Couch: Todd Simon returns home with Southern Utah, gets a crack at Michigan State

EAST LANSING – Todd Simon’s 6-year-old son has been recording Michigan State games on television for the last month to help his father scout the Spartans.

His 4-year-old, though, is rooting against his dad Saturday when Simon’s Southern Utah program takes on MSU at Breslin Center.

You see, he’s a Spartan fan. 

“Little Raylan, he’s always the contrarian on everything, which is probably also my trait,” Simon said.

Simon has never had a coaching homecoming quite like this. He is a son of Fowler, a tight-knit little town about 30 miles northwest of MSU’s campus. His wife, Kati, is from nearby Pewamo. She and their three boys stayed back in Cedar City, Utah, with Kati expecting the couple’s fourth child, a daughter this time.

Simon’s mother and stepfather were at Friday’s practice at Breslin, sitting with former Everett coach George Fox, who’s become one of Simon’s coaching pen pals. Two of Simon’s former players from previous stops, MSU’s Gavin Schilling and Ben Carter, stopped by to chat. 

At tipoff Saturday evening, Simon expects there to be about 100 friends and family from Fowler in the crowd, 50 of them behind the Thunderbirds bench. More, if they could get tickets. He’s hoping they’ll be rooting for Southern Utah. His program could use the help.

“Not enough banners. Not enough success here,” Simon joked as he and his staff looked up in the rafters at Breslin before Friday’s practice.

“We literally have zero banners. Every game is like a new first — the first time we beat a WCC (West Coast Conference) team in 20 years, the first time we beat a Mountain West team in like 20 years. This is the first time we’ve won five out of our first eight since like ’03, I think. Michigan State is the highest ranked team we’ve played in any sport ever.”

Simon’s program is making quick progress. Southern Utah, which finished 6-27 last year in his first season there, is 5-3 out of the gate this year, with eight new players on the roster. Senior guard James McGee is the only remaining scholarship player from when Simon took over. 

The Thunderbirds have won three straight, so friends of Simon and Southern Utah’s program are beginning to dream.

“I started getting some calls from people,” Simon said. “We’d won 5 out of 6 against programs of similar status. People are like, ‘Well if you do this, this and this (you can beat MSU).’ I’m kind of like, ‘You do know these guys are the favorites to win the national championship. We were just 6-27.’ We’ve won a few games in a row, now we’re like, ‘You can get them,’ which is good. We’re changing expectations.”

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Speaking of expectations, this is not what Simon’s mother, Aggie George, expected her son to be doing with his life. Simon, though, has always been a basketball romantic, even if he began his 20s hoping to be a Major League Baseball general manager. He studied basketball coaching concepts at a young age and was first drawn to his wife by her jump shot.

“If she wasn’t able to make a jumper, we probably wouldn’t have gone on that first date,” Simon told me in 2013. “I probably never told her that.”

Aggie George may have missed the early signs that Simon was born to coach, but Friday, as he coached his team through a practice at Breslin, she could see the same mannerisms in her 37-year-old son as she did watching him as a little boy.

“Even when he was younger, he’d be on the quiet side a little bit, he would just study everything out. I see him doing that now,” she said.

Simon spoke with reverence about MSU’s program to his players Friday. He spoke of the opportunity to continue to build the program, to improve and to enjoy a night of Big Ten basketball.

“This ain’t the Big Sky,” he said during practice, referencing the Thunderbird’s conference. “This is big boy basketball."

It will be fun, Simon said. 

"I don’t get real nervous for stuff like this. I get more excited. I like coaching the games. I like improving from one thing to the next and seeing if your stuff works against someone else, the gamesmanship of the whole deal. Right now we’re kind of showing improvement every game. That’s my favorite thing in the business.”

Simon has seen just about every side of the business in his career. His first coaching job 15 years ago was as as junior varsity coach in Harrison, a tiny town not too far north of where he was attending college at Central Michigan.

Then, after a failed attempt to crack the baseball business through contacts in Los Angeles, he fell into a volunteer assistant coaching gig for Paul Westphal at Pepperdine in Malibu. Then spent two years as a graduate assistant for Lon Kruger at UNLV, before leaving the college game for an opportunity to be part of an upstart project called Findlay Prep. He spent six years as an assistant coach at Findlay Prep, which produced a number of NBA draft picks in that time and dozens of Division I players, including Gavin Schilling. In the early days, part of his job was to live in a five-bedroom house with the team. And his wife.

In 2013, after a year as Findlay Prep’s head coach, former Findlay Prep head coach Dave Rice was hired at UNLV. Simon joined Rice’s staff. In the middle of Simon’s third season with the Rebels, Rice was fired. Simon was chosen as UNLV’s interim head coach for the rest of the 2015-16 season. On his team, MSU’s Ben Carter.

“There was a lot of animosity surrounding the program,” Carter said. “I felt bad for Coach Simon. Because I thought he did such a tremendous job of being a professional during that time. I can’t credit him enough. I don’t think people gave him enough credit.

“To him, it wasn’t about who was the head coach. It was about proving our team was still very talented and capable of playing great basketball.”

Simon, Carter said, was instrumental in getting him to MSU. He facilitated it. 

“He called coach (Dane) Fife and said, this guy’s got Michigan State written all over him,” recalled Carter, who first knew Simon from his days playing at Findlay Prep’s nearby rival in Las Vegas, Bishop Gorman. “Tom Izzo was one of first calls I got (after I decided to transfer). ‘Are you serious? Tom Izzo? Am I getting a prank call right now?’ I was injured at the time.”

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Simon’s head coaching performance at UNLV didn’t land him the job permanently. But it did lead to a chance to build his own Division I program at Southern Utah.

“You know what, it’s starting to (be fun),” Simon said. “Last year wasn’t a lot of fun. I felt like the cartoon character tied to the train tracks, just waiting for the train to come.

“Last year, I treated the whole year like a practice. I knew we were going to have a long one. I figure, worse case, some of these freshman get mileage. We taped up the day of games and practiced for an hour and a half. We went hard, taking the long view. We could have won six or seven more games, but we wanted to do the best we could to maintain our culture and style. We play fast. I’m stubborn as hell.”

Is it smart to play fast against MSU?

“No, but we probably will anyway,” Simon said.

Simon wants his team to become a fierce defense club. Winning non-conference games in December by playing zone or slowing tempo doesn’t help to develop an identity. Southern Utah is in a one-NCAA tournament-bid league. Winning now, building an RPI, that’s irrelevant.

“Let’s just get good at basketball and try to win our league,” Simon said.

That’s beginning to happen, the good basketball. And the Thunderbirds’ beefed-up roster is getting noticed. Scheduling used to be a picnic.

“It was less hard when everyone thought we were just horrendous,” Simon said. “And we’ve already got some letters like, ‘Nope, nope, we’re getting out of that date.’ People are starting to figure out we’re getting some dudes.”

As Simon closed Friday’s practice, he spoke to his players about how well they’re playing offensively and asked them to keep letting their brotherhood show on the floor defensively and to play through mistakes.

“Just do the next thing right and we should be fine,” he said. “We’ve got a brand that’s not a national brand yet. These are the games we schedule so we can do that.

“We’re starting to see the fruits of our labor. Then we get to do stuff like this in a place that’s highly respected. It’s pretty cool.”

Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.

MSU vs. Southern Utah

When: 6 p.m. Saturday

Where: Breslin Center, East Lansing

TV: Big Ten Network

Radio: WJIM 1240-AM and WMMQ 94.9-FM; SpartanSportsNetwork.com