In-depth with Jai Lucas: How UT recruited GB3 for years and signed him
1) How much time goes into recruiting a player like Greg Brown III?
I don’t think the average Texas fan understands how much time went into recruiting Greg Brown III.
So, I went directly to the source and asked lead recruiter Jai Lucas, whose life in the final anxious days leading into Brown’s announcement was so immersed in trying to beat the NBA’s G League for the guy he spent nearly five years recruiting that his wife became more invested in a recruitment than ever before.
“My wife was my only person here I could vent to,” Lucas said lightheartedly as he described being a quarantined coach unable to meet face-to-face with other UT coaches. “About a week ago I felt pretty good, need to keep doing what we’re doing, and we’ll be fine. And then last second everything changed. My wife got a little more involved with it. She came running to me about things she’s seeing, hearing… she’s usually not that involved. She knew who Greg was, obviously… she’s starting to get more in tuned with Twitter and information you get. It was kind of fun to see because now she understands a little more. I’m not just playing around on my phone.”
Time spent on the phone is just part of the very long, intricate process. Lucas himself can’t even come up with an estimate of the number of hours spent recruiting Brown.
“It’s not really possible,” said, with a big laugh, the former Longhorn point guard and current assistant coach. “He has a lot of family, and they’re really close, and they’re really good people and they’re involved. They’re a rarity in a top recruit in everyone is on the same page and wanting the same thing with the kid… I knew it was five hours a day, six times a week for the last year and a half.”
And that’s just the last year and a half.
“You can’t really put a number on it because there’s the time you spend watching, time you spend on the phone, texting and those sorts of things,” Shaka Smart stated. “And then there’s the countless hours thinking about what we need to do next. These things are hard, man.”
Lucas can describe it as fun now because Brown is a Longhorn. He signed. He wants to add his own chapter to the Brown legacy at Texas. But imagine for a minute you’re an assistant coach at the University of Texas who spent years recruiting a local product only to go head-to-head with the NBA/G League during the final days and hours.
“The week before Jalen Green we felt pretty good about it. All indications were he (Brown) was leaning to Texas. You took a little sigh of relief,” Lucas said as he described the week or two weeks prior to the announcement. “After Green made that announcement [for the G League], your antennas go up. Then they (G League) call back, have a better pitch, have more interest… you don’t know how you’re going to beat it because it’s illegal to offer money – that’s the biggest difference. They can offer it. You’re kind of like, ‘I don’t know?’ It’s something you do not expect and something you don’t know how to overcome. But the silver lining was Greg and his family figured out what was best for him.”
In the end, relationships emerged victorious.
“In recruiting, you have to put a lot of time into recruiting any player of that caliber but there’s never any way to know for sure how it’s going to work out,” said Smart. “At the end of the day, they either pick your program or they don’t. Greg is a guy that we’ve always prioritized to build a relationship with. Jai Lucas deserves a ton of credit for the job he’s done getting to know Greg extremely well and all the people around him. Greg for me as a head coach has always been really, really easy to talk to. He’s always been a guy that’s fun to talk to, fun to sit down with and fun to watch play basketball.”
And those relationships emerged victorious because of all the time poured into developing them with attentiveness and honesty.
So, how far back does this go? Lucas recalls a particular phone call from his father, John Lucas II. If a player has the chance to be very good in high school and eventually college, the chances are he attends one of Lucas’s camps in Houston.
“It actually was his (Brown’s) eighth grade summer. My dad has this big camp for seventh and eighth graders and he calls me and says,’ You know you have the best eighth grader in the state in Austin.’ And I said, ‘Who?’ I was operations (Director of Basketball Operations at Texas) at this point. He says, Greg Brown’ … then, the next day I get in contact with somebody, AAU coach or someone that knew him. Big Greg (Greg Brown, Jr.) calls me and that was the beginning.
“From that point on, we got him over (to campus for visits), we knew the family connection of Big Greg playing here, his mom running track, and his uncle playing basketball here. That was the tie in there. Probably my first time seeing him wasn’t until the summer of his 9th grade year.”
When Lucas became Smart’s Director of Basketball Operations for the 2015-16 season, Smart tasked the new assistant coach with the underclassmen recruiting because the senior prospects were identified and accounted for by assistant coaches. So, Lucas went to work on the underclassmen besides the one senior he had a relationship with – Jarrett Allen.
For Texas and its pursuit of Brown, they received some help.
“It worked out perfectly,” Lucas said.
At one point, Brown, Will Baker and top Texas target and now Houston guard Quentin Grimes, who originally signed and played at Kansas, all played on the same AAU team (Basketball University on the adidas circuit). So, the Longhorns were able to spend a lot of time watching all three during evaluation periods, which helped establish themselves as priority recruiters for Brown.
“He was like a young colt. Just like a racehorse who was just all arms and feet; just did stuff in games so naturally and he didn’t really know what he was doing,” recalled Lucas about first evaluating Brown as an assistant coach. “If he could ever fill out, come together he would be ridiculous. That’s what I noticed his whole 10th grade summer watching him.
