🏀 VIDEO: The Team That Doesn't Shoot Mid-Range Jumpers: "A team playing a style of basketball no one else plays."
- Thread starter TerryP
- Start date
50+yeartidefan
Member
Like at OK....
And for what ever reason...its contagious
50+yeartidefan
Member
And it means?
I can't do all the work.
50+yeartidefan
Member
Lol. If nobody knows what it means its an ineffective acronym
ODS= " Old Dumbass Syndrome "
TDS. .. but OU.
Wouldn't that be ICDATW?
A little background I've learned ...
The guy who made the video runs a substack called Hoops Vision, has his own YouTube channel (seen in the original post,) has a podcast, website ... you get the drill. He was recently profiled in The Athletic.
If you want to understand Jordan Sperber’s basketball mind, travel back to his freshman year of college, somewhere on Villanova’s campus. It was 2011. Sperber, from Slingerlands, N.Y., near Albany, was out in the world, living on his own in Philly’s western suburbs. He was smart, maybe too smart, on his way to graduating in three years with a degree in business administration. He had the world ahead of him, but was, at that moment, haunted by the matchup zone defense long favored by Mohonasen High School in Schenectady, N.Y.
A year earlier, Sperber’s team at Bethlehem Central High School found itself entangled in Mohonasen’s web. Sperber was a senior starter and every possession was a slog. He thought about it ever since. It wasn’t the loss to Mohonasen that stuck with him, as much as it was the problem he couldn’t solve. There had to be an easier way to beat the zone. Sperber thought on it, and kept thinking on it, until an answer arose. Studying clips and film available online, he came upon an offensive set from then-Utah State coach Stew Morrill. Sperber’s eyes darted around, watching the play, seeing the solution.
Soon after, during a visit home for holiday break, he swung by Bethlehem Central. Sperber presented Morrill’s set and told his former coaches and teammates to install it for the Mohonasen game.
When the two teams met soon thereafter, Bethlehem Central blitzed poor Mohonasen with an array of open corner 3s.
“I think we were naive to how good he was at the time,” says Casey McGraw, then, a recipient of those corner 3s; presently, the head coach at Division III Elmira College. “Jordan was like 17 or 18 at the time and already understood things at a totally different level.”
Sperber grew up loving basketball, he says, “to the extreme.” He devoured stats, but also the intricacies of Xs and Os. In college, he played on Nova’s club team and studied early-era data analytics. A borderline obsession. He scrolled through pages on KenPom.com and Basketball Prospectus during business classes. He read Luke Winn at Sports Illustrated, who introduced advanced analytics to an old-school publication and was eventually hired by the Toronto Raptors in 2017. He read Sebastian Pruiti, a writer/blogger for NBA Playbook, SB Nation and Grantland, whose work was data-driven, but aided by a coaching mindset. Pruiti left Grantland in 2012 for a job with the Oklahoma City Thunder.
This was Sperber’s coaching tree.
Meanwhile, over in the Villanova basketball office, Jay Wright and the Wildcat staff didn’t know him from a can of paint, probably because Sperber was about as unassuming as a can of Behr low-gloss eggshell. He never walked across campus to sign on as a team manager or volunteer for a post.
That play, though? Morrill’s quick hitter vs. the zone? It changed everything. It ended up being the first piece of content uploaded on Sperber’s new YouTube channel. He posted a simple 15-second clip with no commentary, no analysis, no anything. He wanted to write about the set and decided — as one was wont to do back then — to start a blog.
He called it The Hoop Vision.
Eleven years later, that YouTube channel is home to nearly 95,000 subscribers, the @hoopvision68 Twitter account boasts 42,000 followers and a newsletter, the Hoop Vision PLUS, is paid for by both fans and many of the most prominent coaches and scouts in basketball.
Sperber is, as a result, widely considered one of the more respected young minds in the sport. No one blinks when heaping that kind of praise upon him. The 29-year-old is a marriage of two often divergent worlds — self-described as “somewhere between a basketball coach and a data scientist.” His content is niche among fans but represents a vastly growing audience that’s consuming and watching college basketball with an elevated understanding. Perhaps more impactfully, it’s devoured by young coaches learning the game.
The influence is both obvious and improbable. Sperber’s mere existence in the ecosystem speaks not only to where college basketball is today, but where it’s going tomorrow.
