New coach, new players, new everything: Utah State prepares for a season where nothing is the same
Utah State basketball coach Danny Sprinkle wasn’t shy about the challenge ahead of him when speaking to media in Las Vegas last Thursday during Mountain West media days.
“It’s probably going to be the hardest year of my life,” Sprinkle said, “and the biggest challenge coaching-wise that I’ve ever had.”
“I thought we got the right guys for what we were given. We got the right type of people for our program. The one thing I didn’t want to sacrifice was character and their fit with Utah State.” — Aggies coach Danny Sprinkle
For the last five years, Utah State basketball fans have become accustomed to change. Constant change. Whether it was a new coach, new players or even, on a broader scale, changes in the athletic administration, it had become an expected and accepted norm for the Aggies, like many mid-major hoops programs, to deal with at least some minor upheaval.
This season, however, upheaval is an understatement. Simply put, nothing is going to be the same.
After the 2022-23 season saw the Aggies turn in a noteworthy performance, including a third-place finish in the Mountain West Conference standings, a berth in the MWC Tournament championship game, and a return trip to the NCAA Tournament after a year away, a single offseason saw Utah State lose virtually everything from that team down to the studs.
Sprinkle, who became the 21st men’s basketball head coach in USU history on April 7, entered a situation primed for a full rebuild, and with a lot of help from the very transfer portal that gutted the program from the beginning, brought together a team of guys he believes are “the right type of people for our program.”
All in all, Sprinkle’s first year with the Aggies involves 13 out of 16 players who were not on Utah State’s roster in 2022. Only four of them are true freshmen, while the other nine include four juniors, a senior, two sophomores and two grad transfers.
“In our situation, getting the job on April 7, a lot of kids were already committed and signed other places,” Sprinkle said. “We had a limited pool to recruit from, and we had to sign a lot of guys. I thought we got the right guys for what we were given. We got the right type of people for our program. The one thing I didn’t want to sacrifice was character and their fit with Utah State.”
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The offseason chaos started with then-head coach Ryan Odom leaving the program after just two years, returning to his East Coast roots to become the next head coach at VCU. With him went both starting guards Max Shulga and Sean Bairstow and Odom’s entire coaching staff. His son, Connor, who played for USU, also left.
Soon after, star junior guard and Utah-native Steven Ashworth got an offer difficult to refuse, joining up with the Creighton Bluejays. Center Trevin Dorius transferred a short drive south to Utah Valley, and just like that, all the starters were gone.
It didn’t end there either. Senior Rylan Jones, whose year was ended by concussions, left for Samford for his bonus year of eligibility due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and bench players like center Szymon Zapala (Longwood) and forward Zee Hamoda (Sacramento State) also went their own way.
When the dust finally cleared, the Aggies were a national storyline feeding into the narrative of the transfer portal. Utah State had lost every single player that had scored even a single point last season to either graduation or the portal.
Danny Sprinkle arrives
This is where Sprinkle came in. The only Aggies around to welcome the new coach were two redshirts — freshman Mason Falslev and sophomore Isaac Johnson — and redshirt-freshman Landon Brenchley, a Cache Valley local who played just nine minutes last season.
And just for one last act in the chaos, Utah State got a new athletic director.
With everything and everyone being so new to the program and the staff, there’s little that’s been deciphered about what Utah State is going to look like when the first game rolls around. What little can be gleaned comes in two forms: first, the style of basketball that Sprinkle and his staff specialize in based on his time at Montana State, and second, that Sprinkle took guards Darius Brown II and Josh Uduje to Vegas with him to speak to media, a strong implication of their status as potential starters.
Brown, a grad transfer, is one of two players who followed Sprinkle to USU from Montana State. The other is junior wing Great Osobor. Brown averaged 9.2 points, 4.6 assists and 4.0 rebounds per game in one season at MSU (previously, he was at Cal State-Northridge). He also notably shot over 90% from the free-throw line.
Osobor spent all of his career so far at MSU under Sprinkle, averaging 9.8 points, 4.4 rebounds and an assist per game while shooting over 60% from the field. Osobor and Brown were both top-20 rebounders in the Big Sky.
Darius Brown II, Great Osobor and March Madness
The two players were part of a program that redefined success for the Grizzlies, making it to March Madness for the first time since 1996 and then returning the next year for MSU’s first-ever back-to-back appearances in the tournament. Sprinkle’s standard of winning had not been seen by the Grizzlies in nearly a century.
