Underdawgs: How Brad Stevens and the Butler Bulldogs Marched Their Way to the Brink of College Basketball's National Championship

PROLOGUE

TWO MINUTES FROM GLORY

The sun set in the west, spring showers were falling, and the Duke Blue Devils were on the verge of a national championship. It was April 5, 2010, and normalcy had returned to college basketball.

Duke was overriding a fictional tale with the facts. The Blue Devils were too big, too talented, too tough, and too well coached to lose to a small-college team that began the NCAA Tournament as a 200-to-1 shot.

It did not matter that most of the 70,930 in attendance on a Monday night at Lucas Oil Stadium—a $720 million palace built for the National Football League’s Indianapolis Colts—were cheering for Butler. Or that most wanted to witness American sports history. Indiana’s governor, Mitch Daniels, said he was anticipating the greatest upset since Lake Placid, where an underdog USA hockey team beat the Soviet Union at the 1980 Winter Olympics.

Downtown was bustling all weekend with fans wearing Butler gear and shouting, Go Dawgs! That contrasted to the previously tepid fan support for the Bulldogs in their home city. In college sports, this was as close to rags to riches as it gets. Butler once considered abandoning major college basketball, sent teams traveling in an old limousine called the Blue Goose, played before crowds of fewer than 1,000, and didn’t cover the full cost of players’ scholarships.

Among college basketball Goliaths, Butler was a David, except without the stone.

Butler had the smallest school (enrollment: 4,200) in the NCAA championship game in 40 years. This was a real-life version of Hickory, the fictional team in the movie Hoosiers, based on the true story of Milan High School, which beat an opponent with an enrollment 10 times larger to win Indiana’s state tournament in 1954. Movie scenes were filmed in Hinkle Fieldhouse, the 82-year-old arena where the Bulldogs played.

Hollywood wasn’t in control, though. Duke was.

The Blue Devils were ahead, 60–55, and fewer than two minutes remained. It had been tense, taut, tenacious labor. The teams were never separated by more than six points.

Butler had trailed in the second half of all five of its 2010 NCAA Tournament victories, but not by this many points this late in the game. In the tournament, Duke had become the first to score as many as 60 points against the Bulldogs. Since this tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985, no other team had held five successive opponents under 60. You couldn’t solve the Dawgs’ defense. You tried to survive it.

Duke’s defense proved to be similarly impenetrable. This was old-school, possession-by-possession, hard-nosed basketball. And Duke could play that way better than anyone. Coach Mike Krzyzewski hadn’t come this far to be denied a fourth national championship, second only to the 10 by UCLA coach John Wooden.

Duke forward Kyle Singler, toward the end of a 19-point night, uncharacteristically was called for traveling with about two minutes left. Butler point guard Ronald Nored dribbled around the half-court, nearing the basket, but was swarmed. He passed the ball out to Gordon Hayward, the Bulldogs’ marvelously versatile 6-foot-9 sophomore. Hayward dribbled toward the basket before looping a pass over his head to Matt Howard underneath. Howard’s layup bounced off the rim and through with 1:44 on the clock.

Duke 60, Butler 57.

Duke ran 25 seconds off the shot clock before Nolan Smith’s left-handed attempt rolled off the rim. Nored cleared the rebound for Butler, pushed the ball upcourt, and passed to Shelvin Mack, who was alone near the 3-point line. Such 3-pointers in transition were Mack’s specialty. This one missed.

The 6-foot-8 Howard, whose participation had been in doubt because of a mild concussion, was hustling as always. He outfought everyone else to rebound the ball. Howard passed out to Hayward, who passed to Nored, who sent it over to Mack. This time Mack bounced the ball for a while, then located Howard on a pick-and-roll play. Again, Howard laid it in. Fifty-five seconds remained.

Duke 60, Butler 59.

If the pro-Butler crowd had despaired moments before, the momentum had reversed. Seventy thousand voices reverberated under a stadium roof that was retractable, and perhaps that top did move a centimeter or so.

