LAWRENCE, Kan. — Once he began running a basketball program with regularly televised games, Grant McCasland would check his phone at halftime for text messages from Jeff Linder with offensive adjustments. Linder was McCasland’s assistant at his first head coaching job at Midland College, where he helped McCasland build a program that won a junior college national championship in 2007. McCasland calls him the “most brilliant offensive mind” he knows.
Last offseason, after McCasland and Texas Tech locked in the best roster they’d ever assembled for 2024-25, McCasland approached Linder about returning to his staff. Linder had been a Division I head coach for the last eight seasons — the most recent four at Wyoming, where in 2022 he took the Cowboys to just their third NCAA Tournament in the last four decades — but he wasn’t sure he had the resources to win consistently in the name, image and likeness era. So he joined a program that has become one of the Big 12’s top spenders on basketball, with the largest 2024 operating budget of any current league member, according to statistics from the Department of Education.
“He’s the only guy that I would have left a head coaching job with three years left on a contract at Wyoming in the Mountain West for,” Linder told The Athletic Saturday. “In this profession, you have so few just truly close friends.”
The pairing has been magical thus far. The Red Raiders, ranked No. 9 in this week’s Associated Press poll, are on their way to making the NCAA Tournament for the fifth time in the last six opportunities. And with Linder’s help, they’re playing the best offense in school history, sitting ninth in the country in opponent-adjusted points per possession according to Ken Pomeroy.
“This isn’t possible to do in one season if I didn’t know him,” McCasland said after a 78-73 win over Kansas at Allen Fieldhouse that kept the Red Raiders in line for a double-bye in the Big 12 tournament. “There’s nobody I trust more over my past 20-plus years than him. We started our journey together. It’s not possible if you don’t have this depth of relationship. But his impact, it can’t be understated how important it is.”
McCasland allows Linder to take the controls of the offense, and while McCasland has veto power, in huddles it’s often Linder with the clipboard.
“We’ve always tried to help each other out,” Linder said. “Now my job as an assistant coach is to make him look as good as I possibly can and hopefully put our team in the best situation to try to score baskets.”
This particular roster was tailor-made for Linder to do so. Linder made a name for himself as an offensive wizard as head coach at Northern Colorado, where his offense improved from 309th on KenPom in his first season to 45th in his fourth, with back-to-back second place finishes in the Big Sky Conference. From there, he went to Wyoming, inherited a team that had ranked 322nd in adjusted offense the previous year and climbed to 68th in his first season.
Linder has always given his best shooters a flashing green light and exploited mismatches, and he is not afraid to take gameplans to the extreme. Three seasons ago, Wyoming finished with a higher percentage of post-ups than any team Synergy had ever tracked, Linder’s way of maximizing the value of two players who thrived in dribble-down post-ups. This year’s Texas Tech team has two players who excel in similar scenarios — JT Toppin and Darrion Williams — but it also has one of the best combinations of pick-and-roll guards and shooters in the country. So Linder has evened out the usage, favoring the ball screen and spreading the floor to take advantage of the shooting. The Red Raiders have made double-digit 3s in 17 games, and they launched a school-record 43 3-pointers (making 15) in Saturday’s win at Kansas.
“With our guys, we don’t want them thinking because they’re such good shooters,” Linder said.
Linder also loves to empower his best players and ride the hot hand, tendencies that have helped Toppin become one of the nation’s highest usage bigs. Toppin averaged a solid 12.4 points last season at New Mexico, where he had the second-lowest usage rate among Lobos starters. This season he takes one-third of the shots when he’s on the floor, the highest shot rate for any high-major big in the country, according to KenPom. Toppin is averaging 17.3 points and 9.0 rebounds and is trending toward becoming the fourth All-American in Red Raiders history.
The Kansas game was a perfect example of how Toppin can wreck a defensive game plan as a chess piece Linder can move all over the board. Linder started the game by using Toppin as a ball screener to pull Kansas’ 7-foot-2 center Hunter Dickinson away from the basket.
“(Dickinson) was going to let the roll get behind, and so we knew they were going to put two on the ball,” Linder explained. “So understanding that, we wanted to play the short roll or short pop to get to the re-screen, because then now you force Hunter to guard two directions.”
