Final Four Link to Ivy League

Florida’s staff was heavily influenced by Kyle Smith’s data-driven approach at Columbia.

Columbia program to build a powerhouse men’s basketball team. 

Florida Coach Todd Golden has used lessons learned from the data-driven approach of Kyle Smith’s 

The New York Times

Sabato 5 Aprile 2025

Pagina 31

‘My “why” has always been, 

I want to empower people to empower themselves.’ 

   - KYLE SMITH, whose emphasis 

     on analytics proved infectious.

SAN ANTONIO — In May 2010, Kyle Smith earned a long-awaited chance to run his own men’s college basketball program. He had played Division III hoops and spent almost two decades as an assistant coach at three different schools. And, somehow, becoming the head coach at Columbia was the easiest part of becoming the head coach at Columbia.

Smith moved to New York with his wife, who was pregnant, during one of the hottest summers in the city’s history. He went three days without sleep in the run-up to the season. What was most frustrating was that none of his new assistants were familiar with his data-driven plan for program building. It was “Moneyball” for basketball, is how Smith puts it, and no one grasped it quick enough. He had to simplify. Maybe even scrap it.

In this gully of doubt, one staff member intervened. We’re on to something, Koby Altman insisted.

“That takes a lot of energy, when you’re trying to teach your staff this philosophy,” Altman said recently, fresh off a European scouting trip in his role as the president of basketball operations for the Cleveland Cavaliers. “I loved the way these stats teach you how to value players. And once we got it, we got it.” 

Smith is now Stanford’s men’s basketball coach. Without that small infusion of resolve, maybe a coaching tree doesn’t shoot into the sky from the ground at West 120th Street and Broadway. And maybe one of its most notable branches isn’t easy to mistake for the trunk itself.

The analytics-heavy model that has taken No. 1-seeded Florida to the Final Four is effectively the same approach honed by Smith all those years ago at Columbia, executed by many of the same people, only with power-conference resources.

The result? Florida is a hulking national title contender with an Ivy League soul.

“If you look at our team at Florida, a lot of these guys were underrecruited, undervalued,” said Kevin Hovde, an assistant on Smith’s teams from 2012 to 2016 at Columbia, a current Gators aide and, when Florida’s season is over, Columbia’s new head coach. “People look at us: ‘How do these guys do that?’ Well, maybe starting off at Columbia had something to do with that, and kind of learning the ropes that way.

During Smith’s nine years as an assistant coach at St. Mary’s, his belief in hustle stats — essentially a way to put values on things no one regularly put value on, like possession quality — helped turn around the Gaels. Smith knew he would follow the same outline in his first head coaching job, for better or worse. He could not guess how the tendrils of it all would snake through the sport.

Smith’s first Columbia staff included a current top executive for a 60-win N.B.A. franchise (Altman), the new head coach at Fordham (Mike Magpayo) and an associate head coach (Carlin Hartman) who is now in the same role with Florida. By Smith’s fourth year, three more 2024-25 Florida staff members — the head coach, Todd Golden; Hovde; and an assistant, John Andrzejek — had joined his program.

The acolytes took it from there, to heights no one anticipated: that same devotion to the hustle stats conceived by Smith is in the concrete of Golden’s three-year build in Gainesville.

“It’s everything,” Smith said last month. “It gets a little emotional, to see what you’ve preached come to fruition. To see it flourish, and guys get their opportunities, it’s been neat. We’re getting there. We got it coast to coast. We got it covered.” 

This was not always the feeling.

There was that three-day stretch leading into that 2010-11 season in which Smith did not sleep. He was fairly sure he was physically incapable of making it into the office, when his wife, Katie, sent him on his way.

That first Columbia staff shared cubicles until the football program moved into new offices. Meetings took place on a squash court. Before the first season, Columbia’s equipment manager informed Hartman there were no new practice jerseys. Hartman asked him whose fault that was. “Kind of yours,” he was told. Columbia’s coaches, as it turns out, were responsible for putting in the order.

“So that first year we had some ragtag, makeshift practice uniforms that were just awful,” Hartman said. “The next spring, I’m like, OK, let’s get on it.

But these were not roadblocks to basketball idea incubation. Columbia might have been a quintessential job in a quintessential environment for that.

The players, for the most part, would be intelligent overachievers who would respond to a system that measured everything they did on the floor. At the start, it was a total of 34 hustle stats, counted by hand and charted by Smith’s assistants after every workout and game.

