NORMAN, Okla. — Oklahoma’s new men’s basketball coach materializes in the practice gym a little before 9 a.m., outfitted in a white polo and black shorts, messenger bag in one hand and breakfast in the other. A Porter Moser in motion tends to stay in motion, and he got moving a couple hours earlier. He worked out long before youth campers shuffled down the Lloyd Noble Center tunnel, even well before his players did their morning conditioning runs. Meetings and film and practice and a top 50 recruit’s visit pack the day from here. For fuel, Moser has a pineapple cup, grapes and a peanut butter dream yogurt. Healthy, but gratuitous. His gauge, in perpetuum, points past full.
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It’s the energy behind a three-decade climb to get here, the literal ground floor of a power conference hoops operation to call his own. The nearby film room features a brand new Culture Wall splashed with a multitude of terms and catchphrases canon to a Moser program, hardcourt runes decipherable only to those in the know, just like the one at his last stop. Upstairs, nearly the entire men’s basketball office has already been repainted. The faux-wood blinds on Moser’s own windows are gone. An entirely new set of furniture is on order, including a stand-up desk, because heaven forbid he sit and work for very long.
“I was like, ‘Dude, we gotta change this, right away,'” Moser says, sitting on a couch that’s not long for the space. “It was like I needed a smoker’s jacket and my grandpa’s pipe. I just like it brighter with higher energy. I mean, there’s sun coming in now.”
That’s the aesthetic explanation, and it figures. But there’s something else at work, too, less than three months into a lifelong mid-major coach’s big shot. There’s an insistence. A conviction to counterweigh the gravity of consequence in a job like this, a job in which you have to win because you have to win but also because you have to prove to yourself that your way works, all the time. And for Porter Moser’s way to work, the details have to matter, all the time. Whatever happens has to happen on his terms.
A couple hours earlier, Moser paced through a workout and noticed empty baggies and bottles strewn about the weight room. Remnants from his players fueling up with snacks and shakes before their conditioning. Moser waited for the group to come back inside and got their attention. For two days running, he said, he’d discovered a mess they left for someone else to deal with. That stops now. Leave it like you found it, he told them, citing an old Navy mantra in a voice loud enough to hear in the next room. And, for that matter, say thank you to the nutritionists who put together the drink and snack packets in the first place.
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How you do anything, he reminded his team, is how you do everything. “We’re not going to be that team that goes into shootaround and there’s cups and tape everywhere,” the Sooners’ new coach says, recalling that chat. “The discipline is going to be a competitive advantage. But it’s got to be every day.”
Porter Moser’s first summer at Oklahoma, in almost every sense, is about getting actions to follow the words.
Renee Forney has been the executive administrative secretary for the Sooners men’s basketball program since Billy Tubbs ran the show. It’s hard to imagine any request surprising her much. The new guy nevertheless tried.
He said he knew she’d been there for three decades, but he guaranteed he had a request she’d never heard before.
Porter Moser needed a laminated copy of the Chicago Cubs’ 2021 schedule.
The glossy sheet currently lays to the right of Moser’s keyboard on that soon-to-be-replaced desk, not terribly far from a Cubs home jersey resting on a countertop above his mini-fridge. Following Loyola Chicago’s stirring Final Four run in 2018 under Moser’s direction, the franchise gifted two such jerseys to the program and its coach. One hangs in a display case back at Gentile Arena. This one somehow made it into the possession of Matt Gordon, a Loyola Chicago assistant coach who joined Moser’s Oklahoma staff and brought the souvenir with him. And, yes, there’s a two-page typed letter from Sister Jean filed away for safekeeping, the centenarian chaplain’s farewell words to the coach who brought her beloved Ramblers to national prominence.
You can take the guy out of Chicago, etc., etc. “I will tell you this,” Moser says. “The Oklahoma softball games gave me my Cubs fix. They were so exciting to watch. The energy going to those games was absolutely off the rails.”
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As for any concerns about a guy not detaching from the place he made famous and vice versa: In a lot of ways that’s the point. The philosophies and principles underwriting Loyola Chicago’s rise from dregs to darlings will be applied at Oklahoma. Moser surely refined his concepts over a decade. He’ll likely adjust them a touch to the level of raw talent on hand. But the Sooners will play dogged man-to-man defense, honed by the same shell drill in practice, with its same ultra-particular demands for everything all the way down to hand position. The offense will emphasize spacing and skill and precision. And this summer, the installation of the fundamentals will look a lot like it did 10 years ago.