Poor Mohonasen High School never stood a chance.
The quintessential Sperbian content is a 12-minute video from November 2021. “The Team That Doesn’t Dribble.” Judging by the 2.2 million views, you may have seen it.
Sperber presents the Bellarmine University offense, a kinetic orchestra of passing and cutting and moving and more passing. Coach Scott Davenport long ago turned Bellarmine into a Division II power with the system and has produced similar success at the DI level. On the surface, Sperber’s video breakdown is a quirky look at an unknown school running a weird offense. Tailor-made YouTube content.
But 2 million views don’t just happen. The video is so good because of its construct. The premise is in analytics. Bellarmine is an outlier, Sperber explains, ranking as one of the top-15 most efficient offenses in points per game, despite using the fewest ball screens, by far. The data is deeply nerdy, but highly consumable. So, too, are the Xs and Os that back it up. Sperber doesn’t explain only what Bellarmine is doing, but how. Animated plays are diagrammed and decoded. You’re in the film room.
“Here’s the system in all its glory,” Sperber says on the video. “They start in the scissor … then flow right into the motion, completing 12 passes and four ball reversals without any dribbles in between … all while cutting and engaging the defense until there’s finally a breakdown 21 seconds into the possession.”
It’s this combination that makes Sperber unequaled in the space. And what space is that? Well, that’s the thing. There’s no singular construct for nontraditional college basketball content creation. In a world that’s self-made, he’s his own thing.
“He’s pretty unique in the field in that he has a plain language way of connecting the data to actual concepts that coaches would understand,” says Ken Pomeroy, college basketball’s dean of analytics. “That’s his talent. I think it’s probably under-recognized or noticed. He doesn’t try to overfit statistics to fit a narrative. He understands the numbers and what he’s seeing on the court, and can communicate both.”
As a result, Sperber’s analysis — videos, newsletter, Substack, podcast — carries a mass following of both fans and coaches who, while understanding the game on varying levels, are speaking the same language. They learn how ripples move through the game from program to program, league to league, level to level. Winn, now the Raptors director of prospect strategy, counts himself among Sperber’s subscribers and says “what makes him really special is that eye to spot how everything from play calls to style trends can jump around a vast landscape.”
It’s not easy to take something in the macro and explain it in the micro. But if there’s an undercurrent to Sperber’s work, that’s it.
“Every time I read something he writes I feel like I learn something,” Winn says.
Fans likely see Sperber as a media member producing content.
Coaches, meanwhile, see him as a coach producing what amounts to an online clinic.
In truth, he’s both. And that’s why it works.
By the end of Sperber’s sophomore year, college coaches began stumbling upon his blog and growing curious. Arizona State assistant coach Eric Musselman sent an email.
Subject: “Great Site”
Body: “Keep up the great work.”
New Mexico assistant coach Paul Weir emailed to ask Sperber if he’d be attending the Final Four — college basketball’s annual networking bazaar. Sperber replied by saying no, he didn’t have tickets, not realizing few people who attend the Final Four actually attend the games. “So naive,” he says.
Sperber scored a paid consulting gig for New Mexico State, filing monthly reports using data to diagnose the Aggies’ issues. He interned at ESPN under basketball analytics pioneer Dean Oliver. He entered a data analysis contest conducted by Teamrankings.com and judged by a panel headlined by Mark Cuban. He finished runner-up in Year 1 with a study charting Wisconsin’s offense. He won the next year with an investigation of whether matchups matter in college basketball. (Conclusion: Yes, but not really.) Sperber gained the full attention of one of the judges. Pomeroy asked him to contribute a few blog posts to KenPom.com.
Graduating a year early from Villanova in 2014, Sperber never considered entering the business world. He instead coached some grassroots ball and leaned hard into Hoop Vision, creating analytical content. That summer, he saw a listing for a graduate assistant post on Musselman’s first staff as head coach at the University of Nevada and applied. Musselman remembered the name.
Ten months after landing in Reno, Sperber was hired as video coordinator at New Mexico State, where Weir was promoted to head coach in the summer of 2016. The Aggies reached the 2017 NCAA Tournament and, with that, Weir was off to the University of New Mexico.
