My Two Cents: Emotional Week for Penn State's Micah Shrewsberry With All These Indiana Ties
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Much like any first-time head coach, Micah Shrewsberry was excited about every game on the Penn State schedule when it was released in the summer. But there was one thing that jumped out and got circled quickly.
Indiana and Purdue. At home, in the same week.
For a guy who grew up in Jeffersonville, Ind., and then later Indianapolis, and was raised a huge IU and Bob Knight fan but also coached at Purdue, this was an emotional dream come true.
Two games in six days, with all those Indiana ties.
It started out beautifully, with a 61-58 win over Indiana on Sunday in Happy Valley, and Shrewsberry and his Nittany Lions get Matt Painter's Purdue team on Saturday, again at home.
What a week.
"It's different. It's weird. It's hard. Emotions get into it," Shrewsberry said this fall during Big Ten media days. "You just have to really lock in on doing your job, doing what you can for the guys that you have. But it is a different kind of deal. You get close to those guys."
Part of it, too, is the enormous respect factor that comes into play. No knows better than Shrewsberry just how good of a coach that Matt Painter is, especially after spending the last two years with him during his second stop at Purdue.
And it was the same with Mike Woodson last Sunday. The 45-year-old Shrewsberry has a lot of Indiana roots, too. He grew up a huge IU fan, idolized Bob Knight and was surrounded by Hoosiers in his family.
“I’m a kid from Indiana. I grew up in Jeffersonville, Indiana,'' Shrewsberry told me last Sunday after the win over Indiana. "My parents went to IU Southeast, so they’ve got Indiana diplomas on their wall. My wife went to IU. It’s IU, not Indiana, that’s what we say. I grew up in Southern Indiana and then I grew up in Indianapolis in the later part of my childhood. I grew up idolizing Coach Knight in regards to his teams, how they played, what they did.
“The greatest way to honor somebody is in how you play. I would have crawled to Indiana if I was a good enough player. I clearly wasn’t. They were always tough, gritty, man-to-man teams. That’s why I knew it would take that for us to win tonight, and to have success in the Big Ten. For our guys to practice that way, and play that way, it was a testament to what they were willing to do.''
Shrewsberry had so much respect for Woodson that he didn't want to give him the opportunity to attack what Penn State does. So he kept changing things up. A man-to-man team, they played a 2-3 zone out of timeouts quite a bit, just to stop Woodson from being able to draw something up.
And then, in the second half, they flipped the way they were running pick-and-rolls, hoping to get their three-point shooters open. It worked. Penn State hit 11 threes, after averaging only five threes a game coming in.
“We changed a little bit from one half to the next in regards to what they were doing and how they were guarding it, and just really kind of flipping it to something else,'' Shrewsberry said of his screens at the top. “Coach Woodson, he’s an unbelievable coach and so are the other guys on his staff. So they’re going to figure out what we’re doing. But we made a slight adjustment to get those guys open a little bit. Myles Dread broke free for a couple of threes based on what they were doing.’’
It was the same thing coming out of timeouts.
“In 2013 when I went to the NBA, and Coach Woodson was coaching there with the Knicks at the time and we played them four times every year because they were in our division at Boston,'' he said. "What he did out of timeouts was fantastic. He runs such good stuff. He had a chance to see how we were going to double-team and rotate.
“When he gets a chance to huddle those guys and talk to them, I thought they could pick us apart. So we worked on it. I just wanted to try to keep him off balance a little bit. Take the pen out of his hands and make the players make a decision, because I’ve got nothing but the utmost respect for Coach Woodson. We had to do something different. If we would have kept doing things the same way, he would have picked us apart.''
It's going to be the same thing on Saturday, where Shrewsberry will try to stay one step ahead of Painter in the X's and O's game. The respect is there, of course, but Shrewsberry would love nothing more than to come away with another win, much like he did over Indiana on Sunday.
"You've got to win the game," Shrewsberry said. "I owe it to my guys to do everything I can to win the game."
It's the same for Purdue's players. They loved having Shrewsberry around at Purdue, and were all thrilled for him when he got the Penn State head coaching job.
Purdue guard Sasha Stefanovic said he wouldn't be the offensive player he is today without Shrewsberry. He said during Wednesday night's Sasha Live! podcast that he learned a lot from him during their two years together.
"He was very instrumental in my growth here at Purdue as a player,'' Stefanovic said from Mad Mushroom Pizza in West Lafayette.. He's such a great offensive mind, and the creativity he brings to that side of the floor is tremendous.
"He's helped me learn the game, with how to attack, and finding people and just understanding more on that side of the ball. He also helped me a lot with shooting drills, with things he brought from the NBA and how guys do things there, and how they perform. He's a great guy. It's exciting to be able to play him now.''
Preparation for Saturday's game is a given, for sure. It's going to be interesting to see the new wrinkles that get thrown in, from both sidelines.
"He created a lot of what we do offensively with some of the sets that we do,'' Stefanovic said. "Obviously, we've added a lot since then, but he knows that basics of our offense, and I know he's going to try to take us out of things. We're going to need to be locked in on that side of the floor for sure.''
Watch the entire Sasha Stefanovic podcast
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Tom Brew is an award-winning journalist who's worked at some America's finest newspapers, including the Tampa Bay (Fla.) Times, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Indianapolis Star. He also owns the book publishing company, Hilltop30 Publishing Group, and he has written four books and published 16 others.