“He’s doing the exact same thing,” says Sooners assistant coach Emanuel Dildy, who worked on Moser’s Loyola Chicago staff when that program transitioned from the Horizon League to the Missouri Valley Conference. “The one thing he’s elite at, and one of the best I’ve ever been around at, is that every day he’s building that culture. I know it’s cliche, and people use that term a lot. But every single day, every second of the day, he’s building a culture with the guys. Constantly, nonstop, he’s hitting them with the way he wants to do things, the way we want to do things, and the types of things you need to do in order to win. It hasn’t changed because we’re in the Big 12.”
It makes for an interesting and challenging dynamic for all sides this summer. Three scholarship players return from the 2020-21 squad that lost to Gonzaga in the second round of the NCAA Tournament: guards Umoja Gibson and Elijah Harkless and forward Jalen Hill. They’re joined by six transfers and three freshmen. There’s a guy who shot 41 percent from 3-point range last year (Gibson), the Big Sky Player of the Year (Eastern Washington transfer Tanner Groves), an All-ACC defender (Duke transfer Jordan Goldwire), an All-Ohio Valley Conference guard (Marvin Johnson), a potential breakout wing who averaged nearly 20 points in his last three games a year ago (transfer Jacob Groves, Tanner’s younger brother) and a top 100 freshman combo guard (CJ Noland).
For a Big 12 roster conceived in about five weeks, it’s not bad.
Still, in practical terms, everyone is new. Nobody has played a minute for the new head coach. Nobody had seen a Culture Wall before. Moser hired staffers such as Dildy and Gordon and director of player development Clayton Custer who have experience with him, and they serve as valuable sounding boards. But two of his bench assistants — associate head coaches David Patrick and K.T. Turner — haven’t worked for him previously. “It’s a good thing for me,” Turner says, “because I’m learning every little step, from the basic ground up.” By the time Moser left Loyola Chicago, the veterans could run practice without him; prior to the first day of workouts at Oklahoma, no one could look at the hieroglyphic formed by the blue painter’s tape on the floor and identify “the funnel” or explain which part of the pentagon represents the driving angle they want to force upon offenses.
Because of Moser’s obsession with correct positioning, and because the staff is committed to those painstaking details, they have to teach habits from scratch. Even older players are re-learning basic concepts they probably figured they’d mastered by high school, if not earlier. Did you know there’s a right way to jab step and a wrong way to jab step? Or the specific, most efficient footwork mechanics to pick-and-pop into a jump shot? There is in the basketball world, according to Oklahoma’s new head coach. How swiftly the Sooners come along depends on how efficiently they process the daily information onslaught. “We’re just as new as them, kind of, because last year we didn’t do much,” Harkless says, alluding to the pandemic-related gym-to-housing-and-back seclusion of the 2020-21 season. “(The coaches) ask us questions, being upperclassmen, and we don’t really have answers. We’re learning just like them.”
It can’t be found in any course catalog, but 13 students at this institution will have the full immersive experience of Porter Moser 101 this summer.
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A good sign, then, that they’re all seated with binders on their laps 10 minutes before the scheduled start of an afternoon film session. This particular proctor expects nothing less.
The slogan on the black binder covers matches the oversized one on the wall: CREATING OUR CULTURE. Three words that, on sight, underscore how everything is the same but not quite what it was before. Moser’s “Created By Culture” refrain dominated everything from wall decor to social media hashtags at his last stop. At Oklahoma, using the past tense struck him as wrong. His program is an organism in its embryonic stages. Everything is in front of the coaches and players. Everything is forward motion. So Moser brought the credo into the present progressive tense. The graphic designer’s use of the iconic Jordan Brand logo as the “A” in “CREATING” is the entirely unsubtle, declarative touch: No, we’re not in Rogers Park anymore.
Neither, though, does Moser stray from what brought him here. His principles are his principles. One day earlier, he introduced his defensive shell drill in a workout for the first time. Every coach does a version of a shell drill; none consider it as essential or sacrosanct as Moser does. “Shell is kind of a warm-up that coaches use, to allow players to get ready to play defense,” Harkless says. “But shell is the drill for him. He expects it to be right.”
Predictably, corrections and teaching points constantly interrupted the action. Also predictably, the next day begins with “Get Better” clips — same name for the pre-practice film review of areas to improve, different venue. They’re followed by examples of how Loyola Chicago executed concepts properly because that’s the only available comparison Moser has.
