COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Just about everyone Bucky McMillan has met in the six months since he was named the coach at Texas A&M has asked him some version of the same question.
“How are y’all going to play?”
What everyone is really wondering is whether they will play Bucky Ball.
McMillan knows his team’s style of play invites skepticism despite the results. “Bucky Ball,” a relentless, full-court pressing, fast-paced style, became synonymous with his name when he was winning five state titles as a high school coach in Alabama. Its cult status grew as he flipped Samford from one of the worst teams in the Southern Conference to a conference champ.
Bucky Ball has become his brand, but originally, it was a term coaches in Alabama used to criticize any team that played disorganized and recklessly.
Oh, they just play Bucky Ball.
No one questions conformity. At the high-major level, it’s rare to find any teams that lean heavily on a full-court press. Poll coaches, and you’ll get some explanation of why it won’t work: The guards are too good; it’s a risk to tire out your best players; or nearly everyone at that level can handle the ball.
The thing is, where he’s from, no one needs convincing anymore. His whole basketball career until this point — as a player and coach — took place in a 15-mile radius in Birmingham, Ala., where McMillan was…
“A legend,” said former Mountain Brook High guard Colby Jones, now with the Detroit Pistons. “He kind of set the blueprint for people to follow.”
As in, the best teams in that area now press, play fast and shoot 3-pointers. McMillan even created his own AAU program — the Alabama Flyers — with teams starting in the second grade, teaching them how to play Bucky Ball so they had been in the system for 10 years by the time they were high school seniors.
Bucky Ball is a religion in Birmingham, Ala.
But can it work in the SEC?
Texas A&M hired Bucky McMillan in April to replace Buzz Williams. Jack Gorman / Getty Images
McMillan has lived his entire basketball life with people saying, “No way you’ll be able to do that,” and him firing back, “Watch me.”
He grew up in an affluent neighborhood of Birmingham. His dream was to play Division I basketball. He was told that no one from his area played DI. Plus, he was too short with no hope of growing. His dad was 5-foot-8; his mom was 5-3.
“That really bothered me,” McMillan said. “That really pissed me off.”
So McMillan quit every sport but basketball when he was in sixth grade. And convinced sleeping would help him grow, he made sure he slept eight hours every night. He grew to 6-3 and was an all-state point guard at Mountain Brook High. He walked on at Birmingham Southern, a Division I basketball program at the time. After redshirting as a freshman, he played 83 games the next three seasons and started every one, earning a scholarship along the way.
While in high school in the early 2000s, McMillan played for a coach who played slow. Everyone in his area did. The belief was that it was the only way to win in suburban basketball. It was boring to play, to play against, and to watch.
“If I were coach,” McMillan said of his mindset back then, “I’m gonna do the opposite of this to show that this isn’t it.”
McMillan started coaching youth teams in high school and college. His teams pressed, played up-tempo and played to the analytics before that became mainstream — shooting mostly 3s and layups. In 2005, between his redshirt sophomore and junior seasons at Birmingham Southern, he took a group of undersized kids from the area and finished sixth in the under-17 division at AAU Nationals in Orlando. A year later Birmingham Southern’s program went on hiatus for the 2006-07 season while transitioning from DI to DIII. McMillan had offers to transfer to several high-majors, but he’d already proven he could play DI basketball. So he took a job as the junior varsity coach at his alma mater.
Playing Bucky Ball, his team went 36-6 in two years. When the varsity job opened in 2008, the parents of players who had played for him wrote letters to the school asking them to hire McMillan. Coaches in the area were skeptical his style would work at the varsity level.
“Mountain Brook might be perceived as a bunch of three-car garage homes, but the perception gets lost that these might not be tough kids,” McMillan told The Birmingham News back in 2010. “This group stems from a group of parents who are very tough and their kids play ball all year round.”
Those kids from the suburbs won the school’s first state title in 2013, repeated in 2014 and won back-to-back-to-back state titles from 2017 through 2019. In seven of eight years, Mountain Brook played in the state championship game.
In the season after his first state title, Mountain Brook played in a tournament on Samford’s campus. Martin Newton, Samford’s athletic director, was there to watch and witnessed Bucky Ball for the first time.
“He took this group of guys that, with the exception of maybe one or two players, didn’t even look like they belonged on the court, and they were just running people out of the gym,” Newton remembered. “And I’m going, oh my gosh, this reminds me of a young Rick Pitino.”
Newton was familiar with Pitino. His father, C.M. Newton, hired him in 1989 to restore Kentucky’s program after it’d been hit with a two-year NCAA Tournament ban for recruiting and academic violations.
