Texts, tears & Skittles: How incredible coaching tree connects Jerome Tang, Paul Mills

18-23 minutes 7/27/2023
No one took Scott Drew seriously when he arrived at Baylor at the age of 32 and boldly said that he planned to win a national championship with the Bears.
The idea, in 2003, of then-lowly Baylor winning a ring, especially with an unproven men’s basketball coach, seemed impossible. Many assumed it would take a miracle worker just to make that team relevant in the Big 12, let alone compete at the highest levels of the sport.
But Drew slowly proved everyone wrong and turned the Bears into a national power.
How? That question is becoming easier to answer with each passing season. If the last 20 years have taught us anything about Baylor’s rise from moribund program to powerhouse, it’s that Drew had an all-star support staff helping him along the way. Look back at team photos from his early years at Baylor and you will see the faces of five current Division I head coaches staring back at you.
Drew’s bench was overflowing with young coaching talent, and they are now respected names in the profession.
All of them have led their own teams to the NCAA Tournament. Many of them have secured destination jobs in power conferences. Together, they have formed the hottest, if not best, active coaching tree in all of college basketball.
Case in point: When Kansas State (Jerome Tang), Texas Tech (Grant McCasland) and Wichita State (Paul Mills) recently needed new coaches, they all tapped into Drew’s coaching tree. North Florida (Matthew Driscoll) did the same in 2009 and it hasn’t changed coaches since.
Their budding careers all trace back to the same place.
“We were a bunch of dreamers,” Mills said. “We all thought we were going to win the Big 12 our first year at Baylor. It obviously didn’t happen that fast, but we put in the work. We were usually in the office until 3 a.m. and right back in there at 8. It was a collaborative effort by people who were extremely motivated.”
It’s easy to see why they are now rising stars.
Tang elevated expectations immediately in Manhattan by leading the Wildcats to 26 victories and the Elite Eight. Mills is coming off a 30-win campaign and NCAA Tournament appearance at Oral Roberts. McCasland just claimed a NIT championship at North Texas. All the while, Drew keeps winning at Baylor.
Last year, Drew’s coaching tree combined for a record of 124-50 with four postseason appearances.
“I can see four of us coaching against each other in the Final Four some day,” Drew said. “Obviously, we would all prefer a different ending with who is cutting down the nets, but that would be the ultimate crown jewel for us. No matter who would win, it would be hard to top that. And I really do think it could happen.“
Another bold claim. Perhaps we should listen this time.
Brothers after Baylor
The coaches in Drew’s tree no longer work together, but you wouldn’t know it by the way they text back and forth on Saturday mornings.
Every weekend, without fail, one coach will fire off a message to the other four that reads, “Let’s go 5-0 today!”
“Then you get a congratulatory text later on at night,” Mills said. “But only if you win. Nothing is worse than being the oddball loser and you know they’re all texting each other and you’re missing out. Fortunately, we won 30 games this year, so that didn’t happen to me very often. It’s exciting to win, but it’s really exciting when you look and see that Jerome won and Grant won and Scott won, too. When all your brothers win those are the really good days.”
It is fitting that they refer to each other as siblings, because they support each other like family.
When McCasland took North Texas to the NIT finals last season in Las Vegas, he could hear Drew rooting for him up in the stands. Tang was the first person to congratulate Mills when Wichita State hired him away from Oral Roberts. Everyone got in line to shake hands with Tang after he won national coach of the year honors in April.
“We are all each other’s biggest fans,” Tang said. “Don’t get me wrong. We are all really competitive guys and we want to beat each other, but we know how to do it without being enemies.”
Driscoll was the first to leave Baylor in 2009 and Tang was the last to depart Drew’s bench in 2022. In between, Mills and McCasland also left to fly on their own. But they remain connected.
That was especially true when Baylor won the NCAA Tournament two years ago and Drew made sure all of his former assistants received a national championship ring. The gift also came with a special T-shirt that featured the word “FAMILY” in capital letters, along with the names of every player, coach, manager and staffer who spent time with Drew in Waco.
“There were hundreds of names on that shirt,” Driscoll said. “I’m still amazed he found a way to fit them all on there. I didn’t know they had fonts that small.”
Drew said the gifts were a no-brainer.
“We wouldn’t have been there if not for all the work that they put in,” Drew said. “You don’t complete a house without a foundation, and everyone that gave support to our program was part of our national championship.”
No compete clause
When K-State athletic director Gene Taylor decided to part ways with former coach Bruce Weber, he made calls to two members of the Scott Drew coaching tree.