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After months of learning about Utah State’s basketball history, it’s clear that what gets lauded at Montana State is the baseline for Aggie basketball.
“It’s been an adjustment hearing all about how awesome Utah State has been the past recent years,” Brown said. “They’ve been to a lot of NCAA Tournaments, and the expectation is to go and win some games in the NCAA Tournament. That’s what we’re striving for, and that’s the approach that we’re taking in the offseason.”
Brown defined Sprinkle as a “hard-nosed, defensive-minded coach; big on energy and lots of effort.” The description seems starkly different than the calm, collected Odom who engineered a fiery offense that finished top five in the country in 3-point field goal percentage.
“I still know what wins,” Sprinkle said. “It’s discipline, it’s toughness, it’s doing the right thing at the right time, and then you got to have great players. You have to have players that, as coaches, make us look good. They’re the ones making the shots, passing, rebounding, going to weights at 6 a.m. and things like that.
“We have to continue to recruit at a high level and just coach these guys and treat them the right way to where they want to stay and be a part of Utah State.”
Filling out the roster
Outside of Osobor, Brown and Uduje, Sprinkle also attracted the services of one of the more coveted portal players in the West, Nigel Burris, a 6-foot-7 sophomore forward from Idaho University. Burris was named the Big Sky Conference Freshman of the Year after averaging 8.8 points and 5.5 rebounds per game.
Other transfer faces include junior juco transfer Khalifa Sakho (South Plains College), grad transfer wing Max Agbonkpolo (USC and Wyoming), sophomore guard Javon Jackson (Division-II Southern Nazarene), junior forward Jackson Grant (Washington) and former Ute guard Ian Martinez.
True freshmen on the team are guard Garrison Phelps (Phoenix, Arizona), guard Jaxon Smith (Woods Cross), wing Dallin Grant (Cedar) and forward Karson Templin (Fairview, Texas).
So what’s an offseason like for a team of players who are collectively brand new to the school they now play for? Who tells them what to do outside of practice? Did they all find out together just how steep Old Main Hill is?
“It’s different, but at the same time, when everybody’s going through something new, it’s a commonality between all of us. We’re all going through something new,” Brown said. “Me and (Osobor) have been with the coaching staff before, so I guess we’re a slight advantage of knowing what they like, and it’s good for us because we get to help everybody else out. … There’s a commonality between everybody being new to Utah State, and that’s been really cool and has brought the team closer, adjusting together on the court and off the court.”
When on the court, Sprinkle is guiding his quickly assembled team of players on how to play a gritty style of basketball that doesn’t lend itself to firestorms of 3-pointers like last year. Montana State was actually dead last in the Big Sky in 3-point percentage last season.
What Sprinkle’s philosophy gets right is shutting opponents down. The Bobcats were the conference’s top scoring defense, allowing just 66.91 ppg and also led the Big Sky in scoring margin, outscoring opponents by 7.03 ppg.
Montana State was also top three in the Big Sky in scoring offense (73.94 ppg), rebounding margin (+2.29 rpg), turnover margin (+1.83 per game), blocks per game (2.97) and steals per game (6.54).
“I would think the only thing that matters at the end of the day is that win-loss category,” Brown said. “No matter what happens or how the job gets done, it’s all about getting wins, whether it’s a defensive-minded team or offensive-minded team, scrappy, ugly, pretty, as long as you get a win, it doesn’t matter.”
One last little difference Sprinkle and his players might have a good time getting used to: attendance. For Sprinkle, Brown and Osobor, their home games last season drew an average of 3,272 fans.
The Spectrum could more than likely triple that in Utah State’s first game.
Uduje relayed how much the new team has excitedly awaited playing in front of a Spectrum crowd for the first time. Even if the Aggies don’t play, or even look, anything like the team fans fell in love with last season, there’s much to be excited about.
“There’s a difference in the play style per se,” Uduje said. “We’ve still got some offensive threats on this team. (Fans) are just going to be getting excited for something a little bit different this year.”
The Aggies have an exhibition matchup at home against Montana State-Billings on Friday, Nov. 3. They’ll then begin the season in earnest with a home game on Nov. 6 against the South Dakota School of Mines. During nonconference play, Utah State will play in the Cayman Islands Classic from Nov. 19-21.