Pitino had just eight scholarship players and didn’t have the best athletes, but he willed that group into a winner, using a full-court press that wore opponents down because his teams were better conditioned than anyone else. In the first year UK was eligible to return to the NCAA Tournament — Pitino’s third year — the Cats made the Elite Eight, losing to Duke in one of the most iconic NCAA Tournament games of all time. Three years later, he’d win a national title.
McMillan grew up watching those teams and idolizing Pitino because of his willingness to be different. Newton kept his eyes on McMillan. He had a friend with a daughter who played at Mountain Brook, and he’d often go to watch her games and stick around to watch the boys’ games. McMillan’s brand of basketball was not just fun to watch; he made it fun to be a part of it by making neon Bucky Ball shirts that kids would wear to games.
“People in the community that would attend their games just raved about him,” Newton said. “He was a cult-like figure.”
“We just want to win in the most fun way possible.”
New @aggiembk head coach Bucky McMillan explains what “Bucky Ball” is all about: pic.twitter.com/u7uV6b1gBr
— Paul Finebaum (@finebaum) April 9, 2025
In 2021, after Samford had a losing season for the seventh time in nine seasons with Newton as the AD, Newton decided he was finished hiring assistant coaches; he wanted a head coach.
He made the unorthodox decision to hire a high school coach.
McMillan always believed he could be a college coach, but he had no interest in the journey — starting at the bottom of a college coaching staff and working his way up.
“I didn’t want to spend the 40 years to do it and say, ‘I told you I could do it.’ Where the hell did my life go?” he said. “But I said if someone wanted to cut that journey significantly short, I’d be all ears.”
Samford had never had a winning record in the Southern Conference since joining in 2009. In McMillan’s second year in 2022, the Bulldogs got there. Then they won back-to-back league titles and ended a 24-year NCAA Tournament drought in 2024, nearly upsetting Kansas with that pesky press.
Why McMillan won was a lot like Pitino. It’s not just the press; it’s the ability to convince players to play as hard as they possibly can.
Last season, Samford trailed by double digits in the second half in four games it went on to win. In each, it had a win probability under 10 percent, per KenPom, including just a 1 percent chance in a game against North Dakota State when it trailed by 14 with 3:02 left.
“We’re going to pick you up full court and be relentless for 94 feet for 40 minutes,” said Rylan Jones, Samford’s starting point guard the last two seasons. “Eventually the other team just got tired, would give in, was not as well-conditioned as us and that’s what would allow us to have our second half runs.”
Samford hadn’t been to the NCAA Tournament in more than two decades, but made it in 2024 — and nearly upset Kansas as a No. 13 seed. Christian Petersen / Getty Images
There’s a Brad Stevens quote, from back in his Butler days, that McMillan loves: “We’re ordinary people doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.”
“People will ask, ‘Why don’t more teams play this way or that way?’ I hope everyone actually does try to play how we play,” McMillan said. “It’d give us an advantage. We know the details of what matters and what doesn’t matter and how to correct it, right? The details in anything you do defines how good you are.”
McMillan’s practices at Texas A&M do not look any different from his days at Mountain Brook. The players might be taller and faster, but he has the same slogan on the wall — “Hardworking. Unselfish. Fearless.” — and he’s stuck with a philosophy of building the mental and physical stamina of his teams by making the practices harder than the games.
After some shooting drills during a late-September practice, the Aggies start a two-on-one drill where a second defender runs onto the floor from the sideline after the offense crosses half court. Once the offense scores or loses the ball, the defenders become the offense and the original offensive players must now guard and try to steal the ball back, guarding until half court. On the other side, another defender waits to run on if the ball crosses midcourt.
Eventually, it’s the same drill but three-on-two, then four-on-three, then five-on-four.
“It can be exhausting, like all the pressing and all the running around,” A&M senior guard Rylan Griffen said. “Sometimes it’d be feeling like we got the zoomies out there just running. I got a dog, so I see him running back and forth all the time. That’s kind of how we be playing.”
What makes Bucky Ball different from most presses is that his teams even press off a miss. The only other team that does that, McMillan said, is Nova Southeastern, which has won two of the last three Division II national titles and is coached by Jim Crutchfield, a former tennis coach who was also inspired by Pitino and has won a higher percentage of his games than any college coach ever.
Crutchfield times his players out of a trap to half court, using math to show them how hard they’re capable of playing. And at one point during Texas A&M’s practice, a turnover occurs and the guilty team hesitates a half second. McMillan stops practice.
“Every second is 20 feet,” he says.
Ten pushups.