Time-out, Duke.

That allowed 33-year-old coach Brad Stevens to gather his Bulldogs on the sideline and say what he always did in such moments: Stay poised. We’re going to win this game.

After the time-out, Duke worked the ball to Singler, who was unguarded at the right of the foul line. His jump shot was short, grazing the rim. There was a scramble underneath as Duke’s 7-foot-1 center, Brian Zoubek, attempted to shove Howard away. Official Ted Valentine signaled Butler possession, pointing that the ball went off Zoubek’s foot. Thirty-four seconds remained.

Duke 60, Butler 59. The scoreboard had not changed.

History beckoned. Butler had the ball, and the chance to win a national championship. Destiny, not Duke, was the opponent.

Hayward passed inbounds to Nored, who dribbled right to left after crossing midcourt. Nored passed to Willie Veasley, then received a return pass and drove into the foul lane. Cut off by Duke’s Jon Scheyer, Nored passed back to Veasley, who in turn passed to Mack. Mack dribbled backward, then saw an opening and headed for the free throw line. He stopped. Veasley was open in the left corner, but Mack’s pass was deflected out of bounds by Zoubek.

Time-out, Butler. Thirteen and six-tenths of a second remained.

Hayward tried to pass the ball inbounds from the left corner, but with Zoubek in front of him, found no one available. Hayward placed his hands in the shape of a T.

Time-out, Butler. As before, 13.6 seconds remained.

Stevens wanted the ball in Hayward’s hands. Twice during the season—against UCLA and Detroit—Hayward had been fouled at the finish and saved games by making free throws. Not that Butler’s coach expected a reprise of those scenarios.

I didn’t think they’d call a foul, Stevens said. My thought was, ‘Shoot a pull-up if you have it.’ You would just have to get creamed in the national championship game to get a foul call.

On a second out-of-bounds play, Howard began with the ball. Mack would have been an option, but he was stationed in the right corner and not in position to catch an inbounds pass. Howard passed high to Hayward, who leaped to catch the ball about 30 feet from the basket.

Hayward, guarded by Singler, started left, dribbled behind his back, and veered right. There was not a clear path to the goal. Singler stayed with his man, directing Hayward toward the baseline and Zoubek. Hayward stopped, leaned back, and arched a shot over Zoubek’s outstretched left arm.

Hayward had made only two of nine attempts until then, but as he shot the ball with seven seconds left, this one looked true . . . but was not. The ball struck the back rim and bounced directly to Zoubek. Mack fouled him.

Duke 60, Butler 59. The scoreboard had not changed.

Players walked to the other end and took their places along the foul lane, waiting for Zoubek to shoot. From the sideline, Krzyzewski motioned where he wanted the Blue Devils positioned along the foul lane. He and Duke players stood, seconds away from what they hoped would be a national championship. Butler forward Avery Jukes, whose 10 first-half points had kept the Bulldogs in the game, was a picture of concentration as he kneeled in front of his bench. CBS cameras panned to worried looks of Butler cheerleaders, all of them adorned with a Bulldog painted on their faces.

Zoubek dribbled three times, squared his shoulders, and released. Swish.

Duke 61, Butler 59, with 3.6 left on the clock.

Then Zoubek executed a calculated risk by Krzyzewski. The Duke shooter intentionally missed the second free throw.

The Duke coach did not want to go into overtime, figuring the hometown Bulldogs would have an edge in an extra five minutes, especially with Duke in foul trouble. Krzyzewski reasoned that a missed free throw would make it difficult for Butler to retrieve the ball, advance it, and attempt a shot—more difficult, in fact, than scoring on an inbounds play. The strategy was defensible, with one caveat: a 3-pointer, maybe from half-court, would beat Duke. But what where the chances of that happening?

Hayward, with no Duke player between himself and Howard on the inside position of the foul lane, leaped and easily collected Zoubek’s miss off the back rim. Hayward took two short dribbles and two long ones as he advanced the ball. Howard stopped to set a screen before the midcourt line, and Singler crashed into him so hard that he fell backward. Hayward took another long step and a half, and he aimed from half-court, about 45 feet away.