One of them obviously went to Tang, who was Baylor’s associate head coach at the time. He wowed Taylor with a preliminary interview in Kansas City and then locked up the job a week later during a follow-up interview at his house in Waco. After spending 19 years coaching alongside Drew, he was ready to take command of his own Big 12 program.
The other call went to McCasland, who was in his fifth season at North Texas. But he never answered. No matter how many times Taylor reached out about the opening, it was radio silence from McCasland.
Why? Well, once word got out that Tang was the front-runner for the job, McCasland had zero interest in competing against his old friend.
They have been through too much together for that.
Ask Tang about McCasland and he responds by saying, “Grant saved my life.”
The story goes like this.
There was a time when McCasland and Tang were both overweight while they worked together at Baylor. They were eating too much junk food on road trips and they were focusing too much on their jobs. It felt like they were too busy to stay healthy.
But they realized they needed to change that when they both ballooned above 200 pounds.
So they agreed to help each other get into shape. For the next few months, they woke up at 5 in the morning and worked out until their muscles ached. They also changed their diets and made every possible effort to lose weight. No sugar, no red meat, no sleeping in.
Both of them wanted to give up after a few days of their new routine, but they pushed each other to keep going. Tang says they stayed with it for over a year. McCasland recalls only a few months. No matter how long it lasted, their partnership worked.
Tang is now one of the leanest coaches in the Big 12.
“I’m not a morning person at all,” Tang said, “but I rolled out of bed every morning because I knew Grant was going to be there and I got in the best shape of my life.”
McCasland dropped to 155 pounds.
“It was a life-changing experience for me, too,” McCasland said. “I was able to lose 50 pounds. I had never been that dedicated about anything since I stopped playing basketball, and I was able to stick with it because we did it together. There were days I wanted to give up, but I knew Tang was getting up early so we just kept on doing it.”
No way were they about to go head-to-head for a job.
It’s also possible that the universe was trying to send some good karma in Tang’s direction.
Years earlier, Mills and Tang were among three finalists to take over as head coach at Oral Roberts. They were both Baylor assistants at the time. They both wanted the position. And they both flew to Tulsa and stayed at the same hotel before they interviewed with university leaders.
Only one of them could leave town happy.
At some point during his interview, Tang decided that person should be Mills. Tang had special demands in mind for the job, and when he realized they were unlikely to be met he stopped talking about himself and began promoting Mills. He spent the final hour of his chat with ORU administrators explaining why they should hire his friend.
“When I saw him back at the hotel he was packing up his clothes, so I figured it didn’t go very well for him,” Mills said. “Then he tells me, ‘I’m leaving, but you are absolutely getting this job.’”
Mills and Tang tease each other from time to time, so Mills wasn’t sure if his friend was being serious. When it was time for his interview, Mills told his future employers that he was prepared to withdraw his name from consideration for the job if they were seriously considering Tang. He didn’t want to stand in the way.
Then something surprising happened.
“The athletic director very adamantly said, ‘No, please don’t do that,’” Mills said. “That’s when I realized Jerome was telling the truth. He had done the exact same thing for me earlier in the day.”
Oral Roberts went on to hire Mills in 2017 and he ended up leading the Golden Eagles to a pair of NCAA Tournaments over the next six seasons.
Tang was happy for him, just like McCasland was happy for Tang years later.
“Isn’t that cool?” Driscoll said. “Even when two of us are up for the same job we find a way to maintain our brotherhood.”
A tree filled with Skittles
Growing a successful coaching tree isn’t easy.
Just ask Bill Self or John Calipari.
Both of them have won big for decades as head coaches, and they have employed many young, promising assistants. But none of them are currently the Godfather of an impressive coaching tree the way Drew is today.
Self has owned the Big 12 since he arrived at Kansas, winning 17 conference championships and a pair of national titles, but the top active member of his coaching tree is Kyle Keller at Stephen F. Austin.
Meanwhile, Drew’s coaching tree just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
There are many reasons why. Let’s start with a few common denominators.
Drew and all of his former assistants are deeply religious people who have found ways to use their faith as extra fuel on the basketball court. They also talk in similar ways, referring to elite scorers as “dudes.” And they all put their players first.
But that’s where the similarities end.
Watch Baylor, K-State, Texas Tech, Wichita State and North Florida and you will find five very different teams. Drew likes to win games with 3-pointers in a spread-out offense. McCasland plays slow and tries to win with defense. Tang likes to play up-tempo and win with highlight plays like alley-oop dunks. Driscoll and Mills have their own styles, too.
None of them follow the same recipe.