Linder also picked on the fact that Dickinson is slow in his recovery time, which forces another defender to help tag the player rolling after a screen. Toppin is one of the best in the country at picking on these mismatches quickly.
Toppin scored 18 of his 21 points before halftime. He did most of his damage against Jayhawks backup center Flory Bidunga, who had the speed to get back but couldn’t handle Toppin one-on-one:
Toppin had 41 in a game last month against Arizona State, but the Red Raiders’ roster offers other levers for Linder to pull. With Toppin in foul trouble on Saturday, Linder gave the Jayhawks a heavy dose of Williams, who is built like a tight end at 6-6 and 225 pounds and can morph from guard to post-up bully in a pinch.
“D5 leverages the defense when teams switch,” Linder said. “Because if you don’t double, then lo and behold, you’re just going to get scored on at the rim.”
Kansas learned that the first time Williams was isolated on a small guard, the 5-11 David Coit:
The Jayhawks brought help most of the game, and that led to Texas Tech burying 6 of 8 open 3s in those scenarios. The Red Raiders manipulated the switches by setting screens off the ball:
And using Williams as a ball screener:
“That was our thing, was trying to understanding that they like to switch with the four, and so trying to find those crossmatches, and not just the crossmatches within the set play, but the crossmatches within the play after the play,” Linder said. “I thought our guys did a really good job of identifying that.”
The Red Raiders thrive on identifying coverages and how to attack them. Their rollers score a college basketball-best 8.4 points per game, per Synergy.
Texas Tech’s guards have also gained confidence going one-on-one when they get a matchup they like. When Toppin was ejected nearly four minutes into the game at Houston on Feb. 1, the Red Raiders went isolation-heavy by using ball screens to set up mismatches. By the numbers, it might have seemed foolish; outside of that game, Houston is allowing 0.59 points per possession on isolation plays this season, per Synergy, and hadn’t allowed any opponents to score in double figures on iso plays all year. But Linder was confident his guards could beat a few select defenders, and they scored 17 points on 12 isolation plays en route to handing the Cougars their only Big 12 loss all year, snapping a 32-game home winning streak in the process.
That game’s star was Chance McMillian (23 points), who has gone from a shooting specialist to more of a complete scorer. Freshman Christian Anderson and transfer Elijah Hawkins are also tough to defend on an island and will not hesitate to go to work when they get a big on them, as Anderson does here:
McCasland and his staff deserve a lot of credit for identifying this year’s key players. Some have had previous college success — Williams and Toppin are the two most recent Mountain West Freshman of the Year winners — but others were not so obvious. McMillian started only 27 of his 91 games at Grand Canyon and averaged just 10.9 points his final season there. Anderson, a sub-100 recruit originally committed to Michigan, might be the steal of the 2024 recruiting class, averaging 10.2 points off the bench and shooting 40.4 percent from 3. And Hawkins, who wasn’t a highly rated portal target because of his size (5-11), was perfect for the Texas Tech offense because of his ability to pass and make pick-and-roll reads.
“The staff did a really good job identifying the right guys,” Linder said, “which in this day and age is really hard to do.”
Because Linder and McCasland’s offensive philosophies have always aligned, McCasland has refocused his priorities.
“It allows me to talk more about the effort and the defense and the nuances of it,” McCasland said. “I completely trust him. I mean I don’t even think twice about it.”
McCasland spending more time helping with the defense has paid off after the Red Raiders took a step back at that end of the floor in his first season. His last three North Texas teams were all ranked in the top 50 in KenPom’s adjusted defensive efficiency, but the Red Raiders dropped to 65th last season. They’re at 29th as March ramps up.
It’s also possible that Texas Tech’s best basketball is still to come. Toppin didn’t practice throughout December with a lower leg injury, missing four games. Hawkins and Anderson both missed the first two games of the season, and Williams and McMillian both just returned from injuries.
“I feel like nobody can stop us when we’re whole and we’re fully healthy,” Toppin said.
Kansas certainly couldn’t on Saturday. And fortunately for McCasland, he didn’t have to check his phone at halftime. His buddy was right next to him with all of the answers.
(Photo: Jamie Squire / Getty Images)
