One of sport’s most famous adages came from Herm Edwards during a mid-week press conference in 2002 when the coach was manning the sideline for the New York Jets.
“This is what’s great about sports,” Edwards began the famous rant with. “You play to win the game. You don’t play to just play it.”
Edwards was right: sports inherently have stakes. No matter the record, no matter the situation, there will be a loser and a winner. One side will be happy, the other not so much.
But maybe this isn’t true. Sure, it is a fact that all games will have a winner and a loser, but is it true that it always matters? Perhaps games can serve as something larger than themselves.
Enter college basketball.
For major-conference programs, there is no game without stakes. Wins are required, not requested. Losses lead to questions. Expectations change from school to school, but it doesn’t where you are if you lose games. A coach who loses, loses his job, and a coach who wins keeps it. Simple as that.
But for the little guys? Not so much.
Without the glamor, glitz and expectations of major-conference teams, smaller schools are able to focus on the bigger picture. Mike Davis, current Detroit Mercy head coach and former head coach at Texas Southern, UAB and Indiana, knows this well.
Davis explained one of the biggest differences between coaching at an Indiana or UAB compared to a Texas Southern or Detroit in February 2017 on Big Ten Network’s “A Taste of Coaching.” His career has been a strange one, running opposite of a traditional course by starting at Indiana to replace Bobby Knight in 2000 as Davis’s first head coaching job, heading to UAB next, moving to Texas Southern, and lastly accepting the Detroit position last June, providing Davis with a unique perspective.
“Coaching in the SWAC is different,” Davis said on the show. “My first game, we played Colorado. Three overtimes. We lost, and I’m feeling the same feeling I felt at Indiana and UAB (after a loss). My AD comes in and says, ‘Great game, you guys did a great job.’”
That moment helped Davis learn there’s a different side to college basketball, one where winning every game is neither required nor expected. Unlike at Indiana and UAB, Davis could tailor his coaching to the long haul at Texas Southern.
“This is the first job where the process is important and not the outcome in non-conference,” Davis explained. “Everyone can talk about the process, talk about the outcome, but in big-time basketball, they want to win every game. But in the SWAC, it’s more important for us to get better for our conference. If we go 1-13 in non-conference, it doesn’t matter. I can really coach the process.”
Davis said he intentionally schedules a very difficult non-conference slate laden with road games without worrying what his team’s record will be come early January. The experience his players get from playing in some of college basketball’s classic cathedrals and in front of five-figure attendances prepares them well for conference play and the conference tournament. As a team in a one-bid league, only outcomes from January through March matter.
“I can say I have the best job in the country because from November to January, I’m okay,” Davis said. “I have my friends text me when we’re 1-5 or 0-8, ‘Keep your head up.’ My head is high as it’s ever been. When you’re going through the drive thru, I walk into any restaurant because I understand the process is for us to be the best we can be in January.”
Now consider the results. In six seasons at Texas Southern, Davis compiled a 88-20 conference record, four NCAA Tournament appearances and one NIT appearance, four regular-season SWAC titles and never finished worse than second in conference. Davis is responsible for half of Texas Southern’s NCAA Tournament bids.
In Davis’s third season, his Tigers traveled to East Lansing to face No. 25 Michigan State for their fourth-straight road game. The team was 1-8 with losses at Indiana, Tennessee, SMU, Baylor, Florida and No. 8 Gonzaga by a combined 145 points, a 40-point drumming in Spokane the most recent result, not to mention a 86-62 blasting at Eastern Washington to open the season.
On Dec. 20, 2014, though, it was Texas Southern’s turn to leave the arena winners, earning a 71-64 overtime victory in the program’s first top 25 win since 1994.
“I know when January comes, we’re going to be able to compete because we played 13 non-conference games on the road,” Davis further explained on BTN. “We get a chance to play at a lot of arenas that 10 years from now, our players will be excited to tell their kids, ‘Hey, I played there. We didn’t win, but I played there.’ And when we beat Michigan State, it was like we had hit the powerball.”
Year after year, Davis’s Texas Southern teams played one of the country’s toughest schedules, and year after year, Davis’s Texas Southern teams played in the postseason. The records were never pretty: double digits losses every season and a 16-20 record in 2017-18. But did that matter when the Tigers were dancing?
In sports, you play to win the game. Unless you’re a Texas Southern or a Detroit. Perhaps, instead, you play to win the final game.