At NMSU, Wichita State assistant coach Chris Jans was inbound as the Aggies’ new coach. Sperber interviewed to retain his job. He and Jans had never met. When they sat down, Sperber slid thick packets of paper across the table. One by one. Analytical breakdowns of the Aggies and every roster in the WAC.
“I was like, who is this guy?” Jans says. “About halfway through the first meeting, I realized I wasn’t the smartest guy in the room. I knew I was going to keep him.”
Jans had previously “dabbled” in analytics, but he was a novice. He knew he wanted to incorporate data more into his program but needed a plan.
“I was fortunate and lucky to run into Jordan Sperber at that point in my career,” says Jans, who went 122–32 at New Mexico State with three NCAA Tournament appearances and is now in his first year as a high-major coach at Mississippi State. “He was in the top 1 or 2 percent in his specific field, even at that age. I was super impressed. He made me think differently.”
Jordan Sperber, left, with then-New Mexico State coach Chris Jans. (Courtesy Jordan Sperber)
Sperber liked his role at New Mexico State but wondered about his future. He was at this point, according to Jans, “absolutely ready to move into coaching, if he wanted to,” but that wasn’t the move for Sperber. There was one major issue: “I looked around and there was no one in the college basketball coaching sphere making serious money who wasn’t a recruiter,” Sperber remembers.
So it was time for something bold. Sperber resigned at New Mexico State and set out on his own. He revived the dormant Hoop Vision website. He returned to a Twitter account with fewer than 2,000 followers. His initial plan: Pick one power conference program per season, cater to that audience, monetize analysis of that team and its opponents.
The plan soon changed.
There was a time, not particularly long ago, when TV analysts, national writers and staid beat writers were the voices of record in college basketball. Those days have calved off into the ocean along with the flex offense and the 45-second shot clock.
There was also a time when young coaches were born primarily from former college players or team managers who swing off coaching trees into a network of connections. Those standards, too, are becoming less and less defined.
Today, Sperber is at the forefront of evolutions in both areas. He didn’t by any means start the proliferation and normalization of data-driven analytics and online Xs and Os, but he’s emerged from it. His impact will come more and more into focus in the coming years.
On the coaching side, he provides real-time coverage of how the game is changing, what’s working where, and how, and what else it’s affecting. Coaches at all levels watch his content. One college coach whose offense was recently anatomized on Hoop Vision commented that Sperber couldn’t understand everything the program does, before admitting a few breaths later, “but I mean, yeah, he mostly got it right.” This is why they all tune in.
“I’d bet there’s not a young high school or college coach in the country who doesn’t know who Jordan Sperber is,” Jans says.
On the media side, fans are becoming more and more assimilated to understanding advanced analytics thanks, primarily, to Sperber and voices like his. The language of the game has changed from points per game to points per possession. It was once unheard of to see conversations of ball-screen coverages and the intricacies of a motion offense in the media’s game coverage, let alone fan message boards, but the evolution is ongoing and not slowing down. Let’s remember, in the early days of the internet, fan websites were primarily dens of debauchery for home-cooked recruiting news and visceral blathering. Today? Many of the top programs in the country have smart, analytic-heavy sites by those providing coverage that attempts to look an awful lot like Sperber’s.
“What he does is great because it ultimately raises the level of quality analysis,” Winn says. “The quality of discourse about why your team is good or bad is simply better than years ago.”
So, too, is the ever-expanding use of advanced analytics within college basketball programs large and small. While some programs already have staff positions dedicated to data analysis, others are integrating it more and more or using outsourced third parties. The college game remains miles behind the NBA on such things, but it’s advancing.
The process has been a long one but is progressing.
“For some coaches it comes naturally, but there are some who it doesn’t come easy to, and the natural inclination is to say, oh, this is a bunch of nerds who don’t understand the game,” Pomeroy says. “But Jordan is someone who sees the game as a coach but understands the analytics. That’s what makes him different. He can bridge that gap.”
Is Sperber the only one? No.
But is he at the top?
Yes, even if he doesn’t say so himself.
Soon after reintroducing Hoop Vision in 2018, Sperber was invited to present at a conference for college coaches and video coordinators. He demonstrated how he cut, analyzed and organized game film and data at New Mexico State. The attendees sat wide-eyed, then deluged him with questions. Sperber saw a broader appeal in front of him.
