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The Basketball Podcast: EP371 with Steve Smiley on the “Over Ourself” Philosophy and Grading Success
In this week’s coaching conversation, Northern Colorado head coach Steve Smiley joined the Basketball Podcast to share insights on the “over ourself” philosophy and grading success.
Steve Smiley has established himself as a formidable head coach at Northern Colorado, leading the Bears with a strong overall record of 89–71 (.556) in NCAA competition. His leadership was instrumental in securing the Big Sky regular season championship in 2025, a testament to his ability to develop winning teams and foster a competitive culture.
Smiley’s success hasn’t gone unnoticed—his efforts were recognized in 2024 when he was named Big Sky Co-Coach of the Year. He also owns the second highest winning percentage in Northern Colorado’s Division I era, equaling Jeff Linder for the most postseason wins with six, who he succeeded in March 2020.
Smiley’s experience in the Big Sky goes beyond his four years at UNC as he was an assistant coach at Weber State from 2014-16. Before Weber State, Smiley spent six years as the head coach and Athletic Director at Sheridan College.
In the six years with Sheridan College, Smiley posted a 153-43 overall record and led Sheridan to four North Sub-Region 9 titles and two runner-up finishes. Smiley was twice named the North Region Coach of the Year. During his time at Sheridan, Smiley had 21 players sign to play NCAA Division I basketball and 38 players moved on to play at four-year colleges.
Prior to his stint at Sheridan, Steve Smiley spent two seasons as an assistant coach at his alma mater, Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota where he collaborated with the winningest coach in NCAA history, Don Meyer. During his time at NSU, the Wolves posted a 50-12 record. Smiley was also the assistant head coach at Black Hills State University during the 2005-06 season. He began his coaching career as a graduate assistant at Texas A&M International during the 2004-05 campaign.
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Steve Smiley Quotes:
“One of my favorite quotes is, ‘Contrary to popular opinion, life is a team sport.’ As basketball coaches, we’re trying to teach a lot more than the X’s and O’s and Spain action and overloads and things like that. If we can use our platform to try to make better people, I think we’ve done our job.”
“I do that, too. Keeping all the practice plans in their chronological order [in a notebook] so that I can refer back to them. Every team’s different, every flow is different, every season. But there are still some common themes of what you need do to stay on pace to be ready for your games.”
“We will do transition breaks all year long where it’s more so for transition defense, it’s eight seconds. Our idea defensively is if you don’t give up a layup or an open three in the first eight seconds of the shot clock, you probably can set your defense. Well, the downside to that is offensively, in eight seconds, guys are going to take crazy shots, right? . . shot quality wise, we grade it and it’s really simple. It’s on the back of our winning/losing chart.”
“The shot quality portion of that is my job. Basically it’s, ‘I don’t care if you make or miss it, but it’s a good shot, it’s a bad shot or it’s a turnover.’ And we have a formula out of that where, let’s say you take 10 good shots and three bad shots and one turnover, that’s a 10 over four. So, you’ll get a 250% . . 10 over four is 250. And then we go through that on a player level, but then I also teach them on a team level.”
“Our favorite thing is transition. And we showed our guys a stat one time that was from the NBA: The five best teams in the NBA in half court, all their PPPs were worse than the five worst teams in the NBA in transition. Point being, that if you can score in transition before the defense is loaded and set up, it is huge for your team . . The common theme for me is I’m trying to find ways to get credibility with my team all the time.”
“If you have good bigs that can get on the perimeter, you can put the ball in their hands. We do a lot of that stuff with the five-out motion, and we have to have bigs that are good on the perimeter, making good decisions. It can really increase your playbook.”
“I believe that good post players have to get doubled and, it goes back to the same philosophy, there’s now two on the ball. If there’s two on the ball, we’ve created rotations and closeouts and now we get that defense spinning and good things happen.”
“We try to get the full court, the transition stuff in first because that’s the only way for me to play – fast. You’ve got to play fast from day one, but then ultimately you’ve got to be good in the half court as well.”
“One thing I learned is that you’ve got to have enough variety offensively. If all we did is run ball screens and . . if that’s all you do and it doesn’t work, you’re in trouble. And so, having a backup plan of we can just post guys up if a team is switching everything on ball . . We call it ‘spot the sucker.’ You’ve got to find their worst defender, switch him like what the NBA does. Switch them on to your best post up guy 1 through 5 and then just play out of the post. And then you’ve at least given yourself the best advantage and the best matchup you can have.”
“I think the biggest thing that we sell is that we’ve done a good job of being able to put you in the right basketball position and situation to improve your career . . We’ve had a lot of guys that have been able to make that jump from our level and we’ve done a good job of understanding how to take you from where you’re at and trying to get you to that next step, whether it’s stat wise or whatever.”
“[Defensively] We’re not saying we’ll just give up the middle . . you still gotta win the first dribble. Guys say, ‘Guard your yard.’ We say, ‘Win the first dribble.’ We spend a ton of time on one-on-one defense.”
“I’d say the biggest part of our defense is understanding the personnel off the ball. You’re one pass away in that flat triangle. If you’re guarding a sniper, you’ve got to fan out so we don’t give up threes. If you’re guarding a driver, we call it a ‘no split.’”
“We have three different things that we can mix up into ball screens, but they’re all based off of the same principle. You can’t get refused or rejected; you can’t get beat outside. I think when you do it that way, you at least give your players some clarity and some consistency.”
“Ultimately, the guys that have the best numbers usually play, and sometimes they’re not the most talented players. But in our world, we believe those five or six, seven categories, they matter so much to winning that we are bad coaches if we don’t play the guys that will do the stuff that helps us win games. And so, that is kind of where we created the system and the guys buy into it.”
“I started thinking about it in the way he looked at it . . the more possessions you get. If we get 3, 000 possessions before our first game and our opponent gets 600, we should be better than them if talent’s equal. So, we don’t stop.”
Steve Smiley Breakdown:
Steve Smiley Selected Links from the Podcast:
Steven Smiley
Don Meyer
Jeff Linder
Randy Rahe
Paul Sather
Ken DeWeese
Dalton Knecht
Ken Pomeroy (kenpom.com)
Jaron Rillie
John Rillie
Saint Thomas
Isaiah Hawthorne
Langston Reynolds
Jonah Radebaugh
Phil Beckner
Houston Reed
Joel Bolomboy
Dillon Jones
Dorian Green
Brett Cloepfil
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