“It’s like kindergarten, when you get a star by your name when you do something right,” Smith said. “People are simple.” 

Putting values on statistics 

that no one regulkarly valued.

Each member of the men’s basketball Putting values on statistics that no one regularly valued. staff, meanwhile, typically lived in proximity to the school, which allowed brainstorming that started in the office to bleed into runs through Riverside Park or hours spent decompressing at the Tap A Keg bar.

“No driving, no commute,” Smith said. “You could go to a place after work and hang out and exchange ideas and just have fun.

” And at an Ivy League outpost with relatively modest coaches’ salaries, in an expensive city, the likeliest candidates for any staff position were young, ambitious strivers eager to learn.

“We’re young, we’re single,” Altman said. “At that time, you feel like, man, this is all upside.” 

All of it made for fertile ground to experiment with Smith’s system.

“There’s stuff that we were doing that I think a lot of programs are doing now, that we were just on the forefront of,” Hovde said.

“We were tracking a bunch of different things within a possession.

Did you get a paint touch? What kind of shot did you get? We would rate the possessions on a zero-through-five scale. That’s one thing that we did for years. We don’t do it as much now, but I just think there was no one doing it back then.” 

As the man at the helm of a Final Four team, Golden is the most public-facing descendant and practitioner. The backbone of his coaching career, Golden said last weekend, was playing for Randy Bennett and Smith at St. Mary’s and then working for Smith at Columbia and San Francisco. It was an introduction to a system, followed by an immersion.

Smith tried to hire Golden at Columbia in 2010 to no avail. Two years on, he hopped aboard for a two-year stint. (He took the spot vacated by Altman, who left to begin his N.B.A. front-office climb.) 

When Golden compiled his first staff at Florida in 2022, the vines connecting to the past were no coincidence; Hartman, Hovde and his director of analytics, Jonathan Safir, all worked with Smith and Golden at Columbia or had Columbia basketball ties. (Andrzejek arrived a year later.) 

A massive chart chronicling data gleaned from workouts hung in the practice gym, for all Florida players to examine daily.

On its stampede to a Southeastern Conference tournament title and now the Final Four, Florida has deployed a first-team allAmerican guard (Walter Clayton Jr.) and a frontcourt rotation with players who stand 6-foot-9, 6-11, 611 and 7-1. At no point will anyone inside the Alamodome this weekend confuse this No. 1 seed for an Ivy League squad. Nor does Florida have to outdata the opposition, given its depth of talent and size.

But then there was Golden and his staff, doing the math while facing a late deficit against Texas Tech in the round of 8, deciding to foul earlier than usual to halt the clock and steal more possessions. It was a calculated risk. And it worked.

“One of the biggest things that we always talk about with the Smith tree is ‘smart wins,’” Hartman said. “Getting really good, smart players that can do the things which we want to do on the floor, be able to carry out a scouting report, being able to remember things on the fly, and being able to adjust on the fly.” 

And so the roots spread.

Altman’s Cavaliers have instituted their own version of Smith’s hustle stats system and sport the second-best record in the N.B.A.

During the N.C.A.A. tournament, Columbia announced Hovde would be its next head coach and Campbell University in Buies Creek, N.C., hired Andrzejek for its top job. (“He’s a combination of Thibodeaux, Belichick and Harbaugh — you do the math,” Smith said.) Magpayo won 89 games in five years at U.C. Riverside, then scored the Fordham job.

“My ‘why’ has always been, I want to empower people to empower themselves,” Smith said. “I like handing off the knowledge. I don’t mind sharing what we do. It’s not hard. It’s hard to commit yourself to doing it.

For the news releases to commemorate the Andrzejek and Magpayo hires, Altman was asked to provide a comment on the two coaches. He ran the words by B.J. Evans, the Cavaliers’ vice president for communications. Evans had to take a beat to digest how it was that an Ivy League basketball program seeded so much coaching success.

But, as Altman noted, “nerding out on formulas and algorithms” at a place like Columbia also makes sense. And winning numbers are winning numbers anywhere.

“It gives you a really good foundation of what you’re looking for, and the undervalued stats that can help you,” Altman said. “And then if you mix that in with great character guys that have unbelievable work ethic and really want to be in your program? Now you’re really cooking with some grease, man.”.