His realization: “I should be the internet’s video coordinator.”
This is how the modern version of Hoop Vision came to be. Today, Sperber calls the business “a test case for a modern independent media outlet” and “a model that combines entrepreneurship, content creation, and consulting.” Out here in the wild, meanwhile, it’s simply great content and required viewing.
This week, Sperber recorded a podcast with Robbie Hummel and rolled out a seven-minute video explaining why Alabama refuses to take long 2-point jumpers, mapping out an offense that leads the country in tempo and ranks in the top 20 in efficiency. These videos, he says, can take upwards of a month to produce, from the original analysis, to watching the film, to cutting the tape, to animation, to voiceover work, to everything else. He does the work. He studies endless amounts of film. Uniquely, he does not interview coaches as part of his analysis and video breakdowns, relying and trusting instead on what he sees and what he knows. This is, at its essence, what expertise looks like.
Things have come a far way from 2018, when Sperber’s primary income came from selling an NCAA Tournament ebook and doing private consulting for some college programs on the side.
“Yeah, it all just kind of happened,” he says.
From his home office in Albany, Sperber speaks of all this as a matter of good fortune. A classic undersell. Sperber has emerged as a mainstream player because he’s incredibly good at what he does and offers real authority in an easy-to-process package. He also debunks the inherent problem that comes with being the smartest guy in the room. He’s actually likable.
And here you realize that while Sperber’s influence will be felt across the college landscape in coming years, his biggest impact may yet to be seen. Whatever he chooses to do next could create the next shift. In the NBA, franchises have repeatedly filled posts by hiring from the web’s fertile talent pool. Last summer, Sperber “went the distance” with an NBA team for a coaching/analyst role before withdrawing from consideration. But what if a prominent college program comes calling? Yes, the college game remains more of an old boy’s network than the league, but it is unquestionably getting younger and younger, changing more and more.
When wondering where Sperber will be or what he’ll do five, 10 or 15 years from now, there are few limits.
“To be honest,” Jans says, “he can legitimately do whatever he wants. He’s that good.”
A good problem to have. A good problem to solve.
The guy who made the video runs a substack called Hoops Vision, has his own YouTube channel (seen in the original post,) has a podcast, website ... you get the drill. He was recently profiled in The Athletic.
If you want to understand Jordan Sperber’s basketball mind, travel back to his freshman year of college, somewhere on Villanova’s campus. It was 2011. Sperber, from Slingerlands, N.Y., near Albany, was out in the world, living on his own in Philly’s western suburbs. He was smart, maybe too smart, on his way to graduating in three years with a degree in business administration. He had the world ahead of him, but was, at that moment, haunted by the matchup zone defense long favored by Mohonasen High School in Schenectady, N.Y.
A year earlier, Sperber’s team at Bethlehem Central High School found itself entangled in Mohonasen’s web. Sperber was a senior starter and every possession was a slog. He thought about it ever since. It wasn’t the loss to Mohonasen that stuck with him, as much as it was the problem he couldn’t solve. There had to be an easier way to beat the zone. Sperber thought on it, and kept thinking on it, until an answer arose. Studying clips and film available online, he came upon an offensive set from then-Utah State coach Stew Morrill. Sperber’s eyes darted around, watching the play, seeing the solution.
Soon after, during a visit home for holiday break, he swung by Bethlehem Central. Sperber presented Morrill’s set and told his former coaches and teammates to install it for the Mohonasen game.
When the two teams met soon thereafter, Bethlehem Central blitzed poor Mohonasen with an array of open corner 3s.
“I think we were naive to how good he was at the time,” says Casey McGraw, then, a recipient of those corner 3s; presently, the head coach at Division III Elmira College. “Jordan was like 17 or 18 at the time and already understood things at a totally different level.”
Sperber grew up loving basketball, he says, “to the extreme.” He devoured stats, but also the intricacies of Xs and Os. In college, he played on Nova’s club team and studied early-era data analytics. A borderline obsession. He scrolled through pages on KenPom.com and Basketball Prospectus during business classes. He read Luke Winn at Sports Illustrated, who introduced advanced analytics to an old-school publication and was eventually hired by the Toronto Raptors in 2017. He read Sebastian Pruiti, a writer/blogger for NBA Playbook, SB Nation and Grantland, whose work was data-driven, but aided by a coaching mindset. Pruiti left Grantland in 2012 for a job with the Oklahoma City Thunder.
