STILLWATER, Okla. – I woke up with a start. It was the middle of the night, as dead-quiet as it always is in this exclusive neighborhood next to the Stillwater Country Club. Out the back door was the coach’s private fishing pond stocked with bass and catfish; beyond that, the golf course.
For a few moments, I couldn’t for the life of me remember why I was sleeping here, in Travis Ford’s guest bedroom.
It was shortly before the beginning of this college basketball season. I had come to this cozy university town with one of the prettiest college campuses I’ve ever seen to peek behind the curtain of the seventh-year head coach at Oklahoma State University. Ford always has seemed to be one of the most misunderstood coaches in the game, that rare breed who has been a head coach for nearly two decades without ever rising through the ranks as an assistant. It’s a journey that has made him, in my view, never fully part of the clubby fraternity that is the world of college coaches. College coaching is a profession where the strongest relationships are forged in the thankless trenches of assistant-ships, through grinding and working your way up. Ford skipped that part. His first coaching job was as an NAIA head coach. He has always seemed an outsider in an insiders’ world.
So why was I here, in the bedroom of the coach’s impossibly immaculate home?
As the middle-of-the-night fog lifted off my brain, the answers seemed simple: Because on the heels of last season’s roller coaster, Ford was heading into this season with one of the most precarious coaching positions in college basketball, if you listened to hoops pundits and to the restless Oklahoma State fan base. And yet despite all that restlessness, Ford’s record has been pretty damn good, winning his 300th college game at the ridiculously young age of 43 and averaging a respectable 21 wins a season since coming to Stillwater. I wanted to reconcile those two things that seemed very much at odds.
Any way you looked at it, this season was going to come to define Ford’s tenure at Oklahoma State, for better or worse. Marcus Smart was gone to the NBA, the sting of another early exit from the NCAA tournament was still acute, and the expectations were insultingly low, with the Cowboys picked to finish eighth in a stacked Big 12.
Earlier that fall day, the enormous gates that enclose Ford’s neighborhood swung open, and the coach’s world opened up to me. At his home, at his practices and at his office, I saw a man who was keenly aware of all the job-security questions yet was not consumed by them. As he told me, “I love what I do, I love basketball, but I try not to define everything I do by winning and losing.”
His only worry was how those questions would affect his wife and three children and their stability at this place they call home.
And the house itself? Simply one of the most impressive places you’ll ever see, an 11,000-square-foot palace that is equal parts shrine to Ford’s basketball past and an aspiration to his basketball future. Over here, a photo of Ford with Michael Jordan. Over there, a photo of Ford with Dick Vitale. His game-worn shoes from college, bronzed. Magazine covers from Ford’s record-setting playing career at Kentucky. A newspaper photograph of his college coach, Rick Pitino, hugging Ford moments after Ford had sealed a trip to the Final Four. A ring from his first time coaching in the NCAA tournament, in 2005, when he took Eastern Kentucky — a program that had won nine games total in the three years before Ford arrived — to its first tournament appearance in 69 years. And a dog lumbering by, a 17-year-old chocolate lab named Riley whom Ford found outside the arena at his first coaching job, scouring through the trash.
Earlier that day, I saw Ford’s 12-year-old daughter, the second of his three kids and the only girl, doing homework at a kitchen counter that seemed impossibly high. I noticed everything at Ford’s house seem taller than normal: the counters, the beds, the showerheads. Even the deep end of the pool was extra deep. It was only later that I learned Ford and his wife had built this home with the basketball team in mind. He wanted his players to always feel at home here, and part of that was having abnormally tall fixtures.
But this place that had been built with tall teenage athletes in mind has become a place where Travis and Heather Ford felt most at home.
Three straight wins against ranked teams have Oklahoma State fans — a tough group to please — buzzing.
And so, as I laid in bed in the middle of the night, pondering the next couple days as an embed in the Oklahoma State basketball program, a much more poignant question began to crystallize, something far more pressing than why I was here, sleeping in Travis Ford’s house.
The more important question was this: One year from now, would Travis Ford still be sleeping here?
Four months later and that question seems a bit silly.
Back then, Ford was on everybody’s preseason “coach on the hot seat” list. That’s what happens when a talented group underachieves in the NCAA tournament two years in a row. That’s what happens when a big-time program hasn’t made the Sweet 16 since 2005, legendary head coach Eddie Sutton’s next-to-last season.
