We are still about 6 weeks away from the tip-off of the college basketball season, which means that we have plenty of time to prepare for the action ahead. We will do so via a series of season previews featuring the best players/coaches in the country. HoopsHD’s Jon Teitel continues our coverage with Mississippi State associate head coach James Miller, who talked about starting last season 11-0 and his expectations for this season.
In the 2018 CBI finals as an assistant to Grant McCasland at North Texas you lost the 1st game at San Francisco by double-digits: how were you able to regroup with 2 straight double-digit home wins to clinch the title? That is pretty unique to have a best-of-3 series in college basketball. We ended up on the same flight back to Texas with San Francisco after that loss! We had a really good crowd for Game 2, which helped us flip the momentum. Tourney MVP Roosevelt Smart played well for us during that entire run. We learned what we did wrong in Game 1 and then were able to make some adjustments.
You have spent the last several seasons working for Coach Chris Jans: what makes him such a good coach, and what is the most important thing that you have learned from him so far? He holds everyone in our program to a high standard and demands the best from us on a daily basis. There are no holes in his game: offense, defense, and he still works as hard as he did when he was an assistant. You can never stop continuing to improve as a coach: he tackles 2-3 weaknesses every offseason and tries to turn them into our strengths.
In the 2022 NCAA tourney as an assistant at New Mexico State you had a 7-PT win over UConn: why does the 5 seed vs. 12 seed games produce so many upsets every year? There is so much parity in college basketball. Once you get past the top few seeds you get great teams regardless of their conference. The transfer portal has also allowed mid-major teams to get old so that you might be rolling out a 23-year old to face a 17-year old, which I think has a lot to do with it.
You also coached at Arkansas State/Omaha: what is the biggest difference between all of your former schools and schools who are part of the SEC? The resources: from travel to nutrition to academic support to whatever else we can provide. It is just stupid! These guys do not realize how good they have it: we are used to 7-hour bus rides but that does not happen any more. In the SEC anyone can beat you, whereas at New Mexico State we felt we would be all right if we showed up ready to play.
You started 11-0 last year (which tied the program’s 2nd-best start ever): did it reach a point where your team expected to win every time that they stepped onto the court? We developed confidence on the defensive end and a belief in each other…but we never thought that we would win every single night. We hit a bit of a wall right before Christmas break with a short amount of prep time. That run validated what Coach Jans had said during the preseason and showed that we could be in a lot of close games.
You became the 2nd team this century to limit each of your 1st 10 opponents to 60 PPG or less: what is the key to playing great defense? Every system is different but we really have a team concept that permeates throughout our program. If you want to get on the court then you have to play defense, take charges, and know your opponents’ personnel.
In the 2023 1st 4 your team missed a pair of last-second shots in a 1-PT loss to Pitt: where does that rank among the most devastating losses of your career? It is bittersweet when you take the emotion out of it…but 6 months later you look back on it and are thankful that we got to experience that. It ranks pretty high because it was a competitive-yet-ugly game. There were a lot of things we could celebrate about last season but we really want to advance much further this year.
You have 1 of the most veteran rosters in the nation with 6 grad students/2 seniors: how crucial will all of that experience be to your team’s success? I think that it will be crucial. We returned all 5 starters and brought in some grad transfers. It is important to get old/stay old while also developing young talent. We are so much further ahead of last year from a system standpoint and are helping the new guys with things they are not used to.
Your schedule this year includes games against ASU/Washington State/Georgia Tech/Rutgers: which of these games do you feel will present your biggest test? Opening the season vs. ASU at a neutral site (Chicago) will be exciting to see where we stand out of the gate. We will also play 1 of Northwestern/Rhode Island in the Hall of Fame Classic and are playing Rutgers right down the road from their campus in a hostile environment (Newark). We have a lot of neutral-site games that will prepare us for SEC play.
What are your goals for this season, and what are your expectations for this season? You can see why we have high expectations this year. Coach said that he wants to win multiple games in March so that is what our mindset is: he is NOT just talking about the conference tourney. You need to win games in the fall and then compete every single night in the SEC. It is a process and we need to get better along the way.