“We’re not a cookie-cutter tree,” Driscoll said. “We’re a tree that’s been able to sprout its own roots, so to speak, and the seeds have been able to grow based on the program you’re with. An apple tree produces apples, but in our case we are more like a Skittles tree. We’re all a little different, and I think we blossomed because Coach Drew allowed us to be who we wanted to be and develop in our own ways.”
Drew likes to think they are all different coaches by design. When he brought them on as assistant coaches at Baylor he never tried to pigeonhole them into specific roles. He gave his assistants autonomy to do their jobs in their own unique ways, and that meant doing a little bit of everything.
Baylor assistants aren’t just recruiters or frontcourt specialists or coordinators with an emphasis on offense or defense. Drew views them as future head coaches who can do it all.
“I learned that from when I worked for my dad,” Drew said. “When you have everybody do everything it allows you to learn how to run a program. If you’re in the restaurant business it’s impossible to open your own place if you only know how to be a waiter or a host or a chef. If you haven’t learned every capacity of the business, it’s hard to train people and work with people. My dad allowed me to basically be like a head coach, and that’s how I always treated my assistants. So when they take over a program there’s not a big a transition for them to make.”
To that end, Mills and Tang both said they never felt like they worked for Drew. They worked with him.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise if you are familiar with Drew’s interview process. He won’t hire someone unless they get lost in conversation like old friends. Mills spent hours on the phone with Drew, talking every day for more than a week before he agreed to work at Baylor. Drew never intended to hire Tang but they meshed so well during phone conversations, and then at a dinner at Tang’s home, that he brought him on board.
Whenever a coach leaves for their first head coaching position, Drew treats it like a Baylor player leaving for the NBA. He is happy for them and offers them some advice on how to make the most of the opportunity.
First and foremost, Drew advises his coaches to recruit players who know how to score. He likes to say defense can be taught in college, but teaching a player how to get buckets is much more difficult.
“It was 15 years ago, but I can still hear him telling me, ‘You have to get dudes,’” Driscoll said. “X’s and O’s are great, but they don’t beat Jimmys and Joes. That is the main thing he reiterated for me. We all think we can win games with our coaching, but that’s not really true. You have to have dudes.”
K-State fans will recognize that terminology after one year with Tang.
Drew’s other advice was to pay close attention to your schedule, because it can be just as important as recruiting.
Finally, he also likes to use a metaphor: Try not to look at things as if the cup is half empty or half full, instead simply keep filling up the cup.
Mills took that to mean he should find as much help as he possibly could with Wichita State.
“Many hands make light work,” Mills said. “When you’re a first-time head coach you want to make sure your fingerprints are on everything, but you really have to have trust in your staff. The more you delegate to them and work together the better your team is going to be.”
The 2021 NCAA Tournament was a miserable experience for many teams, but it was a blast for Baylor and anyone who used to coach for the Bears.
While some players and coaches felt trapped inside “the bubble,” as COVID-19 forced the entire tournament to be played in Indianapolis and required participants to get tested daily, they treated it like a vacation.
The Bears, coached by Drew and Tang, won the national championship. Oral Roberts, coached by Mills, reached the Sweet 16. North Texas, coached by McCasland, reached the Round of 32.
When they weren’t focused on basketball, those coaches and their teams linked up to play games and have fun inside the bubble. While other teams were miserable, they were carefree.
“You would turn on the TV and see all of us winning on the bottom ticker,” Drew said. “Those were some good days.”
One thing is for sure: If those days keep coming, Drew’s coaching tree will keep growing.
The difficult part will be playing against each other.
Drew and Tang went head-to-head twice last season, with K-State winning both games over Baylor. The first game took an emotional toll on Tang. He cried outside the visiting locker room when it was over, because he felt awful for his former team.
That is one reason why Drew has refused to schedule any games against his former assistants. McCasland admits it will feel strange coaching against Baylor and K-State next season. Mills isn’t looking forward to coaching against K-State.
“It will be hard, but we coached against each other every day in scrimmages at Baylor,” Mills said. “Coach Drew would tell me to coach one team and Jerome to coach the other. Then he would watch. We tried as hard as we could to win those scrimmages. Once the ball goes up it’s all about your players. I’m sure we will get used to it.”
When those games are over, they will all go back to supporting each other.
After watching Tang reach the Elite Eight last season at K-State, Mills said he is gunning for even more at Wichita State. McCasland says he came to Texas Tech to win a national title, nothing less. Tang isn’t satisfied with what he’s accomplished, either. Drew wants another ring.
They’re all gunning for the Final Four, no longer on the same team but always together.