“After that, that sophomore year of high school is when it really clicked. You knew he was going to be a McDonald’s All-American. You knew what he was going to be. That’s when all your early work on the front end happened and hopefully would pay off. That’s what helped us out down the stretch I think.”
What Lucas and Texas soon didn’t know is where and when Brown would be playing the next summer. Well, not exactly. But Brown, as many top players do, switched AAU teams the following summer and played with the Dallas Seawolves and also Team Faith. Since both teams weren’t affiliated with a shoe brand and on the usual shoe circuits, they often played in sites and events different from the usual locations many high-major coaches flocked to.
During an evaluation period, normally just a weekend in length, coaches must decide who they’re going to watch, how they’re going to get there, how much time it might take to go from one site to another, and which coaches need to watch certain players. It’s not as simple as showing up to a single event and sitting there from 8:00 a.m. until 10 sometimes 11 p.m. Organization is key, and crucial decisions need to be made because kids always know who is watching; coaches can’t afford to waste their time recruiting guys they can’t get because the competition is getting ahead with guys they can.
“It’s a lot different because... a traditional recruitment for us from the standpoint is going to be more regional based and Texas is usually on that list,” responded Lucas when asked the differences between recruiting an elite, five-star prospect and a more traditional recruitment. “The other school that might be after the kid is Kansas in the region… and then you have those top tier, five-stars and in their mind they’re only going to be in school one year, as it should be. In their mind it’s who has done that the most. Kentucky, Duke... We have to figure out how to offset that.
“You have kids like Tyrese Maxey where that was his dream – Kentucky. Then you have Greg and Mo (Bamba) where they wanted a different path. Unless you’re Kentucky, you can’t recruit five of them. You’re not going to be lucky enough to get all five… not going to be able to recruit them well enough if you’re spreading it out among five. Find one that you really think you can get and have strong ties to.”
Texas, mainly Lucas, remained committed to giving Brown an in-person scouting presence at those events off the beaten path to show how interested it was.
“Getting to see him was when we established ourselves as him being our guy,” said Lucas.
From that point forward, no one could dispute Brown’s standing as UT’s priority target in 2020. All that was left were all those hours Lucas described the last year and a half communicating and consistently recruiting the five-star prospect and arguably the best high school ever from Central Texas.
“Jai deserves a ton of credit again for his stick to it-ness… people don’t understand sometimes… recruiting is about continuing to pound the rock doing the little things whether it’s a phone call, graphic, knowing a little detail, knowing something that’s coming up, paying attention to something small,” Smart said about his assistant coach. “That’s what the best assistant coaches do in recruiting.”
And that’s what Lucas did over and over and over again.
“Jai did a terrific job. He was very, very consistent. That’s one of the underrated traits you can have in recruiting particularly when you start recruiting a young man earlier in his career… new people can jump in, twists and turns. Jai did a phenomenal job staying in constant contact, developing a relationship… fortunately his family, especially his dad, they’ve been awesome with communication,” Smart said. “In recruiting, communication takes two sides. Big Greg has been phenomenal about being available and open to communicating with him and his son.”
Somewhere, likely fighting off the nerves and anxiety helping grip his phone while he watched a computer, Lucas, like the rest of us, found out Brown was going to Texas when he announced in an Instagram Live interview with ESPN’s Marc Spears. At length, Brown described the relationships built with Texas, the amount of time the Longhorns put into recruiting him, Texas being his first offer, and wanting to continue a legacy at UT. And as Brown delivered music to the Longhorns’ ears, Lucas, after a deep sigh of relief, could tell himself with an exhausted smile – it was all worth it. Relationships and time won even in an uneven playing field against the NBA’s final charge.
“The biggest thing at least for me because of the relationship we built and the level of people the Browns are. It’s rare you get a family or a parent like his dad that doesn’t tell you lies. They’re always upfront. They were always honest with us. I think that was the biggest thing with this one besides anything else. For us, it was more so them than the job we did,” Lucas said. “We always knew what we needed to do and what we were up against. The satisfaction is everyone was on the same page. I think that’s the one refreshing part about it.”
Almost immediately after Brown announced, Lucas fired off a tweet with a Michael Jordan “flu game” .gif.
“I had the Jordan tweet probably got it… at least two days before. I had saw it and that was the way I was feeling that moment. If he does commit, this is exactly how I feel when this thing is over,” he said.
Exhausted, but winner of the big prize.
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Alright, the rest of Wednesday's column...
2) Greg Brown III scouting report…
By now you’ve watched multiple Greg Brown III highlight tapes. If you haven’t, what in the hell are you waiting on? They’re far more entertaining than anything I’ll write, especially considering I need at least two coffees to even remember what day it is. Imagine how many I need to write a column. Life with a newborn.
Anyway, Brown’s highlight tapes are as good and entertaining as any high school player ever. EVER. Someone should follow him with a boombox that plays Oynx’s “Slam” on repeat. “He’s always been a great athlete and I think over time his athleticism has become more violent which is obviously a very, very important component of attacking the basket and rebounding and transition basketball,” said Shaka Smart when describing the player Brown is...
READ THE REST OF DUSTIN'S COLUMN INSIDE THE 40 ACRES BY CLICKING HERE.
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