The 70,930 onlookers inside the stadium, 48 million TV viewers, and more millions online in 178 countries, watched expectantly. The ball they were watching was not thrown wildly. Hayward released with a running start, and the basketball had the proper trajectory.

Hey, was the simultaneous thought, that looks good.

CHAPTER 1

RISE, FALL, AND REBIRTH

Tradition is difficult to revive when it’s been gone so long. Late in the 20th century, Butler University leaders reasoned that its basketball program could be restored and perhaps have a positive influence on the entire campus. But some suspected Butler was deluded.

Basketball at Butler was in a sorry state by the late 1980s. It was in as much disrepair as its old arena, Hinkle Fieldhouse. Crowds rarely exceeded 2,500. During the mid-1970s, there was discussion of reassigning all Butler teams to the NCAA’s Division III, joining schools that don’t offer athletic scholarships, and thus participating at the lowest level of college sports. Butler instead forged ahead, trying to compete in Division I—the highest level—with a Division III budget.

Past glories were distant memories.

Butler is an Indianapolis university that opened with high ideals and low funding, a condition that persists to this day. Although Butler is no longer a church-affiliated university, biblical principles are woven into its fabric, and especially into the 21st-century basketball program.

The pre–Civil War force behind the university was Ovid Butler, an abolitionist and attorney. He was the son of Chauncey Butler, a preacher for the Disciples of Christ. Because of poor health, Ovid Butler gave up his law practice, but not his crusading nature. Members of his denomination wanted to build a university, which was approved on January 15, 1850, by the Indiana General Assembly.

Doors opened at what was then North Western Christian University on November 1, 1855, at a site at 13th Street and College Avenue on the near-north side of Indiana’s capital city. It was a modest start. There was a janitor, two professors, and no president. There was a mortgage, too. Money would forever be an issue. In 1875, the university moved to a 25-acre location in the Irvington area of Indianapolis and was renamed in honor of its founder.

As George Mac Waller wrote in his book Butler University: A Sesquicentennial History, From its earlier days, Butler harbored the dream of becoming something more.

 • • • 

Butler University’s first season of basketball can be traced to 1892–93, although no results are available. By the 1920s, the school was becoming more serious about athletics, and especially basketball. Although the sport was invented in 1891 by James Naismith at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts, nowhere did it become more popular than in Indiana. The first statewide high school tournament was held in 1911, and basketball became a rallying point for communities from South Bend to Evansville, Richmond to Terre Haute, and all stops in between.

Harlan Pat Page became Butler’s basketball coach in 1920. He was a three-sport star at the University of Chicago and once averaged 10.3 points a game, then an amazing figure.

In 1924, Page coached an upstart Butler team that presaged the national tournament run 86 years later. In the final game of the regular season, on February 28, the Bulldogs had a 6-7 record when they traveled 20 miles south to face Franklin College, then a national power. Franklin High School’s Wonder Five is a storied team in Indiana, having won state championships in 1920, 1921, and 1922. The players stayed in town and enrolled at the local college to follow their coach, Griz Wagner. Franklin’s Fighting Baptists won 36 consecutive games over two seasons.

Unexpectedly, Butler won 36–22. Franklin star Robert Fuzzy Vandivier was held to eight points on a single field goal and six free throws.

My boys were ‘off’ tonight, and Butler was definitely on, Wagner said. It’s bound to happen.

Despite a 7-7 record, Butler earned an invitation to the Amateur Athletic Union Tournament in Kansas City, Missouri. There, the Bulldogs defeated Schooley-Woodstock 34–29, Hillyards 35–29, and Kansas State Teachers 40–21 to reach the championship game. In the climactic game before a crowd of 10,000, Haldane Griggs scored 12 points to lead Butler over the Kansas City Athletic Club 30–26, resulting in a national title.

