EVANSTON, Ill. — It’s 1:22 p.m. on a Thursday in September, and for the billionth time Bryant McIntosh breaks a Northwestern men’s basketball huddle. Feels like it, anyway. After seven-plus years, the practices and games pile up and the count gets a little fuzzy. The program’s all-time assists leader stands on the outskirts of the pack these days, though, outfitted in a gray T-shirt and black Under Armour athletic pants. It’s a very ordinary ensemble for a staff member helping oversee a preseason workout, save for one notably new accessory: a whistle.
And yet when a walk-through review of defensive rotations begins, McIntosh is called in from the sideline and stationed at the top of the dummy offense, ball in hand. It’s kind of amusing. He’s come all this way in a short time, into a spot as one of, if not the, youngest power conference assistant coaches in the country, just to be a scout team point guard again. “I do everything,” McIntosh says with a laugh after the workout ends, that whistle still slung around his neck. “Trial and error.”
Everyone in the Trienens Performance Center hopes to limit the latter, and not only to keep one of the most accomplished players in program history on track to running his own program one day. The skinny 27-year-old occupying a big-boy chair is an avatar for the entire 2022-23 season, even if he’d perish the thought. A walking reminder of a time when Northwestern did things no Northwestern team had ever done, and how that happened in the first place. An emblem of targeted change preceding a year of potentially very, very significant consequence.
Bryant McIntosh, new assistant coach, may or may not be the reason the Wildcats win or lose games. But there is a reason he’s Bryant McIntosh, new assistant coach, when nobody here wants to find out what happens after a season of more of the same. “I just felt like the time was right,” Northwestern coach Chris Collins says. “I thought we needed a little bit of infusion of energy, a little bit of youth on that side of it. Especially whether it’s recruiting or on the floor, who better to portray our program than Bryant? Everything we’re trying to do, he did it.”
What Northwestern is trying to do, specifically, is end a stretch of five straight losing seasons following an NCAA Tournament appearance in 2017. McIntosh, as much as anyone, knows what the other side looks like. As the lead guard for the only team in school history to reach the Big Dance, as one of three players in Big Ten history to amass 1,600 points and 700 assists in their careers, as a relative contemporary with most of the players on the current roster, reliving the glory days isn’t going to set eyes a-rolling in this program. It is, among other things, precisely the sort of perspective this program needs.
The new job description empowers McIntosh to lean into that, more than he could while toiling away in a more administrative capacity the past three seasons on Collins’ staff. “That’s one of the best things I can do, is share my experiences — the highs and the lows,” McIntosh says. “These guys have been building it up for the last couple years. These seniors have gone through a lot. And it’s their time to own the program and have it go the way they want it to go.”
It’s all that he came here for, not so long ago, dead set on a career path with a hilarious amount of preordination. McIntosh is from Greensburg, Indiana. His father was a high school basketball coach. He hadn’t been alive a week before he was in a gym. “I was asleep in a bleacher for a long time of my childhood,” McIntosh says. Of course he’s wanted to do this forever. The opportunity to play high-level college basketball was linked, inextricably, to the opportunity to learn how to run a high-level college basketball program; when coaches asked him what he wanted to study, McIntosh told them he wanted a seat on a bench, somewhere, eventually. Education mattered.
Playing for Collins, and thereby being Duke tree-adjacent, served those purposes. After injuries and a couple concussions cut short McIntosh’s post-Northwestern career overseas, he called Collins and asked to be kept abreast of any job opportunities on his former coach’s radar. Collins said to call back in a week if McIntosh didn’t have any second thoughts about transitioning to coaching. After a week, McIntosh called. Collins told him to call back in another two weeks. After two weeks, McIntosh called, and this time Collins said he might have an opening in Northwestern’s operation.
Assistant director of basketball operations sounds like a job title more worthy of George Costanza or Dwight Schrute, but it was, in fact, a first test to pass. “With great players, they all say they want to coach, but do you want to do the stuff behind the scenes to learn?” Collins says. “And he really dove in. I was really proud of that aspect. No job was ever too small. If he needed to do manager-type stuff, he jumped in. Here’s a guy who’s as accomplished as anybody in the history of the program, and he’s out there wiping the floor, getting water for guys.”
