From January:
https://theathletic.com/762393/2019...t-the-buffalo-coachs-present-is-pretty-great/
https://theathletic.com/762393/2019...t-the-buffalo-coachs-present-is-pretty-great/
The future of Nate Oats is TBD, but the Buffalo coach’s present is pretty great
Brian Hamilton Jan 16, 2019
AMHERST, N.Y. — Nate Oats is a little late to Alumni Arena, walking through the Buffalo men’s basketball office doors at a few minutes after 11 a.m., a backpack slung over his shoulder and a massive Yeti mug of ice water in hand. A short night has spilled into a busy morning. He went to bed around 1 a.m. after rewatching his team set a school record for points scored in a conference game that evening, and his wife, Crystal, woke up with a migraine. When the alarm sounded at 5:45, it was left to Dad to jump into action and rouse 14-year-old daughter, Lexie, to prepare for school. This is how Nate Oats began another day of living the dream.
Lexie used to be able to walk to school. But when the Oatses shopped real estate last year, they fell hard for a 115-year-old house on the opposite side of Grand Island, a Tudor with original woodwork, a coach house and a boat dock. The relocation meant Lexie would have to bus to school. It turns out she’s the second stop on the route. So she gets ready and meets her dad downstairs for a warm ride to the end of a long driveway on cold mornings, where the two await a 6:38 pickup. It’s often a hectic dash to the finish. Today, Lexi opts to wear sandals and walks outside and steps into a puddle. Dad wonders why she can’t just wake up a minute earlier and find some shoes.
An hour later, Jocie and Brielle, the fourth- and first-graders, have to depart as well. Oats returns inside to wake them up and make their breakfast. Sometimes it’s just cereal, sometimes pancakes with syrup and whipped cream. This time it’s scrambled eggs, their favorite. He dresses them and does their hair — really, ponytail is the only choice — and eventually they, too, are on their way. From there, Oats sneaks some rest and watches video until Crystal sleeps off the headache, and then he heads into the office. He likes when the job permits him to be an attentive father and husband, when he can do the breakfasts and Wednesday date nights and life seems normal. And it’s worth savoring these moments. They may be harder to come by if things keep going the way they are.
Five and a half years ago, Nate Oats was a math teacher and a high school coach outside of Detroit. He’s now in charge of the best mid-major basketball team in the country, a battle-worn, swaggering 16th-ranked outfit with legitimate aspirations of not only reaching another NCAA Tournament but also staying in it for a while. And when you’re a forward-thinking 44-year-old with a history of doing more with less, and you appear headed to your third tournament in four years at a place such as Buffalo, beating multiple big-name schools along the way, well, you probably will be a person big-name schools want to hire.
So Oats may leave. He may stay and try to build Buffalo into the next mid-major that grows into a national power. For the moment, he sits on an office couch wearing a school-issued hoodie with BLUE printed on the right sleeve and COLLAR on the left, and the shape of what dream he chooses is still evolving. “I love it here,” Oats says. “I don’t really want to move. I’d love to be able to continue to coach a top-25 team. So if we can keep it at that…”
The Nate Oats origin story is less pertinent than where he is now and what he is accomplishing and where that might carry him next. It is also too pertinent to ignore because if you want to know who he is and what he is capable of wherever he goes, it is a story you must understand.
“I like to deal with all types of different people,” Oats says, leaning back and snacking on some mixed nuts. “Being a high school coach helps you in dealing with parents. It helps me with recruiting because for 11 years I was on the other side. I had 18 kids that played Division I, so I got to see really good recruiters come in that were really personable, great people. I got to see arrogant pricks come in, and I never wanted to be that guy. I got to see the guys that come in, they kiss my butt as the head coach and ignore my assistants and act like they weren’t even there, weren’t human beings. Well, that doesn’t work either because my assistants are working those kids out every day. So you get to see what works and what doesn’t and build relationships with people. It’s not just the kid. It’s his parents and his coach and his assistant coach and his trainer and whoever it may be. There’s a lot of stuff I learned. It’s not the most conventional route to get where I’m at, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
For the unfamiliar, this is how it goes: He grew up in Watertown, Wisc., 50 miles west of Milwaukee, and by high school he knew he wasn’t good enough to count on playing basketball for a career. He figured the path to coaching started by playing at Maranatha Baptist, the Division III school in his hometown, and then serving as an assistant there. In 2000 he moved on to Wisconsin-Whitewater’s staff, where he supplemented a D-III assistant’s income by teaching math at Watertown High School while also pursuing a master’s and running stat labs at the University of Wisconsin. Some days, he drove from his apartment outside of Madison to Watertown to Whitewater to the Milwaukee area to recruit and then back home, a round trip of potentially 200-plus miles. He did not need a math degree to understand this did not add up for the long haul.
But he did need the math degree for what he apprised as his next step; he assumed he had to teach to coach, and not every school had math teachers who could run a basketball team. When the Romulus (Mich.) High job opened in 2002, the school left itself wiggle room in its search by listing openings for virtually every teacher spot except physical education. Oats applied off a tip, taught something of a dry-run math class on his visit and got the gig that afternoon, ultimately winning 222 games across 11 seasons.
It was enough to be a high school coach, but that didn’t mean high school basketball was enough. Every year, Oats and his friend Josh Baker tried to visit an NBA training camp or a college program to observe and gather ideas. In 2010, they reached out to Danny Hurley, who had just taken the Wagner job. A byproduct, Oats hoped, would be picking the brains of the entire Hurley clan: Danny, naturally; Bobby, who’d joined his brother as an assistant; and Bob Sr., the legendary Hall of Fame coach at St. Anthony High School in Jersey City, N.J. As a kid, Oats worked a paper route to earn enough money to buy his own TV so he could watch college basketball while the rest of the family dug into “Wheel of Fortune” or “The A-Team,” and he knew all about the Hurleys.
The visit never materialized. But Danny and Bobby did recruit some of Oats’ players at Romulus, most notably future Rhode Island star E.C. Matthews. As a result, Bobby Hurley received a first-hand look at how Oats operated. Romulus High practices were structured and high-tempo. No wasted time or motion. It reminded him of a college practice. When Bobby took the Buffalo job in 2013, he contacted Oats. After a phone conversation and a follow-up interview at the Final Four, he offered Oats his break at the college level.