The Bulldogs went 20-4 in 1925, setting a school record for wins that lasted 37 years. Success was accompanied by tensions, however. Page resigned abruptly in 1926. He had significantly increased the athletic budget, and there was speculation he quit because he would have to relinquish control of the fund.

Page’s greatest contribution to Butler athletics was to bring in Paul Tony Hinkle as an assistant coach in 1921. Hinkle was to remain at the university for 71 years.

 • • • 

UCLA’s John Wooden has been called the greatest coach of all time, any sport, though he disagrees with this popular wisdom. Wooden once suggested that Hinkle was the greatest because Hinkle coached more than one sport. Indeed, the fact that Hinkle could coach football, basketball, and baseball is probably what kept him at Butler so long.

He loved to coach all three sports, said Hoosier historian Herb Schwomeyer, who served at Butler in various capacities for 38 years.

Hinkle was born near Logansport, Indiana, on a farm owned by his mother’s parents. His family moved around before settling in Chicago. In high school, Hinkle played basketball, baseball, soccer, and golf. (His school had dropped football.)

Hinkle’s father, Edgar, directed him toward the University of Chicago, whose campus was four miles from his home. Page, Hinkle, and Fritz Crisler, who became the University of Michigan’s football coach, were the only University of Chicago athletes to win three letters each in football, basketball, and baseball. Hinkle was an all-conference guard in 1919, and the next season he helped Chicago win the Big Ten basketball championship.

In his sophomore year, Hinkle acquired his nickname. On a road trip, he came out of a restaurant carrying an extra serving of spaghetti and meatballs. Page called him Tony, as if he were Italian.

After Page left Chicago for Butler, Amos Alonzo Stagg appointed himself acting basketball coach. Hinkle assisted him as he finished courses for a degree in oil geology. Page asked Hinkle to join him at Butler in February 1921, and to Stagg’s surprise, Hinkle left for Indianapolis.

In 1926, Hinkle took over as Butler’s acting head coach in football and basketball and served as athletic director. Butler soon hired George Potsy Clark as football coach and athletic director, so Hinkle was removed from those two posts. He stayed as basketball coach, however, for 41 seasons, interrupted only by World War II. After retiring in 1970, he continued serving Butler as a special assistant to the president. He was 93 when he died. If the university had allowed it, he might have coached until then.

Hinkle won games—even a national championship—but was more influential outside of his coaching duties. He was enshrined in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 1965 not as a coach, but as a contributor. He was on the national rules committee in the mid-1930s, when the center jump after each basket was rescinded. He originated the orange-colored basketball, replacing dark brown. Hinkle worked with the Spalding Company to introduce the new ball, which was tested at the 1958 Final Four in Louisville, Kentucky, and approved by the NCAA.

When built in 1928, the fieldhouse that bears Hinkle’s name was the largest in the country and remains a memorial to its namesake. What was known as Butler Fieldhouse—the name was changed in 1966—is a hangar-shaped edifice made of red brick built for $800,000, or the equivalent of $10.2 million in 2010 dollars. The big barn on West 49th Street was the first building finished at the university’s new location. It is a National Historic Landmark, and has been called the basketball equivalent to baseball’s Fenway Park or Wrigley Field.

The Bulldogs, coached by a 30-year-old Hinkle, made their first full season in the fieldhouse memorable. They opened against Pittsburgh, which was coming off a national championship, on December 13, 1928. Future major-league pitcher Oral Hildebrand scored 18 points, and Butler erased a late 6-point deficit to end Pittsburgh’s 27-game winning streak, 35–33.

Butler edged Purdue, 28–27, in the game in which the fieldhouse was dedicated, then climbed to 14-1 before losing to Notre Dame, 24–21. In the rematch, at Notre Dame, the Bulldogs crushed the Fighting Irish, 35–16, to finish a 17-2 season. Months later, the Veterans Athletic Association of Philadelphia declared Butler the 1929 national champion.

