His former coaches reveal why Gregg Marshall is college basketball’s best underdog

When word reached Chris Jans, a long-time assistant under Gregg Marshall, the current New Mexico State coach had himself a good chuckle.

Eighth? When was the last time a Gregg Marshall-coached team finished eighth in a conference?

“I thought to myself, ‘Oh boy, be careful of what you wish for,’” Jans said, speaking on the American Athletic Conference basketball coaches’ decision to rank Wichita State eighth entering this season.

Skepticism to Marshall is like spinach to Popeye.

“And all it takes is one person to doubt him,” said Dominic Okon, WSU’s director of basketball operations since Marshall arrived in 2007.

When he has been doubted before, Marshall has always prevailed with a winner regardless of the situation.

“And yet, for some odd reason, people still tend to doubt him,” added assistant Tyson Waterman, who also played for Marshall at Winthrop. “That’s when GM is at his best.”

WSU has a streak of nine straight 25-win seasons and seven straight NCAA Tournament trips, but no team has gone dancing in March in the last 16 years with as few returning minutes (11.2 percent) as the Shockers have this season.

This season promises to be the biggest challenge in Marshall’s 21-year coaching career.

The Eagle spoke to the coaches closest to Marshall to have them explain why he’s loving every second of it.

‘I coach broke’

There is a story that those who have been around Gregg Marshall like to tell on the recruiting path.

Not too long ago, Marshall was on a recruiting visit with a prospect who had been said to “play broke,” meaning there was a sense of desperation to his game, like his well-being rode on the outcome of every possession.

In closing, Marshall, who has taken WSU to a Final Four, an undefeated regular season and won a national coach of the year award, looked the recruit in the eyes and told him, “We’re going to make a great tandem because I coach broke.”

Marshall, at 480 career victories, has the eighth-most in Division I history by a coach at the end of his 20th season and is set to make $3.5 million this season, one of the richest contracts in the country. Yet Marshall still carries that same desperation with him, as if he’s worried all of his wins and money will vanish if he fails.

“He brings that mentality that we’re not defending anything,” said Devon Smith, WSU’s manager of player development who has been with Marshall since 2010. “It’s not our right to have anything. We’ve got to go fight for it every single day and we’ve got to earn it.”

Marshall has always been that way, ever since his playing days in the early 1980s at Division II Randolph-Macon.

“In today’s landscape, there’s such a sense of entitlement and Gregg has never had that sense of entitlement,” said Jeff Reynolds, an assistant at Randolph-Macon at the time. “He has the sense of ‘I’m going to out-work you’ and ‘I’m going to put in more time than you.’ That’s how he got his wife. He even overachieved in that aspect, too.”

‘A master motivator’

Something every coach who has been around Marshall can agree on is his peculiar ability to summon the best from everyone around him.

It’s often overshadowed by his intensity, but Marshall was already proving his chops at motivating when he was an assistant coach from 1988-96 under the legendary John Kresse at the College of Charleston.

“He knew how to get under players’ skin and get them to play up to their potential and sometimes beyond their potential,” Kresse said. “He found a way to win, no matter what the odds were.”

At WSU, Marshall inspires everyone from players to assistant coaches to managers. They see how desperately he wants to succeed and it motivates them to do their job the best they can to help the team achieve its ultimate goal.

“There’s not a fiber in his body that doesn’t think about winning each and every day,” Jans said. “That’s what makes him a master motivator.”

“It was like his back was against the wall every single day,” said former assistant Greg Heiar, now an assistant at LSU. “He found a way to get the maximum out of everyone and that’s so hard to do, but that’s why he’s a Hall of Famer. His competitiveness is just off the chain. When your top guy is like that, then it spreads through your team.”

‘Always wants more’

What Marshall has created at WSU is no different than other dynasties like the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs under Greg Popovich or the NFL’s New England Patriots under Bill Belichick.

Marshall has built his own system, crafted over the years from his inspiration working under Hal Nunnally at Randolph-Macon, Kevin Eastman at Belmont Abbey and Kresse at College of Charleston. Marshall runs drills to improve specific skills and builds practice plans around perfecting his system. As Smith says, “the players continue to change, but a lot of the old-school ways of winning games haven’t.”

The winning formula goes something like this: defend, rebound, then defend some more and rebound some more. On offense, he hammers it home with players to remained disciplined while running through their sets until a good shot presents itself.

“When you get your entire operation to believe in a system, trust it, then execute it,” Heiar said, “then you end up winning a lot of games.”

“He makes practices tougher than the games,” Kresse said.

There’s a reason why so many under-the-radar recruits have developed into stars under Marshall.

In order to continue WSU’s winning ways this season, Marshall will have to work his magic on nine players adjusting to the Division I level. According to Okon and Smith, the two longest-tenured members on staff, Marshall has shown the most patience in practices since his early years at WSU.

But perhaps the biggest difference this summer was Marshall’’s almost weekly invitations for the team to hang out at his house. He knows in order to coach these new players like he needs to, he had to build a trust and a bond before he could do so.

“He is always pushing, always wanting more and that’s what makes him special,” Heiar said. “He believes every player can always get better fundamentally, can make better decisions, can play hard, can play more physical. He never lets you settle.”

‘He’s not stopping anytime soon’

In a lot of ways, last season was the most uncomfortable Marshall has been at WSU.

His program was actually shown respect (a preseason top-10 ranking and eventual No. 4 seed come March), but then his team veered away from his winning formula and started trying to out-score opponents, which led to its eventual demise in a first-round loss to Marshall.

While Marshall would like to skip the sure-to-be growing pains this season, those close to him do think he’s returned to a better space for his style.

“Gregg is much, much better at being the hunter than he is at being the hunted,” said ESPN analyst Mark Adams, who also calls Marshall a friend. “I really do believe this is a good spot for Wichita State to be in. I remember once upon a time when Wichita State was looking up at Creighton and Northern Iowa and trying to figure out how to beat those guys. Obviously we know how that turned out over the course of time.”

Marshall has accomplished almost everything possible at WSU, but he remains obsessed with what he hasn’t won. And any and every slight, real or perceived, will be used along the way to fuel him.

“He still has more things he wants to accomplish and he still has more championships he wants to win,” Smith said. “He’s still young for this stage of his career and he’s not stopping anytime soon.”

This story was originally published October 28, 2018 at 5:30 AM.