Inside his newsletter, Chris Mack shares details on his coaching philosophy -

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The bull decal made the 106-mile trek down I-71 from Cincinnati to Louisville.

It’s a snarling bull — what else would it be? — with a big ring in its nostrils and two pointed horns above the ears. One eyebrow is raised, the other furrowed. The bull’s lips are shaped like an upside-down V. It’s the type of face that, if it was in real life, might spell trouble for a matador.

On Chris Mack’s basketball teams, his players want to mess with the bull. They want the horns, too. See, the bull is Mack’s way of incentivizing offensive rebounding for his players, and it’s placed in the locker of each game’s top offensive rebounder as a reward.

That’s just one of the many tidbits revealed in Mack’s Xavier basketball newsletters, which over the past nine years were sent to 28,000 subscribers from 12 countries and all 50 states, and it gives a glimpse of how the 48-year-old coach could shape Louisville’s program.

Now, back to the bull.

Rebounding is a popular topic in Mack’s newsletters because it’s a major focal point of his teams. In Mack’s tenure at Xavier, the Musketeers annually ranked in the top 100 in defensive rebounding percentage, including six seasons in the top 50. They also ranked in the top 100 in offensive rebounding percentage four times during that span.

At its core, rebounding is a reflection of a team’s intelligence and toughness. It requires the savvy to find good positioning and good avenues to the ball, as well as the desire to get there.

One of Mack’s favorite drills, the “rebounding war,” is spelled out in depth in the 86th edition of the Xavier newsletter (published during the 2009-10 season), and it illustrates the intensity with which Mack wants his players to pursue rebounds. (You can also watch Mack explain the drill to other coaches on YouTube.)

“Go after every loose ball, even if it’s out of bounds,” the newsletter says, quoting from the “Coaches Clipboard.”

In the separate bull decal newsletter, Mack says offensive rebounding is something he and his staff “stress daily” to their players. It is, he says, foremost in the coaches’ minds every time they put together a practice plan. To carry that emphasis over to the games, they introduced the bull, which, Mack said this week, will of course appear in Louisville’s locker room.

To give each player an equal shot at winning the sharp-horned reward, Mack’s staff bases the competition on offensive rebounds per 40 minutes instead of raw numbers.

“As with other points of pride in our program,” he says, “we chart this game by game.”

In the 168th edition of the newsletter, Mack outlines his preferred brand of defense.

“Packline Defense: The Ultimate Guide” is 96 pages of basketball porn for true hoopheads. He explains why he chooses the hybrid pack-line over other styles. It’s a variation of the version popularized by Virginia’s Tony Bennett and a spin-off of Arizona coach Sean Miller’s defense. (Mack was an assistant under Miller before taking over Xavier’s program in 2009, when Miller got the Arizona job.)

Why the pack-line? Modern players, Mack reasons, are better ballhandlers but worse off the ball. The pack-line defense relies on specific things: aggressive on-ball pressure and smart positioning off the ball. It allows Mack’s teams to harry cutters and choke off the paint while retaining position for defensive rebounds.

Over a few pages, Mack provides several drills, illustrated with X’s and O’s, to reinforce the principles of the pack-line.

Above all else, Mack’s defense requires his teams to work as a unit. How do teams build that cohesion to succeed? Naturally, there is a newsletter for that, too.

In the newsletter’s 185th edition, published during the 2015-16 season, Mack details a team-building exercise that can help coaching staffs. It’s called “Hunting Trip,” although it doesn’t seem to have much to do with shooting at anything or staying in a lodge.

Each player lists the three teammates he would want in a foxhole next to him, and then he ranks them, giving three points to the one he trusts the most. Mack recommended giving the test multiple times throughout the year or season “to learn more about your team.”

“This test,” he says in the newsletter, “will tell you a lot about your team’s cliques, beliefs, who they trust, who they don’t.”

It’s clear, after reading the Xavier newsletters (and the player bios in Louisville’s newest media guide), that attention to detail is meaningful to Mack.

A 2014-15 newsletter features an equation that looks like algebra to determine how efficient Mack’s teams are. There are a lot of parentheses and a few plus signs. But it doesn’t end there: The notes then explain what’s a good score and what’s a bad score — for both ends of the floor.

Another note lays out how Xavier’s staff breaks down games into 10 four-minute “mini-games.” That allows the coaches to re-emphasize their focus on intensity. The goal is to win each four-minute segment.

“At Xavier, we want our players to play with great passion,” the newsletter reads. “We are constantly looking for ways to motivate our players to commit to our system and reach their maximum potential. One way in which we have challenged them is with the concept of the four-minute war.”

In another edition, Xavier’s pregame schedule is laid out down to the minute, starting two hours before tipoff. At the top of the first page, the newsletter says Mack and his staff believe “it is important for guys to develop a routine and embrace it.”

The details get so specific that, 29 minutes before the game, as the players run through the “four-corner passing” drill, everyone on the team is encouraged to participate in “BIG chatter” to pump up the players.

To the coaches and fans who subscribed to the Xavier newsletters, they were a hit. David Moss, a former coach at Montgomery-Sycamore High (Ohio), called them great. Chris Renner, who coaches at Louisville’s Ballard High, says he enjoyed looking at them. They provided an on-paper look at how Mack and his staff ran their program at Xavier.

Now Mack hopes to continue sharing insights into the inner workings of his program through the new Louisville basketball newsletter, which has published four times since May with a new database of subscribers.

“It was always something he wanted to do here,” says Andrew Lentz, Louisville’s associate athletic director for men’s basketball, who is in charge of getting the newsletters out. “When he’d go recruiting, he’d have countless people come up to him and ask if he was continuing with them at Louisville. He felt like it was something that had a lot of value.”

Mack felt that way about the bull, too.

(Top photo of Chris Mack: Jim Brown/USA TODAY Sports)

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