It is an offseason that calls for going back to the drawing board for Coach Ron Sanchez which, due to contract extensions signed the two previous off-seasons, is very much secure in his position as Head Coach of the Charlotte 49ers. In his three seasons Charlotte has had some ups and downs but things really started to snowball in disastrous fashion as the 2020-21 season wound down, seeing the Niners lose their final nine games in the purgatory of mediocrity known as Conference-USA.
Three years into Sanchez's tenure we have yet to see the offense click on a regular basis. After slugging through his first season with a misfit roster of Mark Price recruits and a scrambled debut recruiting class, the offense has yet to break out of the bottom third of Division 1 in terms of Adjusted Offensive Efficiency (per KenPom). It is my opinion that this inability to get the offense into second gear is a matter of poorly attempting to fit a square beg into a round hole.
Coach Kotie Kimble joined the Niners after eight seasons on the bench at William & Mary, the final five of which featured a Tribe team with an Adjusted Offensive Efficiency ranked no worse than 52nd. These were teams that scored with relative ease, being in the Top 10 for Effective FG% in three seasons. These teams also played with a bit of pace. They were no Marshall, or The Citadel, but they could not be accused of slowing the game down. The Tribe ranged from 178th to 69th in offensive possession length from 2013 to 2018, with only one season outside the Top 120. This is in stark contrast to Charlotte's offense, which's shortest average offensive possession length ranked them only 310th.
Now, I know what you must be thinking, those William & Mary teams probably generated a lot of fast break opportunities driving that number down, but that is contrary to the statistics. The Tribe ranged from the Steal % of 6.5 to 9.5, the latter giving them a rank of 156th. While the Niners managed to post a Steal % of 11.3, 30th best in 2019-20, they still only managed an average possession length of 18.5 seconds, nearly two seconds slower than the slowest output from the Tribe after the institution of the 30 second shot clock.
The fact of the matter is the Tribe ran a decisive, well paced, but patient, offense that often got high quality shots early in the shot-clock. If this offense did not get the look it wanted, it tried to get another look because it had the time to do so. They kept their turnovers down because the offense was rarely in a position where it needed to force the ball into a place where it could not fit. The Tribe ranked between 38th and 90th in Turnover %, and the year in which they ranked the lowest, the offense achieved it's highest ranking with the 27th ranked Adjusted Offensive Efficiency. A sign that the offense hit the pedal a little harder which may have led to more turnovers, but also led to higher quality shots more often than not. In contrast, while also boasting one of the slowest tempos in Divsion 1, Charlotte has an awful record of coughing the ball-up, displaying a Turnover % greater than 20.0 each of Sanchez's tenure.
One thing those William & Mary teams did have in common with the Niners is that neither team showed much concern for getting offensive rebounds. The Tribe peaked with a rank of 289th in Offensive Reb % in those final five seasons while the Niners have peaked with a ranking of 322nd. A tenant of Tony Bennett's pack-line defense is setting up the defense early and making life difficult for the opponent. The success William & Mary had scoring efficiently without depending on second-chance points shows that the philosophy can succeed at the mid-major level.
From an outsider's perspective it is clear that Sanchez wants to run a slow-paced game, but conforming Kimble's offensive philosophy to do so has resulted in an offense that holds the ball for 15-20 seconds before running any offensive sets, this often leads to a mad scramble to find any open shot if the first look is not there. This leads to bad, contested shots, this leads to turnovers, this leads uncontested looks for the opponent, and most importantly this leads to losing games. It's my conclusion that the best thing that Sanchez can do for this team is to hand the reigns of the offense completely over to Kimble, allowing Sanchez to focus solely on the defense.
To play a bit of a numbers game, I have taken the William & Mary's offensive production relative to the Division 1 average over the 2013-18 seasons, which on average had an efficiency 108.25% of the D1 Average, then converted it over to a relative value for the 2019-20 season (due to the circumstances of the 2020-21 season featuring many teams playing partial or no schedules) plus a little boost for increased fast break chances generated by a well operated pack-line defense. I paired that generated value with Charlotte's defensive efficiency from the 2019-20 season, not the highest bar to set the sights on, but one that we know is attainable. What we end up with is a team that would wield a Top 40 Offense and the 84th ranked defense. A team with that profile would have slotted in 52nd in the 2020 KenPom rankings, ahead of teams like Connecticut, Memphis, Texas, Davidson and UCLA. That is my established ceiling for Ron Sanchez. He has the toolbox to meet that ceiling, it's now up to him whether or not he can.