Yet Hinkle wasn’t sure that was his best team. Two years later, in the 1930–31 season, Butler was again 17-2. In 1948–49, Butler was led by the backcourt combo of Ralph Buckshot O’Brien and Jimmy Doyle. The Bulldogs went 18-5 and made it into the inaugural Associated Press rankings—something that wouldn’t happen again for 53 seasons.

Butler made its first appearance in the NCAA Tournament in 1962, winning 13 straight in a 20-5 season. The Bulldogs’ starters were all from small to midsized Indiana towns, except for 5-foot-8 guard Gerry Williams, of Indianapolis. They averaged 6-foot-1. Even half a century ago, that was small.

We’re easy to underrate, Hinkle said.

Butler was led by 18-point-scorer Tom Bowman, rugged rebounder Jeff Blue, and Williams. In the 25-team NCAA field, the Bulldogs were assigned to play No. 8-ranked Bowling Green at Lexington, Kentucky. Butler’s campus—then with 1,900 students—held rallies for the team. Bowling Green featured two future NBA stars, Howard Komives and 6-foot-10 Nate Thurmond. But Butler took a 56–53 lead on Williams’s two free throws with 33 seconds left, then held on to win 56–55. Thurmond had the numbers—21 points, 14 rebounds—but Butler had the Sweet Sixteen berth.

In the Midwest Regional at Iowa City, Iowa, the Bulldogs trailed No. 3 Kentucky, 37–36, at halftime. Kentucky pulled away in the second half and beat Butler 81–60. There was a third-place game in regionals then, and Williams’s late layup gave Butler an 87–86 victory over Western Kentucky.

The Bulldogs wouldn’t play in the NCAA Tournament again for 35 years. They wouldn’t win in the tournament for 39 years.

 • • • 

Buckshot O’Brien was among Hinkle’s notable protégés. The 5-foot-9 O’Brien was a college All-American and played two seasons in the NBA with the Indianapolis Olympians and Baltimore Bullets from 1951 to 1953.

But the Butler player with the most enduring legacy is Bobby Plump. The real-life Jimmy Chitwood of Hoosiers, his basket sent tiny Milan High School over Muncie Central 32–30 in Indiana’s 1954 state championship game, and he has been interviewed about that moment ever since. Plump was a good college player, too, setting a school record of 41 points in a 1958 game and ending his career with what was then a school-record 1,439 points.

The only other Butler player to reach a U.S. pro-basketball league in the 20th century was Billy Shepherd, whose career scoring average of 24.1 remains the Butler record. He played three seasons in the ABA, from 1972 to 1975. Shepherd played for Hinkle’s last team. Before the coach’s final game, on February 23, 1970, a ceremony honoring him included an ovation lasting two and a half minutes. Notre Dame and Butler played what was then the highest-scoring game in fieldhouse history before an estimated 17,000, exceeding capacity. Austin Carr scored 50 points and Collis Jones 40 to lead the Irish to a 121–114 victory. Shepherd scored 38.

Hinkle would soon turn 71, but he wasn’t ready to go. Hoosier historian Schwomeyer said the university president, Alexander E. Jones, pushed for the change because he was totally jealous of Hinkle. Others have corroborated that version of events. Prominent alumni circulated a petition asking that Hinkle be retained as coach, but he resigned himself to the fact that the university wanted him out.

Hinkle finished with a record of 560-392, a .588 winning percentage, and was the seventh-winningest coach in college basketball history when he retired. Toward the end of his life, he was asked to identify the best players he ever coached.

We never had any great players, only great teams, he replied. The kids did what I told them, and we played as a team. That is why we could win so often.

 • • • 

Following Tony Hinkle’s retirement, Butler went into a two-decade decline. The university was ill prepared for the transition, even though President Jones hastened it.

George Theofanis, who played for Hinkle and had been a successful coach at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, succeeded his mentor in 1970. Theofanis’s contribution was bringing in more black players, notably all-time Butler rebounding leader Daryl Mason, at a time when there were few black students on campus. However, the coach’s efforts didn’t produce many victories. In seven seasons under Theofanis, the Bulldogs were 79-105, a percentage of .429.