While he waits for Custer to cue up the tape, Moser uses a green laser pointer to highlight key culture phrases on the wall. There’s one on every brick. Today he lands on READ THE SHOULDERS and SLIGHT DIAGONALS. Moments later, with the clips rolling, Moser asks his new team what the best defense is. “No catch,” they respond, in unison and a little muted, like they’re only half sure they’re giving the professor the right answer.
“I could go in there and tell you probably like 30 to 40 percent of what that stuff means,” Tanner Groves says. “Maybe I’m shooting a little high there.”
“If they asked me, if they gave me a scenario, I think I can get pretty much half of it right now,” Harkless says.
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“I don’t know every term,” Goldwire says, “and I’m probably not going to know it for a minute.”
For the next 75 minutes or so on the Noble Center main floor, the Sooners essentially are another set of campers, a lot taller and a lot better than the tykes who scampered across the court in the morning but nevertheless absorbing information all the same. A full-court shooting drill, with Moser reminding the group to “get out of the mud,” his own personal code for exploding in the first three steps of transition offense. The introduction of an offensive set called “Blast,” during which Moser pauses for a moment. “This is forever: echo the call,” he says, simultaneously installing an offense and the program principle that every player, whether he’s in or out of the drill, repeats the play call made by the coach. The safety check, when Moser sees his group toeing up to the baseline during some heated five-on-five action.
It’s great that they’re involved and attentive. But in Porter Moser’s world, there’s a way to be involved and attentive.
“This is forever,” Moser says again. “Everyone take a step off the baseline. This is for your own safety. If you’re on the baseline, you’re 1 yard back.”
Yards, feet, inches … this is how Moser measures success, or at least the potential for it. This is the enduring aftershock of working for Rick Majerus, Moser’s patron saint of process, the man who imbued him with his obsession over angles and positioning. This is forever, too.
A simple pick-and-pop shooting drill becomes a crash course in footwork for Tanner Groves; after Groves sets the screen, his first step as he pops must be an almost exaggeratedly big one. That maximizes the separation. Then two quick shuffle steps, and then Groves opens up, to get his momentum ever so slightly moving toward the rim. That way he’s not fading away on a shot attempt. “That’s economy of motion,” Moser tells his transfer big man. Likewise, running “Blast” correctly requires one player at one point to take one hard dribble – precisely one dribble, and a precisely hard dribble. When Hill forgets it entirely, Moser stops everything. He explains how that one hard dribble will set up the opposition’s defense just so, in order that a scoring opportunity presents itself two passes later.
“A guy is 2 inches from the spot he needs to be? The whistle blows and it restarts and he explains why,” Tanner Groves says. “Exactly why. That’s my favorite thing that Coach does. After a mistake, he doesn’t say, like, ‘You need to be here, let’s go again.’ He says, ‘You need to be here because.’ And then he’ll explain it. And then guys understand the reasoning behind it. That’s basic learning.”
Or as Gibson puts it: “He wants perfection. That’s what it takes to be great.”
It’s a workout in the second week of the summer for a team with a new coach. It’s a tug-of-war between frustration and optimism. The Sooners beat the previous week’s standard for points scored during a team shooting drill. It looks easier than it did just a few days earlier, a pleased Moser notes. The Sooners also get sloppy running offense midway through practice, and Moser declares they’ll stay there for 30 hours if they have to, to get it right. They demonstrate telltale signs of fatigue toward the end, and Moser tells them they’re doing what 90 percent of college teams do, and the 10 percent who can concentrate when they’re tired are the ones who play for jewelry. None of the good or bad is surprising. All that matters is how effectively the players can apply what they learn to change the ratio of good to bad over the next couple months.
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“These guys have been great,” Moser says. “They’re hanging on every word. They’re listening. They’re trying, but it’s a curve. So I’m going real slow. I’m going real slow. People talk about how fundamental we were at Loyola — it doesn’t happen by accident. You achieve what you emphasize.”
It’s getting to be late afternoon when a spirited but somewhat disjointed scrimmage-like period ends and Moser brings his new team to the middle of the floor. This brief confab is not the time to harp on the details. A lot is being thrown at them, he concedes. It can be overwhelming. So there’s but one goal for the players to keep in mind.
Don’t go backward, he says.