Bryant McIntosh, far right, brings a youthful aspect to Northwestern’s coaching staff, able to relate to players only a handful of years younger than him.
While taking on Big Ten assistant coach duties at 27 seems like a big deal on its face, the transition is likely about as fluid as possible under the circumstances. Video coordinator duties that fell to McIntosh the past three seasons already had him involved in every scout and, as such, he has already analyzed every system Northwestern will see in league play. (He also kept a notebook at his side, jotting down plays and ideas to steal for his own program one day: offensive sets from Matt Painter and Micah Shrewsberry and Fred Hoiberg, defensive looks from Steve Pikiell, thoughts on how Tom Izzo extracts toughness from his roster, and so on.) The player development aspect of the gig allowed him to forge relationships with the roster gradually, outside of the sometimes pressurized coach-player dynamic, establishing comfortable communication lines McIntosh can use to help interpret or underscore directives from the head coach.
McIntosh lingers along the sideline for most of this particular Northwestern workout, when he’s not asked to participate in it. It’s a function of Collins doing the majority of the teaching, at least on this day, and McIntosh learning when and how to use his voice. Collins worked for the guy he played for, too, so he understands any reticence to contribute on the floor or in the meeting room, at least at first. “I gotta poke a little bit,” the Wildcats coach says, “but he’s getting there.” Still, it’s no coincidence when senior forward Robbie Beran hops over to McIntosh for a clarification about 15 minutes into the practice, or when senior guard Boo Buie holds an extended one-on-one conversation with McIntosh near midcourt during a drill a little later in the session.
He remains, in many ways, one of Northwestern’s go-to guys. “Right now, I just try to be in guys’ ears,” McIntosh says. “I don’t have to be the bad guy right now. I can be if I need to be, when I shut a door. But I don’t need to be for the most part. I just need to be like a big brother and help them stay confident and stay ready.”
Being 27 helps in this, too.
“A lot of coaches in this game are a little bit older, so the bodies may not move the same,” Buie says. “But B-Mac is three years out of playing now. He can still move. Instead of always trying to follow by listening, it’s actually good to see the visual. It’s sometimes easier to learn that way. If you’re really confused, he can break it down right there.”
Save the first-day jitters earlier this summer when Collins sent McIntosh and some players to a hoop for a finishing-through-contact drill — “I’m like, all right, this basket is mine — I have to, like, really run it,” McIntosh recalls — it’s as if McIntosh has always been around. Which in some ways he has. And that brings us back to five years ago, and how in the world all the good of 2017 might be imprinted upon or absorbed by a veteran-laden roster in 2022. And whether that will produce results that preempt any tough decisions by an athletic director who didn’t hire Collins and a school president who only started the job on Sept. 12, who comes to the Chicago suburbs by way of Oregon, a school of not-small athletic ambitions.
And that brings us to McIntosh, and how much storytelling matters in a college basketball season. He’s very much here to identify, for the current players, all the traits that pushed Northwestern into the NCAA Tournament for the first and only time. He’s started with one simple but far-reaching premise: That team never had a bad day. It always competed, all the time. “The group that made the tournament — we were an unbelievably tough and together team,” McIntosh says. “We were a very defensive-minded team. That’s what I do think this group is. I think they’re very tough. I think they’re very together. I look at our roster and I think we’re a good defensive team — or have a chance to be, if they’re bought in the way they need to be. It’s going to give us a chance.”
At the risk of overreaction and hyperbole based on a couple hours’ evidence, McIntosh isn’t being wildly credulous here. In the workout preceding his breakdown about how this all came to be and what it can be from here, Northwestern’s competitiveness is consistent and high-end. In live-action, there are few glaring snafus, thanks mostly to a barge-load of experience in the backcourt. It’s something.
Talent overcomes, of course, and we’ll see if Northwestern has enough raw talent to complement its effort level. But that was the case five years ago, too. And it worked then, for once. There’s living proof, hovering on the fringes every day, right where he wants to be.
“I’ve studied it so much, I’ve watched so much, I don’t know what else I would be doing,” Bryant McIntosh says. “And there’s nothing I’d rather be doing.”
(Photos: Courtesy Northwestern Athletics)