The university’s leadership was always conservative, according to former football coach and athletic director Bill Sylvester. And there was never much money.

But it wasn’t just in athletics, Sylvester said. Other things hurt during that time, too.

In an era in which the Baby Boomers were reaching college age, student enrollment should have climbed. Butler’s fell. The figure in 1972 was 1,731 when the university could have accommodated 1,000 more. In 1973 and 1974, the university ran a budget deficit, and the endowment shrank to $8 million.

The NCAA separated into divisions in 1973, with Division I featuring the biggest universities and highest level of competition. Division II granted athletic scholarships, but fewer of them. Division III offered none.

At a meeting of the Indiana Collegiate Conference, other university leaders asked Jones to bring Butler into a lesser division. He considered it, according to Sylvester. Such a move would have represented a seismic change in athletics and had a ripple effect upon the university for decades.

What he was thinking about was the money, Sylvester said. He didn’t have the vision to know what athletics would really do for Butler.

Simply put, it was not a good time to be a Bulldog. However, this period produced a figure who helped pull the Bulldogs from quicksand: Barry Collier. The junior college transfer from Miami played just two years at Butler but later devoted himself to elevating the basketball team, athletic program, and entire university.

Collier’s coach was Theofanis. Eventually Theofanis despaired of what he confronted. He had no recruiting budget. He recruited Collier sight unseen, relying on the recommendation of another coach. The team traveled not on a conventional bus but on a past-its-prime black limousine painted blue, the Blue Goose. Collier was a passenger in the Goose, a hand-me-down from Purdue.

Finally, Theofanis told athletic director Bill Sylvester that he would resign.

I can’t win without players, Theofanis said. And I can’t recruit without money.

That was 1977, the same year President Jones resigned. Butler brought in a new president, John G. Johnson, and a new basketball coach, Joe Sexson. Sexson was a Purdue assistant coach who had been a star player there.

Old problems festered. Athletics operated at a continuous deficit. Butler didn’t have a secretary for the athletic department until 1970, a sports information director until 1981, or a marketing director until 1989. And it was never just about athletics. A 1984 report pointed out that Butler lagged behind other universities in fund-raising and recommended a campaign to raise $75 million. Tuition had been underpriced for years, compared to similar institutions.

For the ’70s and ’80s, it was a Division I school in name only, said Chris Denari, the first sports marketing director and former radio voice of the Bulldogs.

A positive development was inclusion in a new conference of private schools, the Midwestern City Conference, beginning with the 1979–80 season. Of the six original members—Butler, Loyola, Oral Roberts, Oklahoma City, Evansville, and Xavier—only Butler and Loyola remain. Nonetheless, the MCC cemented Butler’s status as a Division I program.

It would be hard to identify a Division I school with a more pitiable introduction to its conference. From 1980 to 1991, Butler lost in the first round of the MCC tournament every year: a 0-12 record. The sports information director, Jim McGrath, became so accustomed to losing that he didn’t pack a change of clothes for the tournament because the Bulldogs always headed home soon after they arrived.

Sexson was 143-188 in 12 years, a percentage of .432, about the same as Theofanis. Sexson declined to speak about his Butler tenure, perhaps not wanting to criticize anyone at the university. His recruiting budget was $3,000, or a tenth that of the second-lowest figure in the Midwestern Collegiate Conference. Butler basketball was such an anachronism that so-called full scholarships excluded cost of books and other fees. Knowledgeable insiders never blamed Theofanis or Sexson for Butler’s decline.

They were trying to eat dinner on a dime, Collier said. It wasn’t a fair fight.

 • • • 

John G. Johnson improved Butler’s stature during his 10 years as president. His administration reversed Butler’s drift, setting up successor Geoffrey Bannister in 1989.

