent the team had during the System years. Their guard pool was super deep, Tess Godhardt was destroying everyone on both ends of the floor, which allowed the team to truly press with four and have your 5 play safety... and when your 5's are the human block party that was Jamie Cuny and master of drawing charges in Anita Sterling, most opponents had a bad time. That senior class never got fully replaced, and it's part of why they never repeated that season.

[Ryan Scott (Hoops Fan)]

Does anyone here have a winning/losing percentage for the teams that use the "system?"   It would be interesting to know if it is, in fact, successful . . . or just a funny experiment, a kind of fanciful and bizarre outlier. 

I surely don't ever claim "Hall of Fame" status here, so will leave all the details and knowledge of the "system" and its recent history to all of you.  I only dip in and out of the board randomly and infrequently now.

Happy holidays to all.  Let's hope somehow we have a season starting in January, though it looks extremely unlikely to me.

IWU'70

On D3hoops.com it's very easy to find year-by-year W/L records, and position in conf standings, for Grinnell and Greenville.

Greenville finished 2nd in the SLIAC last year. 

Grinnell finished 4th in the MWC.

Closer to home, since the CCIW women's basketball board is the other board that iwu70 follows, is the fact that North Central's women's basketball team used the Arseneault System under former head coach Michelle Roof from the 2012-13 season thru the final season of her NCC tenure in 2017-18.

Those were the days when Lucas's voice would be worn out by constantly making "THREEEEEE!" calls over the P.A. in the airplane hangar on a Saturday night before the men's game had even started.

Really, on the women's side of things, it should be known as the Bunky Harkleroad system.  He's currently at Sacramento State, but he adapted the System for women at Berea (pre-d3 days) and was also at Glenville State in WV.  Both men's and women's coaches I've talk to credit him with real adaptations that make the System more than just a tweak.

I also failed to mention that David Arseneault Jr, now the coach at Grinnell is really not running the System anymore.  They've adapted some of the principles and combined NBA analytics work, which makes their current system a lot more like the Houston Rockets of recent years - maximizing layups and threes and far more worried about spacing.  I doubt he'd ever say they're not doing what made them famous, but it's really not functioning on the same principles anymore.  Greenville's as close to what the System was designed to be as you'll find anywhere.

[Gregory Sager]

My conclusion was "But, from a pure basketball perspective, it was the undoubtedly right strategy in order for more winning in Greenville."

The best facts to support my conclusion are the facts directly attributable to the before and after success of the actual program at issue.  I say that Greenville's recent league success is directly related to its shift to the System.  No review of Gary Smith's Redlands teams or Porter's ONU teams or even Arseneault's Grinnell teams would be more helpful to my conclusion than the Greenville data that features the same head and assistant coaches for all ten year, roughly the same budget amount, same conference opponents, and a clearly defined switch in playing philosophy.  My point stands as previously enunciated. 

If my "conclusion" was that the implementation of the System will always be the best for Greenville because it has worked for five years OR that everyone should run the System because Greenville has had five years of success, your condescending point about more data equals better analysis, might make sense. 

As for Ryan's point, I didn't disagree with him at all.

You read condescension into the post where none was intended.

That aside, I understood that you were talking about Greenville and Greenville alone in terms of assessing the success of the System. I was simply cautioning you that five years is not a very long time, and that, as Ryan said, Grinnell similarly crested during the early stretch of its time with the System (the Pioneers went to the D3 tourney for the first time ever a mere four years after Arseneault the Elder instituted the System) and then tailed off a bit. An assessment a few years from now, that has more data to consider, might lead you to reassess if in that time Greenville doesn't have as much success as it is having now within the SLIAC.

Of course, I hedged my post a bit by saying that the MWC and the SLIAC are different animals, so a direct one-to-one comparison may not be sufficient, anyway. I'll further hedge it now by saying that George Barber may simply be better at recruiting for the System than either of the two Arseneaults, or Gary Smith, or Michelle Roof, or Doug Porter. I look at the players that he's bringing into this tiny and relatively unknown school in a rural village an hour outside of St. Louis -- players from all across the country, particularly the southeastern states and California -- and I'm impressed not only by his results but by how he's managed to go about getting them.

[Gregory Sager]

Does anyone here have a winning/losing percentage for the teams that use the "system?"   It would be interesting to know if it is, in fact, successful . . . or just a funny experiment, a kind of fanciful and bizarre outlier. 

I surely don't ever claim "Hall of Fame" status here, so will leave all the details and knowledge of the "system" and its recent history to all of you.  I only dip in and out of the board randomly and infrequently now.

Happy holidays to all.  Let's hope somehow we have a season starting in January, though it looks extremely unlikely to me.

IWU'70

On D3hoops.com it's very easy to find year-by-year W/L records, and position in conf standings, for Grinnell and Greenville.

Greenville finished 2nd in the SLIAC last year. 

Grinnell finished 4th in the MWC.

Closer to home, since the CCIW women's basketball board is the other board that iwu70 follows, is the fact that North Central's women's basketball team used the Arseneault System under former head coach Michelle Roof from the 2012-13 season thru the final season of her NCC tenure in 2017-18.

Those were the days when Lucas's voice would be worn out by constantly making "THREEEEEE!" calls over the P.A. in the airplane hangar on a Saturday night before the men's game had even started.

Really, on the women's side of things, it should be known as the Bunky Harkleroad system.  He's currently at Sacramento State, but he adapted the System for women at Berea (pre-d3 days) and was also at Glenville State in WV.  Both men's and women's coaches I've talk to credit him with real adaptations that make the System more than just a tweak.

I also failed to mention that David Arseneault Jr, now the coach at Grinnell is really not running the System anymore.  They've adapted some of the principles and combined NBA analytics work, which makes their current system a lot more like the Houston Rockets of recent years - maximizing layups and threes and far more worried about spacing.  I doubt he'd ever say they're not doing what made them famous, but it's really not functioning on the same principles anymore.  Greenville's as close to what the System was designed to be as you'll find anywhere.

Point(s) taken ... although I suspect that you really just wanted to post the name "Bunky Harkleroad."

[Dave 'd-mac' McHugh]

Let's also remember Redlands. Under Gary Smith who ran the System on the west coast, they had a smattering of success. And as I understand it, Smith ran a similar style System as Grinnell ran though I can't remember who started what first.

But again, the goals of those who utilize "The System" are different depending on the coach and the program. Muhlenberg women ran it for a few years, but if you talk to their coach he will admit he didn't have the players nor was he getting the players so he wanted something fun just tp keep everyone involved. That changed when recruiting started to become more successful and he got, in particular, one enormous talent ... he went back to more "normal" type systems and continues to this day.

[Pat Coleman]

Gregory remembered Redlands and mentioned them and Gary Smith above.

Back in the day, Westminster (Pa.) was also one of the program that gave this a shot.

[Dave 'd-mac' McHugh]

Gregory remembered Redlands and mentioned them and Gary Smith above.

Back in the day, Westminster (Pa.) was also one of the program that gave this a shot.

I thought I read it but my brain has been mush.

I totally forgot about Westminster!