As Ross Hodge takes over the Mountaineers, he’s turning to a fellow Big 12 program as an image for what he views the future of his team as.
This season, the top-ranked scoring defense in the country was Houston, who conveniently just played for the national championship. Two spots behind them was North Texas this past season, and their former head coach Ross Hodge, is the new head coach of the Mountaineers, who are in the same conference as the Cougars.
“Historically if you look at the teams that win and win this time of year it’s because they’re rooted in defense, especially in the Big 12. Tt’s not surprising at all, the teams that have had the best defense — when Kansas was winning the Big 12, they were the best defensive team in the league. Houston’s won the Big 12 recently, they’ve been the best defensive team in the league,” Hodge said.
The emphasis on defense is what has helped Hodge stand out as a younger coach at the Division I level. Hodge was one of the architects of Texas Tech head coach Grant McCasland’s defense when he was still at UNT, and it’s something Hodge has built his programs on.
Hodge said that toughness has helped his teams at North Texas be right up there with Houston, according to Hodge.
“Not only has our scoring defense been really good but we’ve went back and forth with Houston for having the best road winning percentage in the country the last eight years. And if you’re going to win on the road, you better be tough, you better be physical, you better be able to defend, and then you better have elite guard play and we’ve had some of the best guards in the country,” Hodge said.
Hodge views the Cougars not only as a benchmark for his team, but for most teams around the country, but he models his teams in a similar way to how Houston head coach Kelvin Sampson models his.
“I would think it wouldn’t just be us that’s chasing them, I would think anybody else that wants to be in the Final Four would take a hard look at it. But, I have a lot of respect for Coach Sampson, a lot of respect for all the coaches in the Big 12. And there’s a lot of different ways to skin a cat, obviously, and I don’t think you have to be married to one certain ideology,” Hodge said.
As far as how Hodge will go about trying to be the best he can be on defense, he says it varies based on personnel from year to year, but they will still have the same foundational level of play.
“Every team’s going to be a little different and every team’s going to have certain strengths and weaknesses. We’ve had elite defensive teams throughout these years, but sometimes we’ve had teams that were really good at defending the three-point line and the next year we weren’t great at defending the three-point line but we were elite at guarding twos, or maybe we turned people over a little bit more,” Hodge said.
Hodge’s analogy for this comes from his wife, Shelly, who is a yoga instructor. He said she teaches flexibility, something Hodge knows he’s going to have to be.
“In the storms, it’s the flexible trees that survive storms. The stiff, rigid, trees, they break under storms. You got to have some flexibility, you got to be able to evolve, and you can’t be so stubborn in a certain way that this is how we’re going to do things outside of, you are going to play extremely hard, we are going to play together, we’re going to play for each other, and there’s going to be a connectivity amongst the group,” Hodge said.
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