Anyone have any idea how much of a difference there is between letter grades, or third of letter grade, jumps in IQ? I know that you can go up to a B fairly quickly, but it is much slower to get to an A. How much better is the A- than the B+? Then again, there may not be a set answer. Also, if a team runs the half court/m2m or half court/ zone, I assume that they have to practice both press and the other. This would make it impossible to get to A+ in both, I think.

Iguana used to have a list of rough number of minutes it took to get to each IQ level, I can't remember if it's linked under the Hoops 101 or where it is hidden. I'm sure someone can link it to you or copy/paste.

You are correct, if you run a split D like press/man that you need to devote minutes to both the press and the man in the team practice plan, which then creates a tradeoff with the number of minutes you can use for individual development.

I have the iguana chart in here MEGA FAQS

I did find this on a much older forum post. I assume that it is the one that Rednu mentioned. Iguana1 does a great job of laying out the minutes required to get to the next partial grade. Does anyone know if any of those have changed much in the past five years?

https://www.whatifsports.com/forums/Posts.aspx?ForumID=30&TopicID=428159&ThreadID=9208347#l_9208347

A team could easily become B rated in two different defenses. The question that this leaves me with is how drastic is the difference between a B defense and an A defense? Any ideas about how significant these are?

Thank you the0nlyis. I did not see the link to the Google doc about minutes when I first looked through your link. I love that you have spelled out when you should be at what level for the different practice times. It is very informative.

It's a little tough to pull out anything exact for comparison. The things you can look at are the high end D1 teams that rarely actually get to start seniors. Those teams suffer a little disadvantage from poor IQs. They will run a little scared early in the seasons about playing low D1 press teams that are stacked with mediocre talent, but all seniors and juniors. A rule of thumb, and not much more than that, is that it helps to have your starters at least in the B+ range. For combo defenses, getting press to B+ and the primary defense to A- (on an 8 or 9 players rotation) starts giving very good results.

Since you're new: I suggest practicing and playing only 1 O & 1 D at D3. The reason is that your players need all the individual practice they can get to improve. Never practice more than 1 offense for any reason. There are very successful coaches that will play a combo zone or m2m & press, but never m2m & zone.

If you are really curious, there was an experiment run by someone where they recruited the most talent they could and put all practice minutes into individual practice, rather than team. You might find that forum thread and read it. I don't think they stuck around long enough to add a post-mortem. That probably tells you something.

Thank you. I think that I will take your advice and stick with one defense on my teams for now.