But these days, Ford’s Cowboys are rolling, fresh off back-to-back upsets of eighth-ranked Kansas and 16th-ranked Baylor. They’re ranked 21st in the country and ought to only rise in the polls next week after playing conference bottom-feeder TCU this weekend. Perhaps Ford is better suited to the underdog role; in this season of low expectations, Oklahoma State is 17-7 with a 7-5 record in the nation’s deepest conference, including five wins against top-25 teams. The past week marked the first time in program history Oklahoma State beat three straight ranked teams in the regular season. The Pokes have done it with a scrappy, defensive brand of basketball that feels more suited to the old Big East than today’s Big 12. Before the season, as I was watching an intense, focused practice where it seemed a few fights might break out among teammates, Ford told me his biggest concern with this team was that his players would be too competitive.
Peeking into just one practice, you could feel that enormous chip on this team’s shoulder.
“We don’t have that NBA talent,” junior sharpshooter Phil Forte, the team’s second-leading scorer, told me after a preseason practice. “We might not have that talent, but we are hard-nosed. We scrap and we claw.”
Hard-nosed and scrappy: Sure, cliché, but that doesn’t make it any less true. This team has the nation’s 15th most efficient defense, according to KenPom.com, and grabs more steals than nearly any team in college hoops.
What remains unsaid in Forte’s comment is that one year ago, this team was also hard-nosed and scrappy — but it did have that NBA talent. Point guard and team leader Marcus Smart ended up being picked sixth overall, and shooting guard Markel Brown was a second-round pick. That team fell short of its high hopes.
Depending who is telling the story, last season at Oklahoma State was either a perfect example of big-time potential gone up in flames or a perfect example of a team facing a seemingly insurmountable amount of obstacles — and, frankly, bad luck — and managing to salvage something out of it.
In both story lines, Ford is the man at the center.
Leading into last season, when Smart surprised many by staying in college for his sophomore year, the Cowboys faced enormous expectations. Oklahoma State was the team that would halt Kansas’ remarkable streak of Big 12 titles. The Cowboys were a trendy dark-horse Final Four pick for many people — I know they were mine — and things started out pretty damn well. They were ranked eighth in the country in the preseason, then rose to sixth just before the new year. I was as high on Oklahoma State, and specifically on Smart, as you could be.
Then … yikes.
What the public will forever remember from Oklahoma State’s roller coaster last season is the image of Smart shoving a Texas Tech fan in the middle of a February road loss. It was an ugly scene, the personification of a team’s wheels having come off. To people outside the program, it was when all that Oklahoma State potential went up in flames, a tabloid touch added to the seven-game Big 12 losing streak the Cowboys were in the midst of. And Ford, whose facial expression on the sideline was one of a man staring at a speeding train, became the scapegoat alongside his beloved star player. That one moment was, for some, the metaphor of a coach who had lost control of his program.
But the hidden story is how a set of unpredictable and perhaps unavoidable circumstances put Ford and his team in that situation, where his frustrated star player saw a season spinning out of control and, for a moment, he spun out of control, too.
Michael Cobbins' injury set last season on the wrong path long before the team's seven-game losing streak.
It all started not at Texas Tech on Feb. 8, 2014, but instead more than a month before, on the day before New Year’s Eve, the final non-conference game before the Big 12 gauntlet began.
In that game, Michael Cobbins, Ford’s starting junior center and the hustling backbone of this team, fell to the floor a few minutes in. He hobbled off the court with what would later be diagnosed as a season-ending injury to his Achilles tendon. On the surface, it didn’t seem like a huge loss; Cobbins averaged only 4.5 points and 4.3 rebounds. But Cobbins was a veteran leader, and more important, he was the main post presence for a team that was great in the backcourt but thin down low.
A few days later, Oklahoma State lost to Kansas State in its Big 12 opener. It was the first of a string of heart-breakers, the first of what would become seven one-possession losses in the next couple months, including four in overtime.
A few weeks after that, Ford tossed his backup point guard, Stevie Clark, off the team after Clark was arrested for urinating out the window of a moving car, the third time he’d been in trouble that season.
Then came Smart’s outburst. Which, by the way, happened on the same day Smart’s mother, who had been dealing with serious kidney issues, was put in the hospital with blood pressure that was acting up.
By the time star guard Marcus Smart tangled with this fan a year ago, Oklahoma State was already in a nosedive.
Ford was left in an enormous pickle: During a season in which the world was expected of him, he was left with only six rotation players and then, after Smart’s ensuing suspension, one fewer.