This was Sperber’s coaching tree.
Meanwhile, over in the Villanova basketball office, Jay Wright and the Wildcat staff didn’t know him from a can of paint, probably because Sperber was about as unassuming as a can of Behr low-gloss eggshell. He never walked across campus to sign on as a team manager or volunteer for a post.
That play, though? Morrill’s quick hitter vs. the zone? It changed everything. It ended up being the first piece of content uploaded on Sperber’s new YouTube channel. He posted a simple 15-second clip with no commentary, no analysis, no anything. He wanted to write about the set and decided — as one was wont to do back then — to start a blog.
He called it The Hoop Vision.
Eleven years later, that YouTube channel is home to nearly 95,000 subscribers, the @hoopvision68 Twitter account boasts 42,000 followers and a newsletter, the Hoop Vision PLUS, is paid for by both fans and many of the most prominent coaches and scouts in basketball.
Sperber is, as a result, widely considered one of the more respected young minds in the sport. No one blinks when heaping that kind of praise upon him. The 29-year-old is a marriage of two often divergent worlds — self-described as “somewhere between a basketball coach and a data scientist.” His content is niche among fans but represents a vastly growing audience that’s consuming and watching college basketball with an elevated understanding. Perhaps more impactfully, it’s devoured by young coaches learning the game.
The influence is both obvious and improbable. Sperber’s mere existence in the ecosystem speaks not only to where college basketball is today, but where it’s going tomorrow.
Poor Mohonasen High School never stood a chance.
The quintessential Sperbian content is a 12-minute video from November 2021. “The Team That Doesn’t Dribble.” Judging by the 2.2 million views, you may have seen it.
Sperber presents the Bellarmine University offense, a kinetic orchestra of passing and cutting and moving and more passing. Coach Scott Davenport long ago turned Bellarmine into a Division II power with the system and has produced similar success at the DI level. On the surface, Sperber’s video breakdown is a quirky look at an unknown school running a weird offense. Tailor-made YouTube content.
But 2 million views don’t just happen. The video is so good because of its construct. The premise is in analytics. Bellarmine is an outlier, Sperber explains, ranking as one of the top-15 most efficient offenses in points per game, despite using the fewest ball screens, by far. The data is deeply nerdy, but highly consumable. So, too, are the Xs and Os that back it up. Sperber doesn’t explain only what Bellarmine is doing, but how. Animated plays are diagrammed and decoded. You’re in the film room.
“Here’s the system in all its glory,” Sperber says on the video. “They start in the scissor … then flow right into the motion, completing 12 passes and four ball reversals without any dribbles in between … all while cutting and engaging the defense until there’s finally a breakdown 21 seconds into the possession.”
It’s this combination that makes Sperber unequaled in the space. And what space is that? Well, that’s the thing. There’s no singular construct for nontraditional college basketball content creation. In a world that’s self-made, he’s his own thing.
“He’s pretty unique in the field in that he has a plain language way of connecting the data to actual concepts that coaches would understand,” says Ken Pomeroy, college basketball’s dean of analytics. “That’s his talent. I think it’s probably under-recognized or noticed. He doesn’t try to overfit statistics to fit a narrative. He understands the numbers and what he’s seeing on the court, and can communicate both.”
As a result, Sperber’s analysis — videos, newsletter, Substack, podcast — carries a mass following of both fans and coaches who, while understanding the game on varying levels, are speaking the same language. They learn how ripples move through the game from program to program, league to league, level to level. Winn, now the Raptors director of prospect strategy, counts himself among Sperber’s subscribers and says “what makes him really special is that eye to spot how everything from play calls to style trends can jump around a vast landscape.”
It’s not easy to take something in the macro and explain it in the micro. But if there’s an undercurrent to Sperber’s work, that’s it.
“Every time I read something he writes I feel like I learn something,” Winn says.
Fans likely see Sperber as a media member producing content.
Coaches, meanwhile, see him as a coach producing what amounts to an online clinic.
In truth, he’s both. And that’s why it works.
By the end of Sperber’s sophomore year, college coaches began stumbling upon his blog and growing curious. Arizona State assistant coach Eric Musselman sent an email.