“You can immediately see his passion for the game,” Bobby Hurley says, speaking by phone during a northern California swing with his Arizona State team. “I had never been a head coach at that point, so having a guy on my (Buffalo) staff that had head coaching experience was important. When I talked to him at the Final Four, I could tell he was passionate about wanting to get into college coaching. I knew it was going to be tough to be successful at Buffalo, and I needed someone who had the same energy I had.”
Of greater interest to anyone with a men’s basketball coaching job to fill this spring, of course, will be who Oats has become in four-plus seasons at Buffalo. The 27 wins last season and the emphatic drumming of fourth-seeded Arizona in the NCAA Tournament issued a revised statement about the program’s relevance; the 15-1 start to this season, featuring triumphs at West Virginia and Syracuse, has reinforced it.
What everyone can expect from Nate Oats, and the basketball program he runs, has become a very germane discussion.
In conversations, Oats appears to be a very regular human. He’s easygoing and seemingly low-maintenance. He happily shares details of a weight-loss competition with his staff and shows off the gift cards at stake, and he accepts life hacks such as how to use a pizza cutter for his kids’ pancakes. Some Midwest austerity shines through when Oats admits to chiding players who don’t finish what they take at team meals; he tells them they must have grown up rich, because he couldn’t leave food on the plate as a kid. Any assumptions you make based on this information is at your own risk, though. After a few days at Alumni Arena, it’s evident this is no guileless proprietor of a corner-store operation. There is bombast here. There is an urgency to beat everyone at everything, badly, and a healthy presumption about the ability to do so.
It’s crystallized once you draw in close. Only then do you notice the serrated edges. “You’ll see Nick Saban go crazy when (Alabama is) up three touchdowns in the fourth quarter,” Oats says. “Well, that’s what’s starting to irritate me. We’re up 28, for instance, at St. Bonaventure. We’re supposed to win that game by 35 to 40. Well, we don’t. We won it by 18 because we don’t keep our foot on the gas pedal.”
There are, as Oats calls them, various “non-negotiables” in how his players must perform on the floor. Some fall under the general umbrella of effort, of a workmanlike approach to the game; this is why the assistants wear mechanics’ shirts while they warm up the team before a game, and why one player is rewarded with a blue hard hat for accruing the most points for tips, floor dives, etc., in any contest. Some are more specific, such as squaring up an opponent in a defensive stance and being in constant communication with teammates on the floor, or heeding attention to detail, lest you be penalized one way or another for a lack of concentration.
Not long into practice on the day before a Jan. 9 game against Toledo, Oats stands under the basket with his arms folded and his eyes fixed on his rotation players running through the proper way to defend the Rockets’ sets. It is not a walkthrough. Each sequence has meaning, and each movement must adhere to the program principles. “How in the hell are you going to guard that without talking?” he asks his starters after a bucket by the scout team. “None of you said a word.”
Practice segments to follow, and sometimes all practice segments, are scored as competitions. Point values are assigned to made shots and stops. First side to eight wins, and the losers do push-ups. (Typically it’s a sprint, but the staff tries to save players’ legs before games.) The victory only counts, though, if one of the players on the winning side hits a free throw to seal it. Oats reckons there is no way to ensure game-speed effort without consequence. So shortly before 1 p.m., he sets up two large green cones at half court. He tells a defender to place his left foot on the spot in the floor where poles are inserted to support volleyball nets. The defender can’t leave until a ball-handler, getting a pass from Oats with a running start, passes the cones. And then it’s four-on-four with teammates waiting near the basket.
As Bulls star C.J. Massinburg begins to chase a dribbler toward the basket, Oats whistles the action dead. “Plus-one gold,” he tells the staffer doing the scoring. “C.J. left like 18 steps too early.”
It’s instructive to remember that this is, in fact, intentionally a lighter workout. The competition can be much more acute when there is more time between games, when Oats separates his roster into even-strength units as opposed to top rotation players facing the scout team.
And, yes, especially on those days, there is talking. And, yes, the head coach wants it that way.
“To a point,” Oats says with a smile. “But I like it. I want there to be an edge. I want them to leave practice and go into the locker room and still be talking trash to each other. If a guy gets his butt kicked, he’s going to come in and get shots up [that night], so he doesn’t get drilled again tomorrow.”
On this somewhat lighter afternoon, the Buffalo coach still doesn’t hesitate to note that his starters aren’t playing hard enough when they lose two segments in a row. When a pass sails into the seats during a fast-break drill, Oats is incredulous, reminding the group that they’re supposed to be getting better at things, not worse. When the rate of missed free throws exceeds the makes, he tells players to come in at night and shoot 100 times from the line. “If that ain’t enough,” Oats advises, “shoot 500.” He raises the same rhetorical question regularly during practice — “How does that happen?” — as if Buffalo’s core principles are so self-evident and fundamental that it is unfathomable to think anyone would mess them up. But there is a method to all of it.
The Bulls play fast and aggressively. They’ve likewise accepted a high standard for execution, despite the pace, and hold themselves to it. At one point in practice, Massinburg executes a terrific drive into traffic and gets off a shot that touches every part of the rim before falling out. It is, really, a spectacular play and an unlucky bounce. Massinburg, meanwhile, pulls his shirt over his face in frustration. He’d been working on that specific finish. He doesn’t expect to miss it. The Bulls rallied around their star at the moment, reassuring him it was, in fact, a great take. But the meticulousness Oats demands has bled into everyone.
“Everything matters,” senior forward Nick Perkins says. “You can’t cheat this. A lot of guys coming from high school, they just think college is easy: ‘I’m going to go to college for a couple years, then I’m going to go to the NBA.’ What I got from Nate is being consistent and focusing on the details in life, the small things, the things that really matter.”
To be clear, Oats is quick with a compliment when things go right, all the way down to one made shot by one player in one drill. And he’s self-assured enough to let his staff do a good deal of the coaching in practice instead of tyrannically presiding over the entire session. But he is intensely attentive to those things that matter. And what matters is that which goes into a winning effort. To the guy who takes pride in thrashing his players at cornhole or Ping-Pong, that matters a lot. “That’s one of the reasons why we’re so successful,” Massinburg says. “It’s instilled in his DNA, and he spreads it to us. He feels like if you want it more than the other person, then you just go out there and take it. Life, to be honest, is really about competition. You’re never going to stop competing with somebody, whether it’s for a job or finding the girl of your dreams. I guarantee there’s three other dudes trying to get the same girl you’re trying to get.”
