Feeding Frenzy : Top Teams in the Country Are Running Wild as the Fast Break Is Suddenly Taking Over College Basketball

It’s not new--Claire Bee was doing it before the basketball was round--but it’s never been more popular.

Everywhere you look, teams are pushing the ball down the court in a kind of feeding frenzy. It’s frantic, breathless and fun. And everywhere.

Loyola Marymount, which apparently would run through plate glass to get to the basket, is averaging 110 points a game. Points Aplenty Oklahoma is averaging nearly 106. Seven other teams are averaging more than 90. Suddenly there are all these college teams--Iowa?--determined to make Showtime look about as lively as a funeral procession.

As mentioned, the fast break is hardly new. But nobody remembers it being this exaggerated or widespread or, more to the points, successful. “You look at the top 10 teams in scoring offense and compare that with their won-lost percentage,” suggests Iowa Coach Tom (93 per) Davis. “Now, take the top 10 in scoring defense and compare those.”

We look and compare: Of the top 10 in offense, 4 are among the top 10 in won-lost percentage. But only top-rated Temple, at 27-1, is represented from the scoring defense 10.

We’ve identified another trend, we’re sure of it--this is our job and we’re good at it (see: Vanishing Hook Shot). But to play safe, we check with ESPN’s Dick Vitale, famous basketball broadcaster.

“This is gonna be the style of the ‘90s,” he is saying, somewhat breathless himself. “It’s exciting, a thing of beauty, a show of freedom on the court, people expressing themselves. Let me put it this way: Bobby Knight thinks Oklahoma’s style is the game of the future.”

OK! Bobbo unleashes the Hoosiers! “Run, boys, run for your lives!” Thus is the 20th Century, and fast-break basketball, officially ushered in.

Until that future is upon us though, that will be the day when Dean Smith finally breaks in his Four Corners from Hell offense, we will look at the birth and persistence of this kind of basketball, an offense meant for players and fans, if not always coaches.

We will look first at Loyola Marymount, which is 27-3 with an offense that appears to be a series of random events. To watch the Lions play is to observe the mystery of particle physics; what physical laws apply here? They’re just running up and down, right?

To which Coach Paul Westhead reluctantly replies: Right.

Westhead, the man who coached the Lakers before his career began taking sharper turns than Mulholland Drive, is not unlike other fast-break coaches in that he insists upon a method to his madness.

“The incredible irony,” he is saying, “is that on the surface, it looks like anybody can do this. It’s fun and games. On the other hand, the players are so interrelated on every offensive occurrence that if not done correctly it can just blow up. There’s no margin for error.”

Still, Westhead admits that the system is born of an incredible simplicity. It might be hard to do, but it is not difficult to learn. He doesn’t just roll the ball out at practice, but he certainly doesn’t dwell on those dreaded X’s and O’s, either. You run, and you run all the time.

“There are very few things you have to say in a pregame talk,” he admits.

How about: “Run, boys. Run for your lives.”

Loyola Marymount has pushed this system to a remarkable extreme. In its last game, an ESPN timekeeper calculated that the Lions took a shot every 5.7 seconds. That is incredible when you take into account that they must also play defense. Of course, there are those that say they don’t play defense.

Vitale, who watched that game, says: “My observation is that they’re willing to give you the basket.”

Others complain that the Lions appear to wave the opponent through to their hoop, so impatient are they to run their own break. Westhead, the man who invented the box-and-none defense at LaSalle (a fifth man is left smirking in the backcourt while five opponents try to score on his four teammates) can hardly deny his team’s disposition. His team, after all, gives up more than 95 points a game. They’re not in the top 10 in scoring defense.

This is not for everybody, of course. If a coach is not doing a lot of real obvious coaching, it may appear that he is not coaching at all.

“Basketball is a game of control,” Westhead says. “The more control a coach has, the better his team is, that’s the thinking. Of course, other coaches set that standard.”

Davis, who used the fast break successfully at Stanford before taking it to Iowa, agrees that coaches “would rather control the game than win it, and with the fast break you do lose control to a certain degree.”

The modern day guru, the man Westhead and Davis both identify as their inspiration, is Sonny Allen, recently of Nevada Reno. Allen, now coaching the Las Vegas Silver Streaks in the International Basketball Assn., for players 6-4 and under, acknowledges the coach’s automatic bias against this helter-skelter offense. “Coaches have this belief that if you run, you’re not in control of the team. That’s false. You can have control. For some coaches, it’s an ego thing. Me, I like to win.”

