At a landmark, season-closing “news conference” posted on Twitter last Thursday, a head coach wore a baseball cap backward. He took questions from “the media,” claimed the post, yet curiously, only one voice seemed to ask any questions. He chastised the actual, scholarship basketball players at his school, Virginia Commonwealth, for being “a little jealous” of his technically unbeaten team, and he cheekily called out one trainer in particular – “Eddie Benion,” he said – for petty envy. He concluded, “But haters are gonna hate, you know?”
That VCU student basketball manager, Tyrone Green, is what his peers call a “managing manager.” That means he manages the managers on the managers’ basketball team. His team had just lost in the Sweet 16 – by an online vote.
The actual VCU men’s basketball team, the day before its first-round NCAA Tournament game earlier this month in Salt Lake City, did have a little howl when a reporter entered the locker room and wished to interview … a student manager. In what kind of bent, inverted world would this happen?
It’s the new underworld of Manager Games, concocted in 2014 and unleashed in the 2015-16 season by bustling brains at Michigan State. At the Final Four fan fest on Friday in Phoenix, the managers will stage their own games. Eight teams composed of (mostly) college basketball team managers plus a sprinkling of staffers and the occasional ringer from this year’s bracket will skirmish, provided the Michigan State organizers can finish arranging funds through GoFundMe and elsewhere to transport everyone there.
Basketball managers are, of course, a visible, invisible component of American life. They’re the ones who, among a bushel of other tasks, bring out the chairs during timeouts.
“We’ve joked: If you call a timeout at a manager game, who’s going to grab the chairs and bring them out?” said Kevin Pauga, the Michigan State assistant athletic director and former student manager who, with managers Ian May and Andrew Novak, hatched the Manager Games concept.
Some early facts about Manager Games, according to the mighty record-keeper, Pauga: There were 278 games, counting a final four at the Final Four, between 137 schools and 25 conferences during the 2015-16 season, 374 games between 165 schools and 27 conferences in 2016-17. Rumored ringers have included the former college stars Juan Dixon at Maryland, Greg Oden at Ohio State and, according to Green, Darius Theus at VCU (now the school’s director of student-athlete development for men’s basketball). Road teams have a winning record, Pauga said, possibly because their programs travel with fewer managers, thus more staffers and ringers. Games occur in practice gyms, or intramural gyms, or gym-gyms, or in the real thing on game eves.
“The seats are empty,” Kansas manager Chip Kueffer said of playing in storied Allen Fieldhouse at 11 p.m. “Maybe a girlfriend or a brother’s there to cheer you on, but otherwise it’s pretty quiet. A big, old, empty barn.”
“Imagine,” Pauga said of Indiana, “playing in Assembly Hall in Bloomington late on a Friday night, with nobody there.”
The first national champion was Kansas, which edged Michigan State in a 44-42 spine-chiller last year in Houston on, apparently, two free throws from manager Collin Cook, according to his teammate Kueffer.
“I believe,” Kueffer texted at one fact-checking point.
“And then we got a stop” on defense, he said in an interview.
Then came “embraces, high-fives and hugs,” he said.
Disappointingly, they conducted no dogpile.
Georgetown won the Big East tournament early this month at the Jordan Terminal 23 gym on West 32nd Street in New York as a No. 9 seed of nine teams, which had to be an upset, right?
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” Pauga said. “There’s not nearly as many analytics in manager games … but I’m not sure if it is or it isn’t an upset.”
With the 20-minute halves of running clock, the Hoyas fended off Providence, 25-19; Xavier, 20-15; Villanova, 31-23 and St. John’s, 30-25. They played with seven managers, one graduate assistant coach and one graduate intern. Their lone senior manager tore his ACL in the first game.
Benj Coen, a graduate assistant coach and Georgetown’s managing manager, retold it all in an email: “We cleared the bench in our first game with Providence, and one of our managers hit the ceiling (in fairness, Terminal 23 has low ceilings), but it proved to be a comical and memorable moment. More notably, in the finals, we were playing our third consecutive game without a rest due to how the bracket was set up, and St. John’s had been sitting for four games, having secured their spot in the finals before our first game.
“We were gassed, and we went down 15-6 early, mostly getting scored on in transition. I called a timeout and implored the guys to just play harder, telling them we played too hard to give up now. We cut the lead a little bit to 20-13 at halftime, and then in the second half we found an extra gear, outscoring them 17-5 … I don’t think they scored another point in transition.”
He further noted: “We tore up zone defenses with our passing and offensive rebounding.”
And: “We are more of a cerebral team that just plays harder than any other team.”
And: “Also, Jay Bilas tweeted our victory picture.”
They snared a No. 1 seed in the Manager Games Postseason Tournament bracket, alongside fellow No. 1 seeds Western Kentucky, Florida State and VCU. There, though, the games stopped, and an appreciation for the toil of managers might sprout. All outcomes from then to now have happened by vote, by necessity. For example, the East Lansing headquarters placed VCU and Northwestern in the same bracket to mirror the NCAA Tournament version that had both those programs in Salt Lake City, in hopes the managers’ teams could dredge up a game.
“I don’t think we’re going to play them,” Green said in the laughing locker room of the Rams team he later would say envied his team’s 6-0 record. “We just have so much stuff to do for the coaches.”
Kansas, for one, didn’t get much time this year to pursue a title repeat. Team responsibilities grew steeper, the senior Kueffer said. So much can intervene. Travel plans can change. Film sessions can run long. Meetings can run long.
All of that and the voting leaves a potential final eight, pending travel arrangements, of Georgia, Texas, Dayton, Florida, Michigan, Western Kentucky, Missouri State and Missouri (which vanquished VCU in online voting). The winner will receive a 17¾-inch trophy with a basketball atop. The caliber will be quite good by human standards.
“On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give it a seven,” Green said. “No one’s out there that doesn’t know what they’re doing.”
All of VCU’s roster for the Manager Games played at least high school basketball except Green, a former high school manager who said he’s the one who yells and preaches defense and had to play a lot in the grueling win over George Washington because, he said, “I brought the intensity.”
Further, as Kansas’s Kueffer notes, managers have the privileges of absorbing basketball lingo daily, of getting “beat up a little bit in practice sometimes,” of osmosis.
“So if I was in high school,” he said, “we wouldn’t have been able to communicate defensively the same way as we did because we’re managers. Because we hear, ‘Get the ball to the third side,’ or, ‘Be in strong help,’ or, ‘Low man take the roll man,’ stuff like that. Our diction and our dialect is different because we’re around what is Kansas basketball, a mecca of college athletics.”
That “low man take the roll man” bit, an instruction for combating a pick-and-roll, comes straight from Kansas Coach Bill Self, whom Kueffer believes received it from Larry Brown. That means Brown could have received it from Dean Smith and that it might date all the way near the beginning of peach-basket time, and all the way back now to the managers of whom Kueffer said, “Even if we’re at the bottom of the food chain or the totem pole, it’s good to be on the totem pole.”
From that totem base, the idea has flowered. It has surprised Pauga, who said, “We know what it is, and we know what it’s not, and what it is is pretty cool.”
It has even congealed, apparently, into the geographical pride of conference arguments. When Coen wrote, “I can’t imagine a league with a higher caliber of manager play, top-to-bottom, than the Big East,” it signaled that this thing has a chance to explode out of control.