It’s an idea Oats tries to embed in the players after practice, emphasizing the urgency to seize the opportunity to go up two games on the MAC contenders with a win the next night. He returns to the theme at shootaround the next afternoon, asking for an overwhelming intensity from the start. In general, he feels his group isn’t exerting itself for the full 40 minutes. Not consistently enough, anyway. He anticipates taking Toledo’s best shot, too, so his guard is up. As a rule, he wants Buffalo to play as if it has accomplished everything and nothing at all.
“It’s a much better spot to be in when everyone’s chasing you all year,” Oats tells his team. “You have 100 percent control of your destiny. We need to come out and punch these guys in the mouth and control our own destiny.”
Doing math has never been a problem. There was that one class on non-Euclidean geometry when it took a month of office visits and sitting in the front row and raising his hand with question after question before he got it. But generally, Nate Oats always has had a knack for numbers. He also likes math. He likes that there is a result, and there is no blurring the distinction between right or wrong or haggling over subjective judgments of another’s work. You figure it out, or you don’t. “There’s multiple ways to get there,” Oats says, “but there is a right answer.”
He is less certain about the calculation that he’ll face in the future, mostly because he doesn’t know all the factors. The tale of the coveted coach is, as ever, paralleled by the story of how far a school is willing to go to keep him. Addends like an up-and-coming program shepherd and winning big at a MAC school do not necessarily produce a sum of leaving for a bigger job. They also don’t necessarily add up to Oats staying put. There is a possibility that Buffalo will do enough to start the long, laborious climb to being another Gonzaga, and in truth that sounds pretty good to him. There is the possibility that it won’t, at least not soon enough.
There will be a result. It just depends on the variables. “I understand it and I get it,” Buffalo athletic director Mark Alnutt says of the choice his coach may face sooner than later. “But [losing Oats] won’t be for me not being proactive, or for me not being attentive to the program needs. I look at it day by day, us working together to continue to grow this program. And if that [offer] comes, I want to be in position that it’s not an easy decision for him.”
Alnutt has been on the job for nine months, hired away from Memphis after Allen Greene left Buffalo to take the same position at Auburn. Alnutt is a former Missouri football player with 21 years of experience in administration, so he understands what it means to have the resources to compete. As he talks in his office just off the ticket lobby at Alumni Arena, there can be no more emblematic setting for a discussion of what comes next here.
The building opened in 1982. It serves as not only the home for many of Buffalo’s athletic teams, but also the recreation center for the campus. The concourse just above the 100 level doubles as a carpeted exercise track, with students and personnel or just about anyone getting in their laps while the men’s and women’s basketball teams practice below. A large red sign entitled JOGGING RULES, in fact, is screwed into a concrete wall just a few steps to the right of the hoops offices. Among the regulations: PLEASE SPIT IN DESIGNATED AREAS.
The practice gym a couple of floors down is not exactly, uh, modernized. But it is massive (hence the nickname“triple gym”) and it is sufficient for Buffalo’s needs. “Outstanding for this level,” Oats declares. The problem is that it is not only Buffalo’s practice facility. Sometimes a couple dozen Ping-Pong tables cover a court or two. Sometimes it’s badminton. At least one full court is supposed to be reserved for basketball at all times, per Oats. But even if that arrangement never failed, it wouldn’t account for players who want to get in shots late at night only to find they’d have to dodge shuttlecocks whistling past their ears if they want to do so.
When Alnutt and Oats had their first substantive, face-to-face talk about the pluses and minuses at the school, the numbers’ guy not so subtly articulated the math problem, as he sees it: How does a school with an enrollment exceeding 30,000 students not have a dedicated rec center? “My guys need to have 24-7 gym access where nobody else has access to that gym,” Oats says. “So the facilities are not where I want them to be. We need to continue to work to try to get that. We’re the biggest public university in New York, so we’ve got a ton of alumni. There are guys with money out there that want to help. We need to get them to give the money to get this thing, facilities-wise, where we want to get it to.”
He has asked Alnutt to make that case to the university higher-ups at every turn. Alnutt welcomed the honesty — “You don’t want all the Kool-Aid,” he says now. “You want to hear the challenges” — but the conversation underscored the urgency a school such as Buffalo faces when it has a rising-star coach. That coach will look for signs of a commitment to building something better, in all senses. In this case, Oats envisions sustained impact on the national scene. A lot goes into that, but building a rec center or a wellness facility elsewhere for the general population eases the congestion at Alumni Arena, which allows Oats and women’s coach Felicia Leggett-Jack to operate like teams with ambition operate, which incentivizes them to stick around.
It is Buffalo’s move. The school ranked eighth in the MAC in men’s basketball spending during the 2016-17 reporting year, according to U.S. Department of Education data. But it has demonstrated a willingness to put some money behind its good intentions. It is set to open the $18 million Murchie Family Fieldhouse in the spring, creating an indoor football facility that in turn means softball and track and field will consume less square footage in Alumni Arena. In Oats’ estimation, the school doubled the basketball team’s recruiting budget when Hurley took over, acknowledging that finding better players requires spending more money. It also signed Oats to a five-year extension with a raise after last season.
The hope is that the little things add up. “The thing I like about Nate, he’s a down-to-earth person,” Alnutt says. “There’s no ego. He’s not demanding I need this, this and this. He realizes where he is, he realizes what we’re doing. But also he realizes potentially what we can do to grow, from a realistic standpoint.”
He’s in daily contact with his boss, one way or another, on matters big and small. The question is how much all of that will matter. “I like it here a lot,” Oats says. “The city of Buffalo, the western New York area embraced us. Crystal loves it here. My daughters all like it here. The only thing that you question — will the administration keep building this to a point where you can compete at a national level? It’s great being in the top 25. It’s going to be really hard to do that on a yearly basis. You gotta add some things. The infrastructure has got to be a little bit better. If they want to be a mid-(major) plus that’s challenging high majors every year, then we gotta upgrade some stuff.”
