It’s an interesting fact of basketball that a lot of innovation tends to percolate up from teams that aren’t in what we now call power conferences, at least partly because those schools aren’t going to get the elite recruits very often and they need to find ways to level the playing field.
Former NCCU coach John McLendon invented what we call the four corners offense. The running, pressing style of basketball most people prefer came up from the Southwest in the 1950’s and ‘60s and to a significant extent, from JUCOs.
In the 1960’s and ‘70s, Sonny Allen experimented with a sort of offensive press.