What makes Bucky Ball so effective is the combination of effort and feel in the press, knowing when and where to trap. At Mountain Brook, the players were in the system for so long that they developed that feel. And at the high school and the mid-major level, the consensus is that it’s easier to convince those players to expend the effort it takes.
The press worked in the SEC in the 1990s, for both Pitino and Nolan Richardson at Arkansas, who won the 1994 national title with his “40 minutes of Hell” version. Pitino still presses at St. John’s, but not nearly as much (13.9 percent of the time last season, per Synergy, compared to 41.9 percent for Samford).
The sport has changed a lot since even Pitino’s Louisville days, when players rarely transferred. Player movement can impact style of play choices. McMillan has 14 players who have never played for him before.
But his superpower might be in his ability to convince others his way is the way.
McMillan’s practices at Texas A&M do not look any different from his days at Mountain Brook High. Christian Petersen / Getty Images
McMillan was told this one from Mark McCaleb, another former high school coach in Alabama who liked to press.
“Basketball is a beautiful game. One team got the ball, they come down the floor, they’d shoot, and if they’d score, the whole bleachers on that one side would stand up and cheer. Then the other team would get the ball, they’d come down the court, they’d shoot, then if they scored, the whole bleachers on the other side would all stand up together and cheer.
“And then some son of a b— started pressing.”
It’s a great punchline, but McMillan has found it to be true. “Coaches used to shake my hand like we’d cheated when we beat them,” he said. “We were supposed to come down, it was our turn to play offense and then your turn.”
Most coaches focus on three phases of the game: half-court offense, half-court defense and transition offense. McMillan talks often about four phases, the fourth being full-court defense.
“He talked about that one the most,” Jones said.
McMillan had the advantage of coaching at levels where he could test his theories, and he became even more convinced when he learned to play poker his senior year of high school.
There are two types of successful poker players. One will patiently grind, looking for small edges. Then there’s the aggressive player, who is constantly forcing opponents into mistakes. McMillan was the latter, and he was good. In 2006, he finished 177th out of 8,773 entrants in the World Series of Poker, earning $47,006 in winnings.
“The reason why I was good at poker was because I was mentally strong and had a thinking personality that I got from playing sports,” he said. “And one of the reasons I became a good coach was because of poker, because I learned to not be results-oriented and just focus on what you can control.”
McMillan’s tangent on poker comes during an 11 1/2-minute answer on when he first started pressing and why. This is what it’s like to be in his presence. The conversation is always flowing, and his mind is always working.
“I have these fights in my head all day long,” he says. “It just comes out when I talk.”
And by the time he’s finished, you’re wondering, why doesn’t everyone play Bucky Ball?
Other stylistically similar coaches adjusted when they made the jump from mid- to high-major. When Shaka Smart left VCU for Texas, for instance, he left behind the “Havoc” defense that fueled VCU’s Cinderella Final Four run in 2011.
McMillan pushes back that his style cannot work at the high-major level. This summer, he watched the Indiana Pacers use a full-court press in the NBA playoffs and make the finals.
Bucky Ball is more than the press, too. He uses multiple zone defenses, sometimes switching mid-possession into a man-to-man. He also has different versions of his press.
“It’s not just what everybody thinks, that we just gamble and give up layups. “It’s more than that,” said assistant coach Mitch Cole, who coached McMillan in college and left a head job at Barry College to join him at Samford. “He’s back there playing chess on defense. Most people manipulate the game on offense; Bucky’s trying to manipulate it on defense, making you uncomfortable, making you do things you don’t want to do.”
McMillan knows it’s not exclusively style that wins. When it gets to the postseason, he believes every system is neutralized. “Most of the time the best players are going to end up winning the game,” he said.
That’s another reason he believes Bucky Ball will work. He is convinced his system aligns with attracting the best personnel, because it mirrors the NBA in pace and his analytical approach to offense.
“He’s very statistical when he presents his case,” said Mackenzie Mgbako, a former five-star recruit who transferred from Indiana to Texas A&M. “The numbers don’t lie. He showed me stats from other colleges around the country, and how his way of playing stacked up against other people’s. Those numbers spoke for themselves.”
McMillan admits there are other ways to win, and sure, he could try to play more like everyone else in the SEC.
But what’s the fun in playing safe?
“I’ve got total respect for these guys who have done it in other ways — close to the vest, grind it out,” he said. “I just don’t want to live my life like that, if that makes sense to you. That just doesn’t go with my overall plan for life. I don’t know how long I’m gonna live, but like I don’t wanna go to the grave saying, yeah I grew my 401K every year and I lived close to the vest and we were conservative and we didn’t beat ourselves. Screw that.
“I can live with losing. I just can’t live with not trying to win.”