As all coaches do, he says he plans on coaching in the same spot next winter. On the morning after the Toledo game, Buffalo’s top recruiter, assistant Bryan Hodgson, flew to Chicago for two days of scouting. Oats had been recruiting the previous weekend. Buffalo has the potential to reload again in 2018-19, despite the imminent loss of five seniors. Transfer guard Antwain Johnson averaged 10.3 points at Middle Tennessee and, though not cleared for contact after offseason hip surgery, Johnson seemingly drained every shot during a solo workout at practice. Fellow transfer Gabe Grant, formerly of Houston, has the look of a mismatch four with shotmaking capability. It might require some time to work out the kinks, but Buffalo doesn’t enter a talent void once Massinburg and Co. depart. The get-out-while-the-getting-is-good alarms are not sounding.
This is the place that breathed life into Oats’ college coaching dreams. This is the place where he bought a house, then another. This is the place where he can still be the after-school “pickup” dad for Brielle when she tires of riding the bus. This is the sort of place where he still has time to go on a “date” with Lexie in the middle of conference season. This is the place where he missed six calls from his wife while in a staff meeting in 2015, finally picking up to hear her crying on the other end; she said she had cancer. The diagnosis was double-hit lymphoma. “If you Google double-hit lymphoma,” Oats says, “she’s supposed to be dead.”
But survive Crystal did. She had the bone marrow transplant and the chemotherapy. She endured it all. The CAT scan taken two months ago showed no signs of the disease, and the doctor told her that if it was going to come back, it probably would have by now. So this is the place where the Oats family overcame.
Nate Oats knows this. He also knows himself. “If they’re not going to build it like we all think we could, then yeah, you’re a competitive guy,” he says. “You’d like to be able to compete to get in the Final Four, compete to stay in the top 25, compete to win NCAA Tournament games, not just get to the NCAA Tournament and on a yearly basis. Me and my wife, we talk about it frequently. We don’t want to move. We really don’t. But you have to look at a lot of things too.”
It’s not restlessness, really. A relentlessness is the reason he’d go. In the minds of those who know him, it is the reason why he’d be successful should he choose to do so. “At those big schools, especially when you have success as a coach, a lot of those guys up there get comfortable in their position and stop doing the little things,” Perkins says. “Nate? He’s never done. We could win 30 games straight, and he’s still going back to the drawing board to see what we can do better.”
Says Massinburg: “He’s never complacent or never satisfied. With all the success we had this season, he’s still working. He hasn’t taken any steps back like, oh, we did all this great stuff and we can kind of chill now, kind of breeze through the conference — nah, it’s not like that at all. We finish one task, he’s like, OK, on to the next one. Let’s get it. The more success we have, the harder we go.”
As he rides the team bus from Berkeley to Palo Alto, Bobby Hurley has more than enough to address in a suddenly bumpy Arizona State season. He is in no position to play soothsayer about his former assistant’s future. He does know that Oats is happy where he is.
He also knows Oats is worth a call.
“Any power conference (program) would be thrilled to have him,” Hurley says. “He’s proven he can win championships. He’s won in the NCAA Tournament. He’s not afraid of the moment in big games. He’s the whole package.”
Before tip-off against Toledo, Nate Oats stands before two vertical dry-erase boards crammed with offensive and defensive directives and issues his pregame edicts. Everyone that’s about winning will sprint for 40 minutes, he says. He wants 30 deflections and every loose ball. He wants to chase the Rockets off the 3-point line. Toledo can’t guard the Bulls if they move the ball, he says, and run off defensive rebounds. He ends with one simple message.
“Anything that shows effort and toughness,” Oats says, “we gotta crush them on that stuff. That’s gotta be us.”
Evidently, this could have gone without saying.
Buffalo builds a 12-point lead in the first six minutes. There are some nervous moments in the middle of the game, but the end result is a 110-80 annihilation. The Bulls shoot 62.2 percent in the second half and register 1.375 points per possession overall en route to their most points ever scored in a MAC game. It is a diabolically efficient and cold-blooded effort from a group that, when it is at its best, looks less like a team that plays other teams and more like a team that hunts them. It looks like a team no one wants to see on any night, a team that will turn someone’s otherwise happy Selection Sunday into a dirty trick.
After the players jog into the locker room, a guy with a keen sense of what it means to win big in this city makes his way down the hall.
Thurman Thomas stops for a picture with Alnutt, then with Hodgson, who is giddy about the NFL Hall of Famer in his midst. “I’m the only Buffalo guy here,” Hodgson cracks. The former Buffalo Bills and Oklahoma State star running back then chats up assistant coach Jim Whitesell about the good old days of the Big 8 Conference, before the staff makes its way into the locker room. Thomas follows but lingers to the side as Oats briefly addresses the team. “That’s how you come out and make a statement,” he says, before ceding the floor to the night’s keynote speaker.
Given that most of the Bulls weren’t out of diapers when Thomas retired in 2000, Hodgson makes a brief introduction. Thomas then notes that he attended a Bulls game last year, incognito. He jokes that he was miffed at Oats for reinserting Jeremy Harris against Toledo when the senior guard sat on 34 points, worried that Harris’ propulsive scoring total wouldn’t match Thomas’ old jersey number. And then he reinforces what most people already know: All eyes are on the Buffalo Bulls.
“You guys have really captivated the city the past couple of years,” Thomas says. “I’m a fan. I support you guys. I support everything with Buffalo. That’s the way I am. So great win. Just keep working at it. Hopefully down the line I’ll see you guys again in the tournament.”
After a round of applause, Thomas departs, leaving Oats to deal with one last, critical detail for the evening: His players want massages.
They are off the next day. They have done everything he’s asked. So, yes, they think some massages might be in order.
Standing in the middle of the locker room, Oats considers the request. The players ain’t getting any massages on Wednesday, he tells them, because there’s no time to set them up. He then starts to consider the calendar. Games against Miami (Ohio) and at Western Michigan are looming. We now know that Buffalo would win both, of course. But in the moment, Oats has incentives to invent. So he tells the players they can have their massages if they win those two. That would make them 4-0 in conference. That would mean the team that is supposed to be the best team in the league, that has all of these aspirations to cause even more commotion in March, has acted like it. That would mean Buffalo has left nothing on the plate, which is all Nate Oats ever asks.
(Top photo: Timothy T. Ludwig/USA Today)
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Brian Hamilton joined The Athletic as a senior writer after three-plus years as a national college reporter for Sports Illustrated. Previously, he spent eight years at the Chicago Tribune, covering everything from Notre Dame to the Stanley Cup finals to the Olympics. Follow Brian on Twitter @_Brian_Hamilton.