Bannister was not a sophisticate of basketball, an American invention. He was born in England and raised in New Zealand, where he was a champion cyclist. But Bannister’s vision for Butler basketball in the 1990s resembled that of Notre Dame football in the 1920s—a marketing tool that could remake the university. The vapid nature of the campus extended even to Butler’s stationery. Instead of blue, the school color, it was beige.

We were dying slowly, said Bruce Arick, who has been at the university since 1990 and later became vice president.

If Butler was going down, Bannister said, it would go down fighting. The most visible changes were capital improvements and campus landscaping. Bannister hired 34-year-old Barry Collier as coach, and the president was the force behind a $1.5 million renovation of Hinkle Fieldhouse. Collier said the same peeling paint that was on the walls when he first arrived on campus in the 1970s was still visible in 1989. The fieldhouse’s decrepit basement locker room was upgraded, windows replaced, seatbacks added, offices installed, and the parking lot repaved. Seating capacity was reduced to 11,043, and later to 10,000.

The university had gone into a quiet, retiring phase where people had forgotten its name, Bannister said in a 1991 interview. Basketball is such a big part of our history, and it was a way to remind people we were back at work.

Bulldog basketball was not exactly a sports entertainment priority in Indianapolis. In Sexson’s final season, 1988–89, eight of the Bulldogs’ home games had attendance under 2,500. There were only 15 paid season tickets the next year, according to Denari. The 597 other season tickets were giveaways. Media coverage reflected the apathy. The only radio coverage was from the student station, and the Indianapolis Star had no beat reporter assigned to the Bulldogs.

Collier accepted the challenges. He was prepared for his job interview, and his 45-page proposal was persuasive. Coincidentally, both Collier and Bannister were born in England. What might not have been as evident in the process was this: Collier loved Butler.

It was a love that stemmed from his earliest days on campus. Collier, a transfer student, was fewer than three weeks into his first semester as a business major in 1974. He asked whether it was too late to transfer into education and was surprisingly ushered in to see the dean of education, Joseph Nygaard. It was near the end of the school day, so the dean told him to see him the next morning.

When Collier reported back, Nygaard handed him a revamped schedule and told him his next class was in half an hour. Any problems, the dean said, check back with him. The incident changed Collier’s life.

I’m sure that has a lot to do with why I think so much of Butler, Collier said.

As a player, he averaged 15.2 points and 7.5 rebounds in his senior season, 1975–76, for a 12-15 team. He and Bill Lynch were cocaptains and Lambda Chi fraternity brothers. Lynch remembered Collier as smart, tough, and physical. Lynch returned to Butler in 2011 as an associate athletic director.

From the day he walked on campus, you could tell he [Collier] was a special guy, said Lynch, who has been head football coach at Butler, Ball State, and Indiana. You could tell he knew what he wanted to do, and he set out to do it.

Collier started the requisite apprenticeship for coaches, serving as an assistant at Rose-Hulman, Seattle Central Community College, Idaho, Oregon, and Stanford. He sought head coaching jobs at Idaho (twice) and the University of the Pacific but was rebuffed. He was with Stanford at the Pac-10 Tournament when he heard Butler was seeking a new coach, and he immediately applied. During the 1989 Final Four, Collier met with Denari, who was about to take Butler’s new sports marketing job, in a Seattle hotel room.

I was really captivated, Denari said.

The best thing that ever happened, Collier said, was not getting one of those other coaching jobs. Yet he did not begin auspiciously.

The Bulldogs were 6-22 in his first season, 1989–90, and set a school record for losses. The next season, led by MCC player of the year Darin Archbold, the Bulldogs were 18-11 and made the NIT. Collier earned the first of four awards as conference coach of the year. There were other great moments—notably a 75–71 upset of coach Bob Knight’s 10th-ranked Indiana Hoosiers on November 27, 1993—but the seasons were ultimately unsatisfying. To Collier they were, anyway. He yearned for the Bulldogs to play in the NCAA Tournament and became convinced his up-tempo style would not get them there.

