Ben Jacobson’s Scheme By the Numbers Part 1 — New identity for Aggies on offense | Sports

Utah State announced Ben Jacobson as the 23rd head coach in men’s basketball history on Monday and introduced him Tuesday morning. The openly stated goal and hope for his tenure is to take the Aggies to at least the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament, something that has eluded the program in the entire life of the 64-plus team era of the Big Dance.

With each coaching change USU’s fanbase has endured — four such transitions since 2021 — comes the uncertainty surrounding what kind of basketball the new head of the program will bring. Jerrod Calhoun brought a fairly unique matchup zone defense and a transition-heavy style on offense. Ryan Odom led the Aggies to record-breaking 3-point shooting numbers. Craig Smith injected energy into his team and the program. Danny Sprinkle provided stability and a calm demeanor for a season that began with the chaos of losing nearly the entire team.

Jacobson will put his own stamp on Utah State history. And his style will be unique to his immediate predecessors, especially Calhoun.

Jacobson runs a “Five-Out” offense and has used it to great effect. He generated some buzz in the 2019-20 season when his offense finished 23rd in KenPom Adjusted Offensive Efficiency. And while most people associate the “five-out” part of the scheme’s name with having five 3-point shooters on the floor, UNI ran this offense even though they usually had at least one non-shooter on the floor (mainly their centers).

This is where Jacobson actually finds himself on common ground with Calhoun as both build their offenses on five-out concepts. And they’re far from the only coaches to do so as such a style has incredibly benefits, namely in creating space for players to attack and shoot.

Where Calhoun and Jacobson’s styles begin to differ is in their more common ways to create stress points for the defense.

Calhoun put defenses in binds with a litany of actions on the wings. Flare screens, pin-down screens, dribble hand-offs. The whole works. These were primarily off-ball actions that created shooting windows or driving lanes once the player navigating around those screen fielded the pass from a teammate. Jacobson’s offense differs a bit in that many more of his team’s actions will usually come toward the ball for a handoff after any off-ball actions. Many of the results can be the same, though, even if some of the specifics are different.

Here’s one example from Calhoun’s offense. Mason Falslev comes off a double screen on the wing and Drake Allen hits him with a pass. With Kolby King and Karson Templin spreading out the defense on the back side and Adlan Elamin keeping his defender honest, it’s an open layup for Falslev.

Stringing screens together is far from unique and Northern Iowa’s offense had these as well, though you’ll see how the second screen is merged with a handoff. In this next clip, UNI’s Leon Bond comes off a screen, takes the hand-off from Will Hornseth who sets a screen and then rolls. That creates a two-man game between Bond and Hornseth which also put the defending big in a bind where he couldn’t fully commit to stopping the drive and it gave Bond the upper hand to finish even a contested shot at the rim.

Jacobson’s offense features a lot of these handoffs into screen, along with regular on-ball screens, to begin (though also sometimes end) sets. It’s a highly repeatable action that can be run as part of a set play, but also as something to just run over and over during a play. If the defense stops the first attempt, reverse the ball and try things again with a different player.

Having the center involved in these actions as the hand-off man and screener is what helps this scheme maintain space even when the center is a non-shooter. Even though the man defending the center isn’t following him much further than the free throw line, and will give up a shot beyond that range, he’s still pulled away from the basket. And the handoffs then force the defensive center to guard in space. UNI’s ball-handlers got to attack downhill with the option to pass to an open big.

The following clips were compiled by Basketball Film Room in their breakdown of Jacobson’s five-out offense. It showcased the 2019-20 team and outlined the numerous types of sets. This compilation won’t include the nuances between the different types of plays showcased, though. Something Basketball Film Room did go over in their full video.

When watching UNI’s offense you’ll quickly come to see another divergence between Jacobson’s five-out offense and Calhoun’s. Mainly in the types of shots Calhoun heavily emphasized while Jacobson allowed his players a bit more freedom in where to shoot the ball. Calhoun, with his thinking planted firmly in the realm of analytics, heavily prioritized getting the two most effective types of shots according to analytics: layups and 3-pointers. The Aggies were near the top of the country in both catch-and-shoot field goal attempts (54th) and shots around the rim (60th).

Northern Iowa under Jacobson has not leaned as heavily into applying analytics as Calhoun. Jacobson’s players take far more dribble-jumpers, short mid-range shots and post-ups in recent years, things analytics tends to lean away from. Over the last four seasons, UNI has ranked below the 30th percentile in its ratio of shots that come at the rim or from 3-point range. At the same time, the Panthers have ranked in the 86th percentile or higher in non-layup shots in the paint (floaters, runners, hook shots, etc.).

In that sense, Jacobson is a bit more old school. But being old school hasn’t necessarily prevented him from having good offensive teams in the modern age of basketball. From 2009 to 2015, he was regularly breaking the top 50-70 in KenPom’s Adjusted Offensive efficiency. In 2015 his team ranked 18th in offense, and the aforementioned 2019-20 team was 23rd, then 43rd in the 2021-22 campaign.

It goes to show that you don’t have to bend the knee to computer models to have good offense.

Something that’s worth noting is that looking at the raw tempo numbers for Northern Iowa under Jacobson will give you the impression that the Panthers play a slow, plodding style of offense (a conclusion I arrived at on first inspection). That’s not the full story. Look a little closer at the tempo numbers and you can see that responsibility for UNI ending up in low-possession games all the time lies mostly with the defense.

