Coach of the year candidate Scott Drew turns Baylor's low-star talent into star team

Baylor coach Scott Drew sure can coach ’em up. That sentence doesn’t jibe with the image you see of him as simply an aggressive recruiter. It doesn’t fit with the (unfounded) criticism you still hear of his in-game coaching.

But consider the number of top-50 recruits on this year’s roster: Zero.

The number of times Baylor has been ranked No. 1 in the country? One.

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And, for good measure, the number of times Baylor had ever been ranked No. 1 prior to this season? Zero.

That speaks to player development, cohesiveness and chemistry. It speaks to leadership, which this team has. And most of all it speaks to the coach who has orchestrated one of the greatest turnarounds in all of college basketball during his 14-year tenure in Waco. Often times, with little-known players who developed into future pros.

“Pierre Jackson (part of the 2012 Elite Eight team, and 2013 NIT champion squad) — when he came out, he had zero stars from Scout,” Drew tells USA TODAY Sports.

“I thought everybody who played got a star,” he deadpans.

It’s particularly timely to pay this tribute to Drew in the midst of a season in which a group of overlooked high school players — Ishmail Wainwright is the highest-ranked recruit out of players, and he clocked in at No. 57 in his class, per 247 Sports — turned into the best team nobody expected to be any good.

The Bears received no votes in the preseason polls after losing the school’s all-time leading rebounder (Rico Gathers) and a lottery pick in Taurean Prince.

“You understand why we weren’t predicted, early in the year, to be successful,” Drew says.

Yet they were, even so. They went undefeated through nonconference play, piling up wins against Oregon, Michigan State and Xavier all before Christmas because of a somewhat masochistic scheduling philosophy similar to that of Michigan State coach Tom Izzo. The strategy guarantees that a team will be challenged before the rigors of conference play, but it almost nearly also always guarantees at least one loss.

“To play the teams that we did and not have an early season loss, that’s hard to do nowadays,” Drew says. “We’ve had unbelievable leadership with our upperclassmen, and great chemistry because of that. We have really good depth, and that allows different people to step up to win games.”

Then, the Bears ascended to the No. 1 ranking by Jan. 9, a feat astounding on its own but even more so when you consider the Baylor men’s team had never found that perch before.

It was short-lived, though, with the Bears suffering their first loss of the season on the road at No. 10 West Virginia. The next game, a win at Kansas State, helped offset the lone bit of disappointment reached by becoming No. 1 and only getting to play with that label on the road, away from Waco. The loss dropped them from the top spot this week.

“Coaches understand the big picture, that no one cares who’s ranked No. 1 in January,” Drew says. “But to see all of Baylor nation fired up and excited, it was hard for our players not to get excited to be ranked No. 1 and achieve that for the first time in school history, for the past players who were texting, and all the students, the whole community.”

It’s a situation almost unrecognizable to the one Drew inherited back in 2003. When he took over a program reeling from the worst scandal in NCAA history — one involving a player murdering another player, and the lies that surrounded it.

So, yes, even a brief stint at No. 1 is a big deal. And 17-1 is a big deal, too, a record that includes five wins against top-25 teams and suggests that Bears could be capable of ending Kansas’s 12-year streak of Big 12 regular-season championships. Another point worth making suggests consistency at a rather high level: Baylor has averaged 24 wins during the last six years, with two Elite Eight trips in the mix.

But what’s an even bigger deal is how Drew’s doing what he’s doing this year. Or, well, the way he’s done it quite often in Waco, with the occasional one-and-done talent sprinkled in.

“The goal was always to go to Final Fours, win national championships, be ranked No. 1,” Drew says. “But you don’t always achieve what you set out to do.”

This year’s Baylor team is 1-for-3 so far. The other two remain possibilities, if the Bears continue to play the way they have with one of the deepest rosters in all of college basketball and more monster games from Johnathan Motley, who scored 32 points, grabbed 20 rebounds and blocked three shots Tuesday night against Texas.

“From the standpoint of leadership, chemistry and depth — it doesn’t guarantee that we’ll finish in the Elite Eight or the Final Four,” Drew says. “But we have the potential, if we keep getting better each and every day, to do that.

“I would think this team’s capable of beating anybody.”

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