Brad Underwood And a Culture Of Defense

If you watched Brad Underwood and his players talk on Monday as they previewed the season, you started to find the through lines (or themes) that will make this team great (again).

One of those — probably the biggest and most important — is intense defense.

Underwood’s squads have been marked by playing lights-out defense. Stephen F. Austin was No. 7 in the country in turnover percentage on defense in 2014 (the percentage of possessions by your opponent that ends in a turnover). They were No. 5 in 2015. They were No. 1 last year. No. 1 in the nation. Out of 351 teams. OSU was No. 210.

“We are pretty basic right now, but the majority of our time has been spent on the defensive end and trying to establish our culture,” said Underwood. “We are making strides there.”

Swoon. Bring back the defense/discipline shorts. I want to see football pads and helmets and black and blue graduate assistants!

His players are clearly all in, too. Several of them noted how difficult it is to shoot and score in practice because of the insane defense OSU is playing right now.

“The way our defense is, it’s a little difficult to get shots in practice,” said Micth Solomon.

“What I love the most is the focus on defense,” added frosh Cam McGriff. “It’s what coach’s main focus is on every day. It’s not much of a learning curve, because my high school coach was a huge defensive guy, but it’s a lot of new things I’ve learned since I’ve been here.”

It’s something that will get progressively better as well.

“At first, it was completely different because I’ve never played this style of defense before in my life,” said Leyton Hammonds. “It was kind of tough for me because I really didn’t catch onto it as fast as I thought I would. Now I feel like everybody, even the freshmen, have caught onto it. It’s kind of hard to run our offense against each other in practice because the point is not to let your guy catch the ball.”

The point is not to let your guy catch the ball.

One of the players who has the most to gain here is PG Jawun Evans. He *only* averaged 1.6 steals a game last season. That number could balloon over two pretty easily (SFA guard Thomas Walkup averaged 2.1 last season).

“The biggest surprise for me with Jawun is his defense,” said Underwood. “Tremendous defender. A guy that can go pressure the ball, go hawk the ball, he has long arms, he anticipates.”

I need the season to get here quickly.