All that drama was what put Ford on so many about-to-get-fired lists before this season began.
But what I prefer to focus on is what happened to the this team after Smart returned from his three-game suspension. Oklahoma State was spinning out of control, but then, to everyone’s surprise, it wasn’t. No team in history had experienced a seven-game losing streak then made the NCAA tournament. But the Cowboys won five of their next seven games, including an upset of fifth-ranked Kansas. (Both of those losses were in overtime, of course.) They made the tournament, which, given the past couple months, was an enormous achievement — even though things ended quickly with a first-round loss to Gonzaga.
But Oklahoma State fans are not a patient bunch.
“It was a perfect storm in the best league in the country — and we got it back, which is the hardest thing to do,” Ford told me. “The job stuff, it doesn’t bother me. I question it. I look at it and think, ‘We’ve won a lot!’ Look at the games we’ve won. We’ve made four of six NCAA tournaments. Look at who we’ve beaten. We’ve done a lot. Part of it doesn’t make sense. That’s the biggest thing. You tell me, you sit down and look what we’ve done here, the ranked teams we’ve beaten.”
He paused and shook his head.
“There’s guys who’ve done a whole lot less who’ve gotten extensions.”
It was 7:04 a.m. on a perfect Oklahoma fall day, and Ford already had dropped his oldest son, Brooks, off at school for his first basketball practice of the year.
The remains of Brooks’ pancakes and bacon sat in the back seat as Ford pulled his Escalade into his parking spot. Gallagher-Iba Arena, the Madison Square Garden of the Plains, cast an enormous shadow as he hopped out of his SUV and walked inside to the basketball court.
The arena was dark and spookily quiet. It has an aura that’s rare and beautiful in an age of glitzy NBA-style facilities. The court itself is the oldest in the country, full of dead spots, age 75 and never replaced, instead just refinished every year. It’s named after Henry Iba, the Hall of Fame coach who brought Oklahoma State its only two national titles in basketball. Iba is just one of the many long shadows of history cast over Ford’s tenure.
Think about what loomed over Ford when, as a rising 38-year-old head coach, he started at Oklahoma State in 2008. First and foremost was the memory of Sutton, the man who restored Oklahoma State basketball after decades in the doldrums. Sutton was immediately embraced as an insider in this community since he had played at Oklahoma State in the 1950s. He took this program to two Final Fours. The nation’s oldest basketball court? It was renamed Eddie Sutton Court a few years before Ford took over.
However, the transition away from Sutton was messy. In 2006, in the middle of the first season Sutton hadn’t made the NCAA tournament in nearly a decade, he was cited in a drunk-driving crash. He later resigned, and his son, Sean Sutton — who had played under his father at Oklahoma State — took over. He missed the NCAA tournament in both seasons and was forced to resign, a victim, athletic director Mike Holder said, of high expectations.
It was under this shadow that Ford took over.
“There’s still a lot of Sutton people here,” Oklahoma State assistant coach Chris Ferguson, who worked on Sean Sutton’s staff, told me. “Big Coach did a lot of great things and revived this program. There’s a lot of people who are still true to him, even though Travis wasn’t part of that. The big thing? Even though we’ve been to the NCAA tournament, we’ve only won one game in the NCAA tournament. Big Coach had been to two Final Fours.”
There are other shadows of history, too, apart from Sutton, apart from the NCAA tournament losses. There are Ford’s parents, who were both high school coaches; one of Ford’s earliest memories was of, at age 3 or 4, his dad sitting in the stands at a women’s high school basketball game and having young Travis run a note down to his mother on the sideline with some advice.
Ford has never been as good of a politician as a coach, and that has hurt him at times.
There’s an athletic program that has more history than just about any other. Oklahoma State has won 51 national championships in all sports, fifth in the nation. Every time Ford goes to work, he’s next to Heritage Hall, where Barry Sanders’ Heisman sits among one of the most impressive collections of college sports memorabilia you’ll ever see.
And there’s Ford’s own shadow, the perfectionist nature of a man who went to a Final Four with the nation’s best basketball program, who works insane 18-hour days of recruiting and coaching yet can’t seem to accomplish the seemingly simple task of getting people — the fan base, the media, the coaches who are his contemporaries — to fully accept him.
“I’m not a good marketer,” Ford told me. “I don’t play the political part of it. I probably need to be better about it. I’m more of a traditionalist. I guess I just love the game but not all the other parts.”
