Grinnell College
 

Has anyone seen these guys play? They are a DIII team, so the first time i saw then was last night against Beloit. They have the most absurd style of basketball I've ever seen. They treat every offensive possession like a fast break and apply full court pressure every defensive possesssion. their guys run they entire time they are on the court and maintain it with a huge bench and a five man substitution system. It's a bit like playing basketball with football intensity. If you get the chance...watch these guys play.

...Here's an article I found.... http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/200...nnell.preview/ again, it's utter absurdity

i enjoyed watching the game play. it reminded me of controlled chaos. i was tired watching them. if one of their games were to be televised again, i'd watch it. they play a very unique style of basketball. i heard during the telecast that the coach asks the kids what type of style they want to play every year. one year it may be defensive, lately it's been completely offensive.

They sound a lot like teams such as the late '80s-early '90s Loyola Marymount and mid '90's George Mason, both coached by one of the innovators of this type of ball, Paul Westhead.

EDIT: They are like those teams, but seemingly even more caffeinated.

I'm a Grinnell student, and was at the game against Beloit. Our style is generally called Run and Gun, the idea being that we want to shoot a three-point shot every dozen or so seconds. We play full-court press, hard as we can, like every one of our players is on speed. Then we substitute in a new group of 5 players every 30 seconds to keep our team fresh.

We just aren't as good this year, as our best players graduated last year. However, against Beloit, we had the additional problem of TV timeouts - every now and then they had these really long timeouts to allow ESPN2 to run commercials. This gave the Beloit a lot of extra time to rest, which really hurts us. Usually the other team is exhausted by the last quarter.

Our style of play was actually devised by a statistics student some time back. He figured that this all offense, three-pointer oriented game would be the most productive style of play. Only at a school which really, really focuses on academics like Grinnell would pattern our basketball team's strategy after a statistics student's findings. Heh, actually, our chant when we lose is "It's allright, it's ok, we'll be your boss one day."

Our school is very small, only 1400 or so students, so it is a lot of fun seeing the whole country get a chance to see us play. I'm glad you guys liked it.

So do they ONLY go for 3 pointers ? Or do guys sometimes dribble inside and go for jumpshots/layups ?

This sounds crazy, but very intriguing.

Mostly 3s. But if there is a very easy layup to be had, or nobody can easily get open for a trey, our guys will go for 2.

At the time of the game, all of the players on the squad that play at least taken 40 3s(according the the game announcer). They compared it to the if the Iggles would blitz 9 guys on every play and just try to tire out the other offense and score more points