His team at Santa Clara was young and undersized and faced with a daunting non-conference schedule that included UCLA (the defending national champions), Memphis State, and Creighton. Necessity dictated shortening games but also running an offense with principles that were static and easy to teach.
As the season wore on, though, Williams loosened the reins, granting his players flexibility to tweak their reads and decisions.
Several years earlier on the other coast, a young Maryland assistant named Tom Davis, like Williams, put a spin on Pete Newell’s “reverse action” offense — a system he toted along to stops at American University, Lafayette, Stanford and Iowa.