Certainly it’s a matter of personality. Westhead, who saw Allen’s teams run at Old Dominion, liked it because it was a great equalizer.

“I was always looking for something that was very, very good,” he says. “So that if you did it correctly, it was so excellent that even if you were out-manned you could show up in their big arena with a grin on your face. At LaSalle, that in fact would happen. We’d show up with a smirk. ‘We got news for you. We have a system you will not believe.’ ”

For Westhead it was a way to remove all variables from the game. He had only to count on himself and his team.

Davis appreciated the aggressive aspect of it. Bill Mulligan, who usually runs a fast-break offense at UC Irvine, developed it as a junior college coach at Saddleback. It was an economic thing for him.

“I was trying to fill a gym,” he says. “We had been averaging about 15 people a game, but the year we led the country in scoring, we averaged about 2,000. It’s important to entertain, especially in Southern California. Maybe in Fresno, you can do whatever you want. You got a captive audience.”

That last was a pointed aside. Mulligan used to hate Boyd Grant’s measured pace at Fresno and once called it “vomit basketball.” He says, “They still shout that at me when we go up there.”

For Sonny Allen, running was an ideal offense because it was just so simple. He picked it up at Marshall in the late 50s and was just blown away by how fundamental basketball could be.

“It’s so specific,” he says. “Everybody has a role. It’s all by the numbers.”

In Allen’s case, it was like this. No. 1, the point guard always brought the ball down. The Nos. 2 and 3 men sprinted down the sides. The No. 4, the forward, and the No. 5 man, the center, trailed on each side.

“It’s just like in football,” he says. “Once you get the ball, you go in alignment.

“It’s easy to teach and in fact the system is better for the lesser athletes. You can win with lesser talent because the roles are more defined. And the players love it.”

That’s another thing: Coaches love to recruit to this system.

“This is what kids are born to play, nothing restricted,” Allen says. They still get up and down, like they do in summer ball back home, but here it’s in a system.”

Agrees Vitale: “One of the great attractions of basketball is that it’s a game that gives great freedom and expression. Most college coaching is over-coaching, to make it so complex. It restricts the athlete. This is what they’d be doing on the playground anyway.”

Davis reports that kids hardly ever tell a coach: “ ‘I’d sure like to play in your low-scoring, structured program, coach.’ Of course, sometimes they don’t realize how much work it is. The court’s only 90 feet long, but they’ve got to do it over and over. That’s why when we recruit we look for attitude as much as anything. If they don’t like to run, well, we can see that. And we stay away from them.”

So why, except for tradition, don’t more coaches use this kind of go-to-hell basketball, flat-out, burners on, crowd-pleasing, team-teasing fast break?

Well, sometimes it doesn’t work. And maybe, always, it doesn’t work quite well enough.

Davis points out that nobody has ever won a national championship with it. So we go to a man who won 10 of those in a row, John Wooden, to hear his qualms about the offense.

Now, keep in mind that Wooden ran what might be called West Coast fast break at UCLA. He had seen lots of it in the East and in fact came under the same spell Allen did at Marshall, where Cam Henderson might have originated it.

“Ours was a fast break only in comparison (to West Coast basketball),” Wooden says. “I was a fast-break coach but a controlled fast-break coach.”

He liked to see his team race down the court but didn’t always like to see it end with a shot.

“Certain of my players were not permitted to shoot except from certain points. We tried to run the fast break every time, but getting the ball down quickly doesn’t mean it has to end with a shot.”

In fact, it may lead to more set plays.

But that is not the only area Wooden differs on fast-break coaching. He also believes: “Defense usually makes a champion and, though I’m very fond of Paul Westhead, I would be greatly surprised if Loyola won it all.”

Wooden still believes that a more traditional offense, with a fast break that originates off a pressure defense, has the better chance of winning a championship. He points to Jerry Tarkanian, possibly the only coach to have it both ways.

Wooden says Tarkanian’s Runnin’ Rebels, a high-scoring fast break-minded team, may play just as good a brand of basketball as his zone-defense, slow-down Cal State Long Beach teams of years ago. “But his style at Long Beach State might have a better chance at a championship.”

In the meantime, the 45-second shot clock and the three-point play will be encouraging converts. Also, success in this National Collegiate Athletic Assn. tournament. As Davis says, “If Paul were to win the tournament, he might be surprised at how many clinics he could do.” Fan pressure may be another thing. In Southern California, it is not lost on some coaches that people like razzle-dazzle. It’s a hurry-up age we live in and maybe we like to watch hurry-up basketball. We still like to pass the time, see. We just don’t have that much of it. So run, boys. Run for your lives.