What Does Dan Muller Really Think?

(St. Louis, MO) – We watch college basketball coaches march up and down the side-line of their respective basketball courts. We hear their post game analysis of hard fought victories and disappointing losses. But do we know them and what makes them tick? Not usually.

So I traveled to Normal, Illinois to get a closer look at Illinois State coach Dan Muller. In last week’s story we discussed the tragedies of 2015. Today we take a lighter look at the Redbird head man.

ISU was 18-14 last season and Muller’s four-year (all with the Redbirds) head coaching record of 76 and 58, is solid if not spectacular. His teams are typically hard working, athletic, tall and often surprise more highly rated teams.

We played a little ‘word association’ game with the 40-year-old Muller. I asked him about his former head coach and a man he worked for, Pittsburgh Head Coach Kevin Stallings, ISU play-by-play man Dick Luedke, Wichita State Head Coach Gregg Marshall, Tennessee State Head Coach and former Muller assistant Dana Ford and former teammate Rico Hill.

Listen for how many times he uses the word ‘friend’. You learn a lot about the man coaching the team most likely to challenge Wichita State for this year’s Missouri Valley Conference title.

 

 

The I-74 Rivalry with Bradley is one of the oldest and enduring college basketball rivalries in the nation. Beginning in the 1904-05 season these two MVC teams have met 119 times with Bradley holding the edge with a 63-56 record.

Muller has both played and coached in the ‘War on 74’ and says it is a special event on the Redbird schedule. The two teams have rarely been good at the same time over the last 15 or 20 years, but Muller remembers a different scenario from his playing days.

He believes Braves head coach Brian Wardle has Bradley moving in the right direction and sees greater rivalry games ahead.

 

 

Missouri Valley Conference teams seem to be coached by men that genuinely coach for all the right reasons. We have had the opportunity to speak with most of these men in less guarded situations and continually come away from those conversations with the sense of their true commitment to their players, universities and to the things that truly matter.

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