Brian Hamilton Jan 16, 2019
AMHERST, N.Y. — Nate Oats is a little late to Alumni Arena, walking through the Buffalo men’s basketball office doors at a few minutes after 11 a.m., a backpack slung over his shoulder and a massive Yeti mug of ice water in hand. A short night has spilled into a busy morning. He went to bed around 1 a.m. after rewatching his team set a school record for points scored in a conference game that evening, and his wife, Crystal, woke up with a migraine. When the alarm sounded at 5:45, it was left to Dad to jump into action and rouse 14-year-old daughter, Lexie, to prepare for school. This is how Nate Oats began another day of living the dream.
Lexie used to be able to walk to school. But when the Oatses shopped real estate last year, they fell hard for a 115-year-old house on the opposite side of Grand Island, a Tudor with original woodwork, a coach house and a boat dock. The relocation meant Lexie would have to bus to school. It turns out she’s the second stop on the route. So she gets ready and meets her dad downstairs for a warm ride to the end of a long driveway on cold mornings, where the two await a 6:38 pickup. It’s often a hectic dash to the finish. Today, Lexi opts to wear sandals and walks outside and steps into a puddle. Dad wonders why she can’t just wake up a minute earlier and find some shoes.
An hour later, Jocie and Brielle, the fourth- and first-graders, have to depart as well. Oats returns inside to wake them up and make their breakfast. Sometimes it’s just cereal, sometimes pancakes with syrup and whipped cream. This time it’s scrambled eggs, their favorite. He dresses them and does their hair — really, ponytail is the only choice — and eventually they, too, are on their way. From there, Oats sneaks some rest and watches video until Crystal sleeps off the headache, and then he heads into the office. He likes when the job permits him to be an attentive father and husband, when he can do the breakfasts and Wednesday date nights and life seems normal. And it’s worth savoring these moments. They may be harder to come by if things keep going the way they are.
Five and a half years ago, Nate Oats was a math teacher and a high school coach outside of Detroit. He’s now in charge of the best mid-major basketball team in the country, a battle-worn, swaggering 16th-ranked outfit with legitimate aspirations of not only reaching another NCAA Tournament but also staying in it for a while. And when you’re a forward-thinking 44-year-old with a history of doing more with less, and you appear headed to your third tournament in four years at a place such as Buffalo, beating multiple big-name schools along the way, well, you probably will be a person big-name schools want to hire.
So Oats may leave. He may stay and try to build Buffalo into the next mid-major that grows into a national power. For the moment, he sits on an office couch wearing a school-issued hoodie with BLUE printed on the right sleeve and COLLAR on the left, and the shape of what dream he chooses is still evolving. “I love it here,” Oats says. “I don’t really want to move. I’d love to be able to continue to coach a top-25 team. So if we can keep it at that…”
The Nate Oats origin story is less pertinent than where he is now and what he is accomplishing and where that might carry him next. It is also too pertinent to ignore because if you want to know who he is and what he is capable of wherever he goes, it is a story you must understand.
“I like to deal with all types of different people,” Oats says, leaning back and snacking on some mixed nuts. “Being a high school coach helps you in dealing with parents. It helps me with recruiting because for 11 years I was on the other side. I had 18 kids that played Division I, so I got to see really good recruiters come in that were really personable, great people. I got to see arrogant pricks come in, and I never wanted to be that guy. I got to see the guys that come in, they kiss my butt as the head coach and ignore my assistants and act like they weren’t even there, weren’t human beings. Well, that doesn’t work either because my assistants are working those kids out every day. So you get to see what works and what doesn’t and build relationships with people. It’s not just the kid. It’s his parents and his coach and his assistant coach and his trainer and whoever it may be. There’s a lot of stuff I learned. It’s not the most conventional route to get where I’m at, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
For the unfamiliar, this is how it goes: He grew up in Watertown, Wisc., 50 miles west of Milwaukee, and by high school he knew he wasn’t good enough to count on playing basketball for a career. He figured the path to coaching started by playing at Maranatha Baptist, the Division III school in his hometown, and then serving as an assistant there. In 2000 he moved on to Wisconsin-Whitewater’s staff, where he supplemented a D-III assistant’s income by teaching math at Watertown High School while also pursuing a master’s and running stat labs at the University of Wisconsin. Some days, he drove from his apartment outside of Madison to Watertown to Whitewater to the Milwaukee area to recruit and then back home, a round trip of potentially 200-plus miles. He did not need a math degree to understand this did not add up for the long haul.
But he did need the math degree for what he apprised as his next step; he assumed he had to teach to coach, and not every school had math teachers who could run a basketball team. When the Romulus (Mich.) High job opened in 2002, the school left itself wiggle room in its search by listing openings for virtually every teacher spot except physical education. Oats applied off a tip, taught something of a dry-run math class on his visit and got the gig that afternoon, ultimately winning 222 games across 11 seasons.
It was enough to be a high school coach, but that didn’t mean high school basketball was enough. Every year, Oats and his friend Josh Baker tried to visit an NBA training camp or a college program to observe and gather ideas. In 2010, they reached out to Danny Hurley, who had just taken the Wagner job. A byproduct, Oats hoped, would be picking the brains of the entire Hurley clan: Danny, naturally; Bobby, who’d joined his brother as an assistant; and Bob Sr., the legendary Hall of Fame coach at St. Anthony High School in Jersey City, N.J. As a kid, Oats worked a paper route to earn enough money to buy his own TV so he could watch college basketball while the rest of the family dug into “Wheel of Fortune” or “The A-Team,” and he knew all about the Hurleys.
The visit never materialized. But Danny and Bobby did recruit some of Oats’ players at Romulus, most notably future Rhode Island star E.C. Matthews. As a result, Bobby Hurley received a first-hand look at how Oats operated. Romulus High practices were structured and high-tempo. No wasted time or motion. It reminded him of a college practice. When Bobby took the Buffalo job in 2013, he contacted Oats. After a phone conversation and a follow-up interview at the Final Four, he offered Oats his break at the college level.