“You gotta stay soaking it up,” Moser tells the group. “You gotta stay a sponge. Because it’s going to be about the little things.”
Turn onto GT Blankenship Boulevard, bound for the Lloyd Noble Center, and the first large building approaches on the right. It’s a stand-alone edifice. It is probably as big or bigger than the practice gyms for a high percentage of Division I basketball programs. And it is for Oklahoma Rowing. Only Oklahoma Rowing, in fact. We mean no disrespect to the oldest intercollegiate sport there is, of course. Still: This is a university willing and capable of putting envy-inspiring resources behind a rowing program. In Norman, Okla. It’s the kind of school where, athletically, everything you can imagine can be real. “They are wired here to be successful at everything,” Moser says.
Here we have to note the hilarious irony that Moser’s previous office is actually bigger than his new one. But, as an abridged version of why he’s here, Oklahoma’s ability to eliminate want is as good as any. He does not have to worry about making NCAA Tournaments if his team is good enough to earn a spot. He can convince his players that program culture will be a competitive advantage, just as he did before … while not negotiating competitive disadvantages in recruiting or budgets or facilities, and so on. It helps that the Sooners weren’t downtrodden and that Lon Kruger’s approach to running a program wasn’t a far cry from his own, thus limiting the shockwaves of transition. Mostly, though, Moser identified Oklahoma as a place that offered him the chance to compete at the highest level, and for the greatest prizes, more regularly than he ever could before.
Call it semantics or a matter of timing, but he only interviewed for one job after Loyola Chicago’s Sweet 16 run ended. “I know it’s a place you can have sustained success,” Moser says. “With every bone in my body, I thought we could win the national championship at Loyola. I just believed it. I think at Oklahoma, we can eliminate a lot of the roadblocks. You want to be on the highest stage. You want to be at the Final Four. No question, that’s why you’re driven. The timing had to be right. The people had to be right for me to leave Loyola. And it was. All those things aligned at the right time for me.”
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The tests are coming. They always do. He’ll have to attract talent at a level he hasn’t before, and against the best in the game. (It’s worth mentioning Moser pulls out his calendar and notes he’s either on the road recruiting or hosting a visiting prospect every day in June.) And, inevitably, Moser will find himself at the intersection of push and shove at some point, where the urge to win Big 12 games will press against his values and that adamantine culture and decisions will have to be made. “The one thing I’ll tell you about Coach: I’ve never seen him compromise,” Dildy says. Easy enough to say now, though Turner notes Oklahoma walked away from one transfer in this last cycle due to concerns about character issues. That’s auspicious. That’s also only one player, in the spring of 2021, and this program under these coaches haven’t won or lost a game yet.
As for the idea that winning at Oklahoma can validate him in a way other places couldn’t, that’s a test in a way, too. This is inherently about how well his system will work at a higher level. This is inherently about how well he can coach a different brand of player, against a different brand of competition. That’s the elemental truth in this. And that creates tension. It’s not new but neither is it escapable: What happens next will define Porter Moser in some new way. How well he handles this probably depends on how much he cares about the people doing the defining.
“Competitive people are always trying to validate themselves,” Moser says. “There’s always some little level of insecurity inside you that makes you competitive, and I have that a little, but it’s a personal thing.
“Jeff Van Gundy gave me a great piece of advice. It’s easier said than done, but it’s awesome: ‘Don’t accept praise or criticism from someone you wouldn’t ask for advice.’ So, it’s more of a closer circle of people that I respect, that I want to be validated from. I know they’ll tell me the truth if I’m not doing the right things. And there’s always this little level of validation you’re trying to prove to yourself. I hope I don’t grow out of it, because that means I’m satisfied.”
When he’s out and about here, be it at a job-related appearance or at a restaurant for a meal or whatever, the guy from the Chicago suburbs has encountered an odd but charming idiosyncrasy. The people of Norman don’t merely say they’re glad he’s there, or wish him well this winter. They say “Welcome home,” intentionally, with an energy and earnestness Porter Moser can’t resist.
He’s nevertheless the transplant living in a rental house, the 50-something husband and father figuring out a new life for two college-age kids and two high school-age kids, the basketball coach conceiving a program from scratch. So he’s not settled. Not really. That might take a while. But then he’s also still the guy who can’t stop until everything is in its place, perfectly aligned, just the way he wants it.
(Top photo of Porter Moser: Mike Houck /Oklahoma basketball)