Subject: “Great Site”
Body: “Keep up the great work.”
New Mexico assistant coach Paul Weir emailed to ask Sperber if he’d be attending the Final Four — college basketball’s annual networking bazaar. Sperber replied by saying no, he didn’t have tickets, not realizing few people who attend the Final Four actually attend the games. “So naive,” he says.
Sperber scored a paid consulting gig for New Mexico State, filing monthly reports using data to diagnose the Aggies’ issues. He interned at ESPN under basketball analytics pioneer Dean Oliver. He entered a data analysis contest conducted by Teamrankings.com and judged by a panel headlined by Mark Cuban. He finished runner-up in Year 1 with a study charting Wisconsin’s offense. He won the next year with an investigation of whether matchups matter in college basketball. (Conclusion: Yes, but not really.) Sperber gained the full attention of one of the judges. Pomeroy asked him to contribute a few blog posts to KenPom.com.
Graduating a year early from Villanova in 2014, Sperber never considered entering the business world. He instead coached some grassroots ball and leaned hard into Hoop Vision, creating analytical content. That summer, he saw a listing for a graduate assistant post on Musselman’s first staff as head coach at the University of Nevada and applied. Musselman remembered the name.
Ten months after landing in Reno, Sperber was hired as video coordinator at New Mexico State, where Weir was promoted to head coach in the summer of 2016. The Aggies reached the 2017 NCAA Tournament and, with that, Weir was off to the University of New Mexico.
At NMSU, Wichita State assistant coach Chris Jans was inbound as the Aggies’ new coach. Sperber interviewed to retain his job. He and Jans had never met. When they sat down, Sperber slid thick packets of paper across the table. One by one. Analytical breakdowns of the Aggies and every roster in the WAC.
“I was like, who is this guy?” Jans says. “About halfway through the first meeting, I realized I wasn’t the smartest guy in the room. I knew I was going to keep him.”
Jans had previously “dabbled” in analytics, but he was a novice. He knew he wanted to incorporate data more into his program but needed a plan.
“I was fortunate and lucky to run into Jordan Sperber at that point in my career,” says Jans, who went 122–32 at New Mexico State with three NCAA Tournament appearances and is now in his first year as a high-major coach at Mississippi State. “He was in the top 1 or 2 percent in his specific field, even at that age. I was super impressed. He made me think differently.”
Jordan Sperber, left, with then-New Mexico State coach Chris Jans. (Courtesy Jordan Sperber)
Sperber liked his role at New Mexico State but wondered about his future. He was at this point, according to Jans, “absolutely ready to move into coaching, if he wanted to,” but that wasn’t the move for Sperber. There was one major issue: “I looked around and there was no one in the college basketball coaching sphere making serious money who wasn’t a recruiter,” Sperber remembers.
So it was time for something bold. Sperber resigned at New Mexico State and set out on his own. He revived the dormant Hoop Vision website. He returned to a Twitter account with fewer than 2,000 followers. His initial plan: Pick one power conference program per season, cater to that audience, monetize analysis of that team and its opponents.
The plan soon changed.
There was a time, not particularly long ago, when TV analysts, national writers and staid beat writers were the voices of record in college basketball. Those days have calved off into the ocean along with the flex offense and the 45-second shot clock.
There was also a time when young coaches were born primarily from former college players or team managers who swing off coaching trees into a network of connections. Those standards, too, are becoming less and less defined.
Today, Sperber is at the forefront of evolutions in both areas. He didn’t by any means start the proliferation and normalization of data-driven analytics and online Xs and Os, but he’s emerged from it. His impact will come more and more into focus in the coming years.
On the coaching side, he provides real-time coverage of how the game is changing, what’s working where, and how, and what else it’s affecting. Coaches at all levels watch his content. One college coach whose offense was recently anatomized on Hoop Vision commented that Sperber couldn’t understand everything the program does, before admitting a few breaths later, “but I mean, yeah, he mostly got it right.” This is why they all tune in.
“I’d bet there’s not a young high school or college coach in the country who doesn’t know who Jordan Sperber is,” Jans says.
