The Underdog College Basketball Coach

College basketball begins next week — and while Coach K's final season and Kentucky's potential bounce back have dominated the headlines, the most relevant leadership lesson for us might be in the backgrounds of the lesser-name coaches of the top-ranked teams.

Gonzaga, UCLA and Texas are ranked Nos. 1, 2 and 5 in the Associated Press poll, respectively, but none of their head coaches played college basketball — a major rarity in the sport.

So how is it that Mark Few, Mick Cronin and Chris Beard have ascended to the very top of a profession typically reserved for former NBA players or college stars?

The answer might lie in a Malcolm Gladwell theory about underdogs.

“The fact of being an underdog changes people in ways that we often fail to appreciate,” he writes in the book David and Goliath. “It opens doors and creates opportunities and enlightens and permits things that might otherwise have seemed unthinkable.”

College basketball has changed dramatically in the last two years.

Players are now allowed to transfer from school to school without having to sit out a season. Name, Image and Likeness provisions have increased player empowerment. New advancements in stats and analytics have rewarded coaches with open minds willing to play a bit untraditionally. And the turbulence of the pandemic has favored those who can rapidly build culture while developing skill and toughness in their players.

The qualities of nimbleness, flexibility and adaptability that Gladwell believes underdogs must possess are more essential than ever to navigate a fast-changing landscape.

Few, Cronin and Beard have been honing these skills for years as they've sought any edge possible to compete as relative imposters in an unfair game.

Few and his staff have relied heavily on international recruits and internal skill development to get their tiny school in Spokane, Wash., to compete with traditional blue bloods.

Cronin was the coach at Cincinnati for 13 seasons and recruited scrappy, overlooked players with a chip on their shoulder to take on more talented opponents. Now, he’s carried his relentless work ethic to a program with far more resources on a campus littered with palm trees.

Beard has had 14 different coaching jobs, including one with a semi-pro team in South Carolina. Quickly assembling a roster and building camaraderie in weeks are nothing new to him.

In essence, when a massive storm upends a village, the street dog who's long had to fend for himself is often better suited for what’s next than the Golden Retriever.

“This is the classic story of the business world,” Gladwell told Inc.com last year. “The very same thing that appears to make a company so formidable — its size, its resources — serve as stumbling blocks when they're forced to respond to a situation where the rules are changing, and where nimbleness, and flexibility and adaptability are better attributes.”

The lesson here isn’t that fewer resources are always preferable to more or that working at a big-name organization has no advantages.

But whatever challenge we might currently be facing, however overmatched we might appear, certain elements of this struggle can be hugely beneficial in the long term.

The underdog who looks weak and malnourished today can have a pretty ferocious bite tomorrow.