“You can immediately see his passion for the game,” Bobby Hurley says, speaking by phone during a northern California swing with his Arizona State team. “I had never been a head coach at that point, so having a guy on my (Buffalo) staff that had head coaching experience was important. When I talked to him at the Final Four, I could tell he was passionate about wanting to get into college coaching. I knew it was going to be tough to be successful at Buffalo, and I needed someone who had the same energy I had.”
Of greater interest to anyone with a men’s basketball coaching job to fill this spring, of course, will be who Oats has become in four-plus seasons at Buffalo. The 27 wins last season and the emphatic drumming of fourth-seeded Arizona in the NCAA Tournament issued a revised statement about the program’s relevance; the 15-1 start to this season, featuring triumphs at West Virginia and Syracuse, has reinforced it.
What everyone can expect from Nate Oats, and the basketball program he runs, has become a very germane discussion.
In conversations, Oats appears to be a very regular human. He’s easygoing and seemingly low-maintenance. He happily shares details of a weight-loss competition with his staff and shows off the gift cards at stake, and he accepts life hacks such as how to use a pizza cutter for his kids’ pancakes. Some Midwest austerity shines through when Oats admits to chiding players who don’t finish what they take at team meals; he tells them they must have grown up rich, because he couldn’t leave food on the plate as a kid. Any assumptions you make based on this information is at your own risk, though. After a few days at Alumni Arena, it’s evident this is no guileless proprietor of a corner-store operation. There is bombast here. There is an urgency to beat everyone at everything, badly, and a healthy presumption about the ability to do so.
It’s crystallized once you draw in close. Only then do you notice the serrated edges. “You’ll see Nick Saban go crazy when (Alabama is) up three touchdowns in the fourth quarter,” Oats says. “Well, that’s what’s starting to irritate me. We’re up 28, for instance, at St. Bonaventure. We’re supposed to win that game by 35 to 40. Well, we don’t. We won it by 18 because we don’t keep our foot on the gas pedal.”
There are, as Oats calls them, various “non-negotiables” in how his players must perform on the floor. Some fall under the general umbrella of effort, of a workmanlike approach to the game; this is why the assistants wear mechanics’ shirts while they warm up the team before a game, and why one player is rewarded with a blue hard hat for accruing the most points for tips, floor dives, etc., in any contest. Some are more specific, such as squaring up an opponent in a defensive stance and being in constant communication with teammates on the floor, or heeding attention to detail, lest you be penalized one way or another for a lack of concentration.
Not long into practice on the day before a Jan. 9 game against Toledo, Oats stands under the basket with his arms folded and his eyes fixed on his rotation players running through the proper way to defend the Rockets’ sets. It is not a walkthrough. Each sequence has meaning, and each movement must adhere to the program principles. “How in the hell are you going to guard that without talking?” he asks his starters after a bucket by the scout team. “None of you said a word.”
Practice segments to follow, and sometimes all practice segments, are scored as competitions. Point values are assigned to made shots and stops. First side to eight wins, and the losers do push-ups. (Typically it’s a sprint, but the staff tries to save players’ legs before games.) The victory only counts, though, if one of the players on the winning side hits a free throw to seal it. Oats reckons there is no way to ensure game-speed effort without consequence. So shortly before 1 p.m., he sets up two large green cones at half court. He tells a defender to place his left foot on the spot in the floor where poles are inserted to support volleyball nets. The defender can’t leave until a ball-handler, getting a pass from Oats with a running start, passes the cones. And then it’s four-on-four with teammates waiting near the basket.
As Bulls star C.J. Massinburg begins to chase a dribbler toward the basket, Oats whistles the action dead. “Plus-one gold,” he tells the staffer doing the scoring. “C.J. left like 18 steps too early.”
It’s instructive to remember that this is, in fact, intentionally a lighter workout. The competition can be much more acute when there is more time between games, when Oats separates his roster into even-strength units as opposed to top rotation players facing the scout team.
And, yes, especially on those days, there is talking. And, yes, the head coach wants it that way.
“To a point,” Oats says with a smile. “But I like it. I want there to be an edge. I want them to leave practice and go into the locker room and still be talking trash to each other. If a guy gets his butt kicked, he’s going to come in and get shots up [that night], so he doesn’t get drilled again tomorrow.”
On this somewhat lighter afternoon, the Buffalo coach still doesn’t hesitate to note that his starters aren’t playing hard enough when they lose two segments in a row. When a pass sails into the seats during a fast-break drill, Oats is incredulous, reminding the group that they’re supposed to be getting better at things, not worse. When the rate of missed free throws exceeds the makes, he tells players to come in at night and shoot 100 times from the line. “If that ain’t enough,” Oats advises, “shoot 500.” He raises the same rhetorical question regularly during practice — “How does that happen?” — as if Buffalo’s core principles are so self-evident and fundamental that it is unfathomable to think anyone would mess them up. But there is a method to all of it.
The Bulls play fast and aggressively. They’ve likewise accepted a high standard for execution, despite the pace, and hold themselves to it. At one point in practice, Massinburg executes a terrific drive into traffic and gets off a shot that touches every part of the rim before falling out. It is, really, a spectacular play and an unlucky bounce. Massinburg, meanwhile, pulls his shirt over his face in frustration. He’d been working on that specific finish. He doesn’t expect to miss it. The Bulls rallied around their star at the moment, reassuring him it was, in fact, a great take. But the meticulousness Oats demands has bled into everyone.
“Everything matters,” senior forward Nick Perkins says. “You can’t cheat this. A lot of guys coming from high school, they just think college is easy: ‘I’m going to go to college for a couple years, then I’m going to go to the NBA.’ What I got from Nate is being consistent and focusing on the details in life, the small things, the things that really matter.”
To be clear, Oats is quick with a compliment when things go right, all the way down to one made shot by one player in one drill. And he’s self-assured enough to let his staff do a good deal of the coaching in practice instead of tyrannically presiding over the entire session. But he is intensely attentive to those things that matter. And what matters is that which goes into a winning effort. To the guy who takes pride in thrashing his players at cornhole or Ping-Pong, that matters a lot. “That’s one of the reasons why we’re so successful,” Massinburg says. “It’s instilled in his DNA, and he spreads it to us. He feels like if you want it more than the other person, then you just go out there and take it. Life, to be honest, is really about competition. You’re never going to stop competing with somebody, whether it’s for a job or finding the girl of your dreams. I guarantee there’s three other dudes trying to get the same girl you’re trying to get.”