At a 1995 summer retreat, Collier and Bowling Green coach Jim Larranaga spent two days with newly named Wisconsin coach Dick Bennett. Collier admired the way Bennett’s Wisconsin–Green Bay teams played but didn’t believe he should ask for trade secrets in the same league. Bennett was no longer in the conference, and Collier no longer wanted business as usual. The coaches met in an attempt to refine their philosophies.

Not that you coach by, Larranaga said, but that you live by.

Larranaga brought 107 pages of notes, and Bennett told him everything important could be reduced to one page. Collier adopted five principles—humility, passion, unity, servanthood, and thankfulness—that came to be known as the Butler Way. That was a foundation for everything that followed, even when Collier was no longer Butler’s coach.

Larranaga took what he learned to George Mason University. He led George Mason to the Final Four in 2006, featuring upsets of Michigan State, North Carolina, and Connecticut along the way. George Mason was the first true mid-major to make the Final Four since 1979, but the Patriots lost to eventual champion Florida in a national semifinal at Indianapolis.

To Collier, the 1995 retreat represented an epiphany. He had pieces of the puzzle, he said, but had not put them together. In basketball terms, the Bulldogs became better defensively and recruited more efficiently. More personally, Collier found that his Christian principles coincided with winning basketball.

I wasn’t perfect. Far from it, he said. But that helped.

Butler won what was then the Midwestern Collegiate Conference Tournament in 1997 and 1998, earning spots in the NCAA Tournament. Collier recalled that after the first championship, his immediate thought was, Is that it? I don’t know what it was I had been expecting.

More important than winning, he said, was playing in such a way as to win. The path walked is more important than the destination. That’s right out of 1 Corinthians 9:24: You know that in a race all the runners run, but only one wins the prize, don’t you? You must run in such a way that you may be victorious.

At the end of the 1999–2000 season, Butler was victorious, game after game. The Bulldogs’ winning streak reached a school-record 15 as they headed into the NCAA Tournament. Their 23-7 record earned them a No. 12 seed—each of four regions has 16 teams ranked from 1 to 16—and a game against No. 5 seed Florida at Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

The Bulldogs surprisingly led by seven points with four minutes to play in what was shaping up as a 12-over-5 upset, which had become a near-annual occurrence in the tournament. The Gators rallied, sending the game into overtime tied at 60. Butler twice led by three points thereafter, and was ahead 68–67 when Bulldog forward LaVall Jordan was fouled with eight seconds left. Jordan was an 83 percent foul shooter, nearly automatic. He missed twice.

Florida’s Mike Miller took a pass on the left wing and headed toward the hoop. He avoided a collision with Butler’s 6-foot-11 Scott Robisch and shot from five feet. The ball climbed over the rim as time expired. Butler lost 69–68. Florida advanced as far as the championship game—held in Indianapolis—but none of that mattered in the moment.

Jordan dropped to the floor, disappointment piled on top of grief. On the day NCAA pairings were announced, his great-aunt Jetha Jeffers had died.

The loss gnawed at the Bulldogs. It always will. Collier said watching a retelecast makes him sick, and he doesn’t like to relive the game or talk about it. The game is hard to escape, though. It is often retelecast on ESPN Classic. Collier has conceded that our team played the way you want Butler teams to play.

As devastating as the defeat was, the outcome galvanized the Bulldogs in a way victory could not have. Adversity challenges, molds, and humbles. Prosperity rarely does any of that. The Florida game was perhaps the most important played by Butler in the 2000s because the ripple effect was felt in every subsequent season by every player and every coach.

Florida turned out to be Collier’s last game as Butler’s coach. He was soon hired by Nebraska, where he was 89-91 in six seasons before returning to Butler in 2006 as athletic director. As good as Butler’s leadership has been in the 2000s, however, the program evolved from coach-centered to player-centered.

In the summer of 2000, players stayed on campus and practiced together without coaches’ supervision, something that had not been routine. Henceforth, returning players instructed newcomers in