As Ford was saying this on that fall morning, he was walking into the team’s locker room. You couldn’t detect a limp in his stride despite the six knee surgeries and the hip replacement.
The arena might have that aura of history, but that Cowboys’ locker room? There’s a very different aura there. Somewhere between the gaudiest NBA locker room and ornate Roman baths, I thought. It’s a two-level spectacle, full of marble, big-screen televisions connected to video-game consoles and a never-ending spread of food. The most stunning locker room I’ve ever seen. This is one more shadow that hangs over Ford’s tenure: With the gobs of money poured into Oklahoma State athletics come expectations that are often a bit unrealistic.
When Ford walks into a pre-practice meeting with his assistants, though, all that noise melts away, because this is a place where he is in control. Like most coaches, Ford is a control freak, insanely detail-oriented. Every practice he’s conducted in seven years at Oklahoma State is written up in painstaking detail and placed in a folder.
For this practice, Ford had things divided up into 14 segments. Work on the fast break. Work on spacing — no dribbling, just passing. Work on LeBryan Nash’s offensive rebounding. Work, work, work.
Yes, this is just part of Oklahoma State's spectacular locker room.
Not long after, Ford was courtside with a whistle dangling around his neck. In practice, the team reminded me of Wichita State from two years ago: a tough, intense bunch. Players banged in the post. They hit the floor. They fell into the stanchion. There were shoves on the perimeter as they worked on spacing.
Ford seemed more at ease here than I’d ever seen him, nudging his team toward playing with even more intensity, and this was the moment I first remember thinking: This will be a team that will surprise people.
Ten o’clock on the dot in Stillwater. The entire basketball staff filed into the conference room. Rain was in the forecast for the next day. That was bad news — really bad news.
Because when Ford has one shot to show off his program to one of the top recruits in the country — and when he wants the recruit’s mother to be wowed by the beauty and the buzz of the Oklahoma State campus — he wants absolutely every single detail in place. He wants to control it all. The meal that’s waiting for the recruit at his hotel. The song that’s playing on the speakers when the staff gives him a tour of the locker room. The bustle on campus when he’s getting a tour. The player’s food choices at the Ford home: Whether the kid loves peach cobbler, or whether the mother loves carrot cake, Heather will whip something up.
And, yes, the weather.
“You can do everything right,” Ford shrugged, “but you can’t control that.”
Ford is an obsessively organized man. Staffers swear he’s often in this building 18 hours a day. Remember that practice folder? If you want to know how Ford taught an offensive rebounding drill on one specific day back in 2009, it’s in there.
That organization leads to this elaborately planned recruiting visit for a guy who one coach told me could be a “program-changer.” The point is to wow him and his mother, to show them how much he will be valued here. More than that, the point is to let this kid envision himself in this place.
Ford knows the amount of time he spends with a recruit shows how much he values that recruit. And when Ford wants a guy, he goes after him. He once left Stillwater at 11 p.m. one night to drive to Dallas; the recruit’s mother was a bus driver in Dallas, and Ford rode alongside her on her 5 a.m. shift.
Ford passed out a sheet of paper to all his staffers. The group hopes this visit will convince Diamond Stone, a high school senior from Milwaukee who is one of the best centers in the country, to join elite Dallas point guard Jawun Evans for a recruiting class that would be Ford’s biggest coup since landing Smart. The schedule was broken down to the minute, and there was plenty more to do before Diamond landed in Oklahoma City later that night.
Test the videoboard in Gallagher-Iba Arena; when Ford shows the teenager a glitzy highlights video in the darkened arena, the videoboard better not malfunction.
Get to the recruit’s hotel room early for a dry run. The mother’s room better be next to the son’s room. The room better be clean. The toilets better flush. The television remotes better work.
When top recruit Diamond Stone visited campus last fall, Oklahoma State's staff was more than prepared.
Oh, and a meal better be waiting. Diamond’s favorite meal? Shrimp pasta. Order it.
“His mom will be really attentive,” Ford reminded his staff. “She’ll pop in and ask everyone a question. Be prepared.”
The drive from Oklahoma City to Stillwater: What music will be playing on assistant coach Butch Pierre’s iPod? Al Green, baby. This kid is cool. He digs soul music along with modern stuff.
When Diamond walks in the locker room for the first time, catered food needs to be waiting. The televisions have to be on. Cue up that game when Oklahoma State upset Kansas a couple years ago. Have NBA2K loaded in the PlayStation and ready to go on the giant screen in the players lounge. Diamond loves NBA2K.