It’s an idea Oats tries to embed in the players after practice, emphasizing the urgency to seize the opportunity to go up two games on the MAC contenders with a win the next night. He returns to the theme at shootaround the next afternoon, asking for an overwhelming intensity from the start. In general, he feels his group isn’t exerting itself for the full 40 minutes. Not consistently enough, anyway. He anticipates taking Toledo’s best shot, too, so his guard is up. As a rule, he wants Buffalo to play as if it has accomplished everything and nothing at all.
“It’s a much better spot to be in when everyone’s chasing you all year,” Oats tells his team. “You have 100 percent control of your destiny. We need to come out and punch these guys in the mouth and control our own destiny.”
Doing math has never been a problem. There was that one class on non-Euclidean geometry when it took a month of office visits and sitting in the front row and raising his hand with question after question before he got it. But generally, Nate Oats always has had a knack for numbers. He also likes math. He likes that there is a result, and there is no blurring the distinction between right or wrong or haggling over subjective judgments of another’s work. You figure it out, or you don’t. “There’s multiple ways to get there,” Oats says, “but there is a right answer.”
He is less certain about the calculation that he’ll face in the future, mostly because he doesn’t know all the factors. The tale of the coveted coach is, as ever, paralleled by the story of how far a school is willing to go to keep him. Addends like an up-and-coming program shepherd and winning big at a MAC school do not necessarily produce a sum of leaving for a bigger job. They also don’t necessarily add up to Oats staying put. There is a possibility that Buffalo will do enough to start the long, laborious climb to being another Gonzaga, and in truth that sounds pretty good to him. There is the possibility that it won’t, at least not soon enough.
There will be a result. It just depends on the variables. “I understand it and I get it,” Buffalo athletic director Mark Alnutt says of the choice his coach may face sooner than later. “But [losing Oats] won’t be for me not being proactive, or for me not being attentive to the program needs. I look at it day by day, us working together to continue to grow this program. And if that [offer] comes, I want to be in position that it’s not an easy decision for him.”
Alnutt has been on the job for nine months, hired away from Memphis after Allen Greene left Buffalo to take the same position at Auburn. Alnutt is a former Missouri football player with 21 years of experience in administration, so he understands what it means to have the resources to compete. As he talks in his office just off the ticket lobby at Alumni Arena, there can be no more emblematic setting for a discussion of what comes next here.
The building opened in 1982. It serves as not only the home for many of Buffalo’s athletic teams, but also the recreation center for the campus. The concourse just above the 100 level doubles as a carpeted exercise track, with students and personnel or just about anyone getting in their laps while the men’s and women’s basketball teams practice below. A large red sign entitled JOGGING RULES, in fact, is screwed into a concrete wall just a few steps to the right of the hoops offices. Among the regulations: PLEASE SPIT IN DESIGNATED AREAS.
The practice gym a couple of floors down is not exactly, uh, modernized. But it is massive (hence the nickname“triple gym”) and it is sufficient for Buffalo’s needs. “Outstanding for this level,” Oats declares. The problem is that it is not only Buffalo’s practice facility. Sometimes a couple dozen Ping-Pong tables cover a court or two. Sometimes it’s badminton. At least one full court is supposed to be reserved for basketball at all times, per Oats. But even if that arrangement never failed, it wouldn’t account for players who want to get in shots late at night only to find they’d have to dodge shuttlecocks whistling past their ears if they want to do so.
When Alnutt and Oats had their first substantive, face-to-face talk about the pluses and minuses at the school, the numbers’ guy not so subtly articulated the math problem, as he sees it: How does a school with an enrollment exceeding 30,000 students not have a dedicated rec center? “My guys need to have 24-7 gym access where nobody else has access to that gym,” Oats says. “So the facilities are not where I want them to be. We need to continue to work to try to get that. We’re the biggest public university in New York, so we’ve got a ton of alumni. There are guys with money out there that want to help. We need to get them to give the money to get this thing, facilities-wise, where we want to get it to.”
He has asked Alnutt to make that case to the university higher-ups at every turn. Alnutt welcomed the honesty — “You don’t want all the Kool-Aid,” he says now. “You want to hear the challenges” — but the conversation underscored the urgency a school such as Buffalo faces when it has a rising-star coach. That coach will look for signs of a commitment to building something better, in all senses. In this case, Oats envisions sustained impact on the national scene. A lot goes into that, but building a rec center or a wellness facility elsewhere for the general population eases the congestion at Alumni Arena, which allows Oats and women’s coach Felicia Leggett-Jack to operate like teams with ambition operate, which incentivizes them to stick around.
It is Buffalo’s move. The school ranked eighth in the MAC in men’s basketball spending during the 2016-17 reporting year, according to U.S. Department of Education data. But it has demonstrated a willingness to put some money behind its good intentions. It is set to open the $18 million Murchie Family Fieldhouse in the spring, creating an indoor football facility that in turn means softball and track and field will consume less square footage in Alumni Arena. In Oats’ estimation, the school doubled the basketball team’s recruiting budget when Hurley took over, acknowledging that finding better players requires spending more money. It also signed Oats to a five-year extension with a raise after last season.
The hope is that the little things add up. “The thing I like about Nate, he’s a down-to-earth person,” Alnutt says. “There’s no ego. He’s not demanding I need this, this and this. He realizes where he is, he realizes what we’re doing. But also he realizes potentially what we can do to grow, from a realistic standpoint.”
He’s in daily contact with his boss, one way or another, on matters big and small. The question is how much all of that will matter. “I like it here a lot,” Oats says. “The city of Buffalo, the western New York area embraced us. Crystal loves it here. My daughters all like it here. The only thing that you question — will the administration keep building this to a point where you can compete at a national level? It’s great being in the top 25. It’s going to be really hard to do that on a yearly basis. You gotta add some things. The infrastructure has got to be a little bit better. If they want to be a mid-(major) plus that’s challenging high majors every year, then we gotta upgrade some stuff.”
