“the idea that uptempo press is a thing people should try to build is generally speaking a fantasy. there are perhaps press teams where uptempo isn't unambiguously bad, but they are actually the lower caliber teams. at the high end of press play, with volatility as enemy #1, the foul/fatigue spiral risk is one of your biggest drivers of loss. even when i had the most dominant program in history of the game, i did not even run uptempo in the NT once. well, maybe against a sim in round 1 or something, but most definitely not outside of that.”
At D1, I have no quibble with this statement, because it’s very hard to consistently run out 12 players good enough to be the kind of team that really benefits from maximizing possessions at the D1 level. At D2/D3, it’s absolutely not a fantasy to build that kind of team, even (especially, I would say) FB/FCP. There are qualifiers, of course. As you say below, stamina is a core for everyone in this approach. At D2, I wanted to have my 8 core players at high 70s at least, and averaging mid-80s. And the last 4 all at least mid 70s. There isn’t much room to carry guys who have a lot to grow, like the guys with blue stamina in the low 60s, I was very reluctant to take them. Definitely not more than one in a class. Defense was a similar priority, to avoid gratuitous fouls. Since defense is a little more highly valued in general, I was looking at low 60s as the bottom benchmark, and average of mid-70s as ideal. So I would shoot for a team stamina no lower than 80, team defense no lower than 70 (at D2). If I had that, and if my core 8 averaged mid 80s stamina and mid70s defense, I had no concerns at all about the foul/fatigue cascade. So then my approach was simply push as hard as possible, to reduce volatility by sheer number of possessions.
“OP, if you do go fb/fcp, stamina becomes a core for every player, and 12 deep really is your goal. you can do 11 but without great stamina and great foul avoidance, you are going to feel significant pain. fb/fcp is a significantly higher tempo scheme than fcp alone. you also lose the slowdown which REALLY makes your down years harder. i would not recommend fb/fcp to someone trying to learn the press. its like a whole different scheme. fb is so different than the 3 main offenses, fb/fcp is really its own whole scheme with its own set of guidelines and probably not the right starting point for anybody! also, press relies so heavily on your guards, if you were to run 11, 4 bigs + 7 from 1-3 is ideal. the press defense is the single most powerful force in this game, its just harder to build up than other defenses, and it extremely heavily relies on guards - who are also the best scorers in this game - so you really are much better off focusing on the 1-3 players and skimping at the 4-5 than the reverse.”
I mostly agree. I think FB is more closely related to motion in some respects, favoring balanced distribution and relying more on physical cores than skill cores for scoring, just to a more extreme degree than motion. But it is noticeably different from flex and triangle, I think.
I preferred to shoot for 5 bigs and 7 guards. I never redshirted, and tried to avoid ineligibles and walkons whenever possible - and on those seasons when it was not possible, I certainly did not utilize uptempo except against the weakest opponents. I also valued flexibility in this scheme - I wanted most my bench players to cover multiple positions. This was kind of my ideal structure:
PG - Distributor1, Distributor2, scoringG4, scoringG5
SG - scoringG1, scoringG3, scoringG4, scoringG5
SF - scoringG2, scoringG3, scoringG4, scoringG5
PF - athletic/rebound1, A/R3, A/R4, A/R5
C - A/R2, A/R3, A/R4, A/R5
6/17/2020 2:51 PM (edited)