What music should be playing on the locker room tour? There was a pause among the coaches. What’s Diamond’s favorite song? Blank stares.
An assistant coach texted Diamond’s AAU coach.
Are the gift baskets done? Yes. Catered lunch ordered? Yes. What about wives of the basketball staff — will they be around at breakfast to talk with Diamond’s mother? Of course. Heather especially. (Earlier, she’d told me the message she gives recruits’ mothers: “Mother to mother, I promise you I’m going to love on your child. If you don’t like the sound in their voice, I’ll check up on them.”)
Academics? Someone will be talking with Diamond from the sports management department — that’s what he wants to major in. Media relations? There’s a presentation planned, where the media coordinator shows him how he’ll be made the face of the program. Life planning? Pierre will show Diamond and his mother a plan to get his degree in five or six years if he ends up going to the NBA after one. And there’s a presentation about a $10 million insurance policy the school will purchase to insure him if he comes back to school as a sophomore.
Weather report: It’ll be 67 degrees the next day. Need to have Oklahoma State jackets on hand? No — the kid’s from Milwaukee, 67 is not cold for him. But there will be an 80 percent chance of rain. The staff sighed. Make sure giant orange and black umbrellas are ready.
An assistant coach’s phone buzzed. A text from Diamond’s AAU coach. His favorite song, the coach said, is Young Jeezy, “Get Ya Mind Right.”
Cue it up in the locker room. Pull out all the stops.
There is no guarantee Ford will get this elite teenager to come to Oklahoma State next season. There is no guarantee Ford will be in Stillwater next season, either. There are no guarantees of anything in college basketball. It may be the most fickle sport there is, especially in the age of one-and-dones. Every team goes through cycles, with the exception of a handful of bluebloods, yet there is very little patience to let a coach right the ship.
That’s where Ford sits today. A ship that appeared veering off course four months ago seems more than stable now. It’s similar to the story of last season: Ford and his team set things right when they appeared to be going wrong. There’s even been buzz this week, after the team’s three straight wins over ranked opponents, about Ford being the Big 12 Coach of the Year. His Cowboys have six games left in the Big 12 regular season. Three of those are against ranked teams — one against Iowa State and two against West Virginia — and two are at home. There’s an outside shot that Oklahoma State, picked to finish near the bottom of the nation’s deepest conference, could win the Big 12.
A few months ago, that would have sounded insane.
I called Ford this week to catch up. He had told me in the preseason this team would overachieve. He had told me the Cowboys would be tough and scrappy, get steals, surprise everybody. Instead of sulking because of lack of minutes or lack of shots — a mentality that is the bane of so many college coaches’ existences — these players, he had predicted, would be the type that would rush over to help up a teammate who hit the floor.
He was right.
“The sky is not falling like so many people thought,” Ford told me this week. “I never thought that. I never quite understood it. But it’s the world we live in.”
“This team,” he continued, “has accepted who they are. Not every team does that. All 16 of them, they’ve accepted that this is what I need to do, that this is who we are. And we use that to help us win games.”
The Oklahoma State Cowboys have all but sealed up an NCAA tournament bid, and a relatively soft remaining Big 12 schedule means their prospective tournament seed ought to only rise in the next month. Perhaps the best role for Ford, with all the shadows and the expectations, with all the doubters and the critics, is here, urging on a team that nobody expected much of at all.
Forte, a guy few thought could play at this level, is third in the Big 12 in scoring, averaging 17 points. Nash, a once-elite recruit who until this season was thought of as a player who never fulfilled his promise, is second in the Big 12 scoring race, a shade above his teammate. Point guard Anthony Hickey, an LSU transfer who has never played in the NCAA tournament, is the floor general. Cobbins, coming off a major injury, is back to his normal, grinding self.
Phil Forte is one of the leaders of an Oklahoma State team that has overachieved this season.
“We got some guys on this team that people didn’t believe in,” Ford said. “I use it every day. I push those buttons every day. You go through our team, they’re all fighting the odds a bit. And that’s motivation, if it’s channeled in the right way. And we understand that winning can change all of that.”
Winning, it seems, has changed all that. And so Ford has found his perfect role: as the coach people didn’t believe in, leading the players people didn’t believe in, during a season that just a few months ago would have seemed pretty unbelievable.
Email Reid Forgrave at reidforgrave@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter @reidforgrave.