As all coaches do, he says he plans on coaching in the same spot next winter. On the morning after the Toledo game, Buffalo’s top recruiter, assistant Bryan Hodgson, flew to Chicago for two days of scouting. Oats had been recruiting the previous weekend. Buffalo has the potential to reload again in 2018-19, despite the imminent loss of five seniors. Transfer guard Antwain Johnson averaged 10.3 points at Middle Tennessee and, though not cleared for contact after offseason hip surgery, Johnson seemingly drained every shot during a solo workout at practice. Fellow transfer Gabe Grant, formerly of Houston, has the look of a mismatch four with shotmaking capability. It might require some time to work out the kinks, but Buffalo doesn’t enter a talent void once Massinburg and Co. depart. The get-out-while-the-getting-is-good alarms are not sounding.
This is the place that breathed life into Oats’ college coaching dreams. This is the place where he bought a house, then another. This is the place where he can still be the after-school “pickup” dad for Brielle when she tires of riding the bus. This is the sort of place where he still has time to go on a “date” with Lexie in the middle of conference season. This is the place where he missed six calls from his wife while in a staff meeting in 2015, finally picking up to hear her crying on the other end; she said she had cancer. The diagnosis was double-hit lymphoma. “If you Google double-hit lymphoma,” Oats says, “she’s supposed to be dead.”
But survive Crystal did. She had the bone marrow transplant and the chemotherapy. She endured it all. The CAT scan taken two months ago showed no signs of the disease, and the doctor told her that if it was going to come back, it probably would have by now. So this is the place where the Oats family overcame.
Nate Oats knows this. He also knows himself. “If they’re not going to build it like we all think we could, then yeah, you’re a competitive guy,” he says. “You’d like to be able to compete to get in the Final Four, compete to stay in the top 25, compete to win NCAA Tournament games, not just get to the NCAA Tournament and on a yearly basis. Me and my wife, we talk about it frequently. We don’t want to move. We really don’t. But you have to look at a lot of things too.”
It’s not restlessness, really. A relentlessness is the reason he’d go. In the minds of those who know him, it is the reason why he’d be successful should he choose to do so. “At those big schools, especially when you have success as a coach, a lot of those guys up there get comfortable in their position and stop doing the little things,” Perkins says. “Nate? He’s never done. We could win 30 games straight, and he’s still going back to the drawing board to see what we can do better.”
Says Massinburg: “He’s never complacent or never satisfied. With all the success we had this season, he’s still working. He hasn’t taken any steps back like, oh, we did all this great stuff and we can kind of chill now, kind of breeze through the conference — nah, it’s not like that at all. We finish one task, he’s like, OK, on to the next one. Let’s get it. The more success we have, the harder we go.”
As he rides the team bus from Berkeley to Palo Alto, Bobby Hurley has more than enough to address in a suddenly bumpy Arizona State season. He is in no position to play soothsayer about his former assistant’s future. He does know that Oats is happy where he is.
He also knows Oats is worth a call.
“Any power conference (program) would be thrilled to have him,” Hurley says. “He’s proven he can win championships. He’s won in the NCAA Tournament. He’s not afraid of the moment in big games. He’s the whole package.”
Before tip-off against Toledo, Nate Oats stands before two vertical dry-erase boards crammed with offensive and defensive directives and issues his pregame edicts. Everyone that’s about winning will sprint for 40 minutes, he says. He wants 30 deflections and every loose ball. He wants to chase the Rockets off the 3-point line. Toledo can’t guard the Bulls if they move the ball, he says, and run off defensive rebounds. He ends with one simple message.
“Anything that shows effort and toughness,” Oats says, “we gotta crush them on that stuff. That’s gotta be us.”
Evidently, this could have gone without saying.
Buffalo builds a 12-point lead in the first six minutes. There are some nervous moments in the middle of the game, but the end result is a 110-80 annihilation. The Bulls shoot 62.2 percent in the second half and register 1.375 points per possession overall en route to their most points ever scored in a MAC game. It is a diabolically efficient and cold-blooded effort from a group that, when it is at its best, looks less like a team that plays other teams and more like a team that hunts them. It looks like a team no one wants to see on any night, a team that will turn someone’s otherwise happy Selection Sunday into a dirty trick.
After the players jog into the locker room, a guy with a keen sense of what it means to win big in this city makes his way down the hall.
Thurman Thomas stops for a picture with Alnutt, then with Hodgson, who is giddy about the NFL Hall of Famer in his midst. “I’m the only Buffalo guy here,” Hodgson cracks. The former Buffalo Bills and Oklahoma State star running back then chats up assistant coach Jim Whitesell about the good old days of the Big 8 Conference, before the staff makes its way into the locker room. Thomas follows but lingers to the side as Oats briefly addresses the team. “That’s how you come out and make a statement,” he says, before ceding the floor to the night’s keynote speaker.
Given that most of the Bulls weren’t out of diapers when Thomas retired in 2000, Hodgson makes a brief introduction. Thomas then notes that he attended a Bulls game last year, incognito. He jokes that he was miffed at Oats for reinserting Jeremy Harris against Toledo when the senior guard sat on 34 points, worried that Harris’ propulsive scoring total wouldn’t match Thomas’ old jersey number. And then he reinforces what most people already know: All eyes are on the Buffalo Bulls.
“You guys have really captivated the city the past couple of years,” Thomas says. “I’m a fan. I support you guys. I support everything with Buffalo. That’s the way I am. So great win. Just keep working at it. Hopefully down the line I’ll see you guys again in the tournament.”
After a round of applause, Thomas departs, leaving Oats to deal with one last, critical detail for the evening: His players want massages.
They are off the next day. They have done everything he’s asked. So, yes, they think some massages might be in order.
Standing in the middle of the locker room, Oats considers the request. The players ain’t getting any massages on Wednesday, he tells them, because there’s no time to set them up. He then starts to consider the calendar. Games against Miami (Ohio) and at Western Michigan are looming. We now know that Buffalo would win both, of course. But in the moment, Oats has incentives to invent. So he tells the players they can have their massages if they win those two. That would make them 4-0 in conference. That would mean the team that is supposed to be the best team in the league, that has all of these aspirations to cause even more commotion in March, has acted like it. That would mean Buffalo has left nothing on the plate, which is all Nate Oats ever asks.
(Top photo: Timothy T. Ludwig/USA Today)
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Brian Hamilton joined The Athletic as a senior writer after three-plus years as a national college reporter for Sports Illustrated. Previously, he spent eight years at the Chicago Tribune, covering everything from Notre Dame to the Stanley Cup finals to the Olympics. Follow Brian on Twitter @_Brian_Hamilton.
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