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Stevens leads Butler into Championship

By Nate Mink
Special to NCAA.org

HOUSTON — There could not have been a statement that goes more against everything Butler has come to represent in college basketball than what came out of Shelvin Mack’s mouth the day before he takes a second crack at a national championship.

“We kind of want to do it for ourselves, not for anyone else,” Shelvin Mack said. “We work hard every day, I think me and my teammates deserve it.”

We’ll get ours. You get yours. Or, as senior Matt Howard alluded: Take this theory about us doing mid-majors everywhere a good deed – and forget it.

That’s certainly not The Butler Way, five core principles the school and program prides itself on: passion, unity, servanthood, humility and thankfulness.

But Howard’s stance is reflective of the heights fourth-year coach Brad Stevens has reached with the Bulldogs. Angst may very well be the overwhelming feeling of his team here Monday night because, really, how many chances does a school like Butler have to seize the scissors and cut down the nets at the Final Four?

As Stevens sees it, and as the nation has quickly learned, the foundation he inherited on the 290-acre campus in Broad Ripple Village just north of downtown Indianapolis is rock solid enough to possibly ensure future opportunities for basketball glory.

All because of those five words.

“The most important thing is that we try to advance appropriately without losing who we are,” Stevens said.

That means taking pride in the little things, the minute details overlooked by the casual basketball fan. The leap steps. Closing out on ball screens while switching defensively. Hedging dribble penetration and recovering on the perimeter. Drawing a charge.

“It’s not rocket science,” Stevens said. “It begins with selflessness, and certainly accountability is very important, humility is very important. You kind of go through those founding principles.”

Added Stevens: “The only way we address The Butler Way with our team is in this regard. People know they’ve seen and felt something special. They just can’t put their finger on it.”

That phenomenon has spread across the country for the last two years, with fans attempting to explain how this Horizon League program continues to march through March, dispatching basketball giants of major conferences.

Since he left a stable job as a marketing associate at pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and arrived at Butler in 2000 as an unpaid graduate student manager, Stevens has traced Butler’s rise to success.

The turning point goes back to 2007, one season before Stevens was promoted to head coach. Butler, led by a trio of seniors in Brian Ligon, Marcus Nellems and Brandon Crone, reached the Sweet 16 for the second time in school history before losing to eventual national champion Florida.

Neither senior had much basketball success since. Stevens said Crone played a couple of seasons overseas. Ligon is set to graduate from medical school in May and join his family’s dentistry in Florida, Nellems a physical education teacher in South Carolina.

“Those guys gave us a belief that we could do something if we all stayed together and did all out jobs as well as we possibly can,” Stevens said.

And as the last two NCAA tournaments have shown, a collection of bright players willing to put ‘we’ before ‘me’ is just as powerful than the name stitched on the front of the uniform. 

“The conference shouldn’t matter as much as the media may portray it,” Ligon said in a telephone interview. “The biggest thing is playing like you’re supposed to be there instead of focusing on being the underdog.”

Despite Butler’s return to the national championship game, many still consider Stevens and the Bulldogs the underdog, waving the flag for the little guys. 

It’s a perception that can change with a victory against Connecticut and elevate Stevens among his coaching peers to a level that could be difficult for Butler to sustain.

“People always look at their job and say the grass is greener somewhere else,” Stevens said when asked about staying at Butler for the duration of his career. “We recognize the grass is very green at Butler.”

And getting greener.

“He’s not going out there trying to impress anybody,” Ligon said. “I don’t feel he’s worried about trying to change the image of the program to fit in just with the bigger conference schools.”

It wouldn’t be him, not the guy who played for four years at tiny DePauw University in Division III, who dreamed of playing for a national championship since his eighth birthday, when he was given a hoop for the driveway.

“Coaching is the closest you can get other than playing,” he said. “I guess that’s how the dream has changed.”

Butler’s not changing.

Neither is its coach.

Just its expectations.

Nate Mink is a senior in the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism at Penn State University