On the media side, fans are becoming more and more assimilated to understanding advanced analytics thanks, primarily, to Sperber and voices like his. The language of the game has changed from points per game to points per possession. It was once unheard of to see conversations of ball-screen coverages and the intricacies of a motion offense in the media’s game coverage, let alone fan message boards, but the evolution is ongoing and not slowing down. Let’s remember, in the early days of the internet, fan websites were primarily dens of debauchery for home-cooked recruiting news and visceral blathering. Today? Many of the top programs in the country have smart, analytic-heavy sites by those providing coverage that attempts to look an awful lot like Sperber’s.
“What he does is great because it ultimately raises the level of quality analysis,” Winn says. “The quality of discourse about why your team is good or bad is simply better than years ago.”
So, too, is the ever-expanding use of advanced analytics within college basketball programs large and small. While some programs already have staff positions dedicated to data analysis, others are integrating it more and more or using outsourced third parties. The college game remains miles behind the NBA on such things, but it’s advancing.
The process has been a long one but is progressing.
“For some coaches it comes naturally, but there are some who it doesn’t come easy to, and the natural inclination is to say, oh, this is a bunch of nerds who don’t understand the game,” Pomeroy says. “But Jordan is someone who sees the game as a coach but understands the analytics. That’s what makes him different. He can bridge that gap.”
Is Sperber the only one? No.
But is he at the top?
Yes, even if he doesn’t say so himself.
Soon after reintroducing Hoop Vision in 2018, Sperber was invited to present at a conference for college coaches and video coordinators. He demonstrated how he cut, analyzed and organized game film and data at New Mexico State. The attendees sat wide-eyed, then deluged him with questions. Sperber saw a broader appeal in front of him.
His realization: “I should be the internet’s video coordinator.”
This is how the modern version of Hoop Vision came to be. Today, Sperber calls the business “a test case for a modern independent media outlet” and “a model that combines entrepreneurship, content creation, and consulting.” Out here in the wild, meanwhile, it’s simply great content and required viewing.
This week, Sperber recorded a podcast with Robbie Hummel and rolled out a seven-minute video explaining why Alabama refuses to take long 2-point jumpers, mapping out an offense that leads the country in tempo and ranks in the top 20 in efficiency. These videos, he says, can take upwards of a month to produce, from the original analysis, to watching the film, to cutting the tape, to animation, to voiceover work, to everything else. He does the work. He studies endless amounts of film. Uniquely, he does not interview coaches as part of his analysis and video breakdowns, relying and trusting instead on what he sees and what he knows. This is, at its essence, what expertise looks like.
Things have come a far way from 2018, when Sperber’s primary income came from selling an NCAA Tournament ebook and doing private consulting for some college programs on the side.
“Yeah, it all just kind of happened,” he says.
From his home office in Albany, Sperber speaks of all this as a matter of good fortune. A classic undersell. Sperber has emerged as a mainstream player because he’s incredibly good at what he does and offers real authority in an easy-to-process package. He also debunks the inherent problem that comes with being the smartest guy in the room. He’s actually likable.
And here you realize that while Sperber’s influence will be felt across the college landscape in coming years, his biggest impact may yet to be seen. Whatever he chooses to do next could create the next shift. In the NBA, franchises have repeatedly filled posts by hiring from the web’s fertile talent pool. Last summer, Sperber “went the distance” with an NBA team for a coaching/analyst role before withdrawing from consideration. But what if a prominent college program comes calling? Yes, the college game remains more of an old boy’s network than the league, but it is unquestionably getting younger and younger, changing more and more.
When wondering where Sperber will be or what he’ll do five, 10 or 15 years from now, there are few limits.
“To be honest,” Jans says, “he can legitimately do whatever he wants. He’s that good.”
A good problem to have. A good problem to solve.
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Thread '📈 Bracketology 2026 - A quick from the distance: 2/8 update'
Alabama currently projected as a 4 seed.- TerryP
- Replies: 23
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2026 Alabama Roster Management Chart and Portal news
The latest on who's in and who's out.- Brandon Van de Graaff
- Replies: 1,651
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Thread 'Anybody watched any good new shows or series lately?'
The off-season "blues." What to watch?- Brandon Van de Graaff
- Replies: 149
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Thread '🏀 2025-26 Bama Basketball Updates: Roberts recuses himself: Judge Daniel Pruet has a decision on his hands'
Bama held their 1st practice 9/22- Brandon Van de Graaff
- Replies: 725