The average possession length for the Panthers on defense has usually ranked in the bottom half of Division I for slowness, and recently has ranked in the 350s more often than not. On the other side of the court, UNI has sped things up a little more. Something that Jacobson said has surprised some people that just took a peek at the numbers on a stat sheet.

“We hear that a lot with our offense,” Jacobson said about his team having slow tempo numbers. “Then we’ll play somebody and they’ll be like, ‘whoa.’ The conversation will be similar. I see these tempo numbers and you just went out and you’re throwing it up and you’re shooting it three, five seconds into the shot clock. Whether it’s an opponent or maybe a fan. Those numbers don’t tell the entire story. We’re going to play in transition. We’re going to find that shot before the defense gets set. Now we’re going to execute if we don’t get the one that we like, but I trust these guys. They’re going to go find one.”

Ben Jacobson called his style “fast and physical,” though tempo numbers suggest otherwise and I asked him about that at the introductory presser. He explained how his team does play fast despite the tempo metrics.According to Jacobson, their defense draws out opponents’… pic.twitter.com/djSYm0S0oe

— Jason Walker (@jwalker_sports) March 31, 2026

Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves here. Jacobson’s offense isn’t fast-paced, and the Panthers have one of the lowest transition rates among D1 offenses. It’s just fitting to call them slow or plodding. And while last year they did have one of the slowest offenses in the nation, it represented an exception and was due to key injuries that limited depth.

As Jacobson said, his team will rise and fire early in the shot clock, though not as much as his comments on Tuesday would give the impression of. Less than a third of their field goals in the last few years have come in the first 10 seconds of the shot clock. That usually put them in the bottom 80 or so of teams in terms of frequency in that particular area. But even less frequent for UNI are shots in the final 10 seconds of the shot clock, where you’d imagine a slow-paced team would attempt more of their shots.

Again, it’s the middle road that Northern Iowa ends up on as the offense plays neither fast or slow. The Panthers have ranked in the 90th percentile or higher every year since 2019 in frequency of shots in the middle 10 seconds of the shot clock (between 10 and 20 seconds left).

A big question with this system is figuring out how current Aggies, assuming they remain Aggies through the close of the transfer portal on April 21, will fit within this offense. The two we’ll focus on the most is how Falslev and Templin might look. Templin has already affirmed that he is staying and Falslev could do the same in the near future, so focussing on these two is fitting.

Let’s start with Falslev.

Jacobson has featured a lot of solid, and even elite, scoring guards in his time. AJ Green is the best recent example. In a four-year career (more like three as he was injured for most of his junior year), Green 18 points and dominated defenses with heavy usage of pick-and-roll and isolation scoring. That helped Green land a spot in the NBA and he is currently the starting shooting guard for the Milwaukee Bucks.

Can Falslev, as someone with professional ambitions, fill a similar role that Green did?

The answer is that he can, but he doesn’t fit the same archetype for many of the recent scoring guards UNI has had.

There’s certainly some overlap, as there is for most great scorers, in the ability both Green and Falslev showcase when attacking in both pick and roll and in isolation. Both could score points at multiple levels of the court and both were efficient. At his peak usage in the 2019-20 season, Green averaged 0.869 points per possession in pick-and-roll and isolation scoring attempts. Falslev averaged 0.860 this past year across those same play types.

Where the distinction between UNI’s top scoring guards and Falslev are is that the former are more pure jump shooters while the latter is much more of a slasher. Green, Trey Campbell, Bowen Born filled up the stat sheet with a steady diet of jump shots at both the mid-range and beyond the 3-point line. Falslev hasn’t leaned into that style of scoring much. In three years at Utah State, he’s made only 28% of all dribble jumpers (including 27% from three) and has barely even touched mid-range jumpers, attempting only 43 in 104 career games.

However, this is unlikely to be a significant issue, mainly because Falslev has developed enough skills to be a enough of a three-level scorer to fulfil the lead scoring guard role in a Jacobson offense. Even though the mid-range jump shot hasn’t been in Falslev’s arsenal, what he does have is a rather effective floater. He averaged two of these floaters per game last year and made them at a 46% clips, which is on par with high-major scoring guards like Arkansas’ Darius Acuff and BYU’s Rob Wright in this specific shot type.

The biggest change we’d likely see in Falslev’s game is a much heavier diet of pick-and-roll and isolation plays (and maybe 3-point shots, but we don’t have time to dive into that rabbit hole as well). While the earlier comparison noted that Green and Falslev had similar efficiency, Green did that in 320 pick-and-roll/isolation possessions. Falslev totaled only 136 last year, well under half the volume. And it will be interesting to see if he can maintain the solid efficiency if/when he runs these a lot more, and faces more sophisticated coverages that teams will throw at such a high-volume play.

Moving on to Templin and there’s a quick, and maybe too simplified, comparison to Hornseth, a player with similar measurables (both are roughly 6-foot-8 and weigh in the range of 230 pounds) and some overlapping strengths and weaknesses. And it’s through Hornseth’s play that we can get a window into what Templin could do under Jacobson.

We’ve already seen some of the role that a non-shooting center will take in a five-out offense. They take part in the screening and passing beyond the arc and, despite lacking 3-point gravity, still pull opposing centers into space. Hornseth played a lynchpin role in the Jacobson’s five-out offense as the handoff man and got a nice reward for it on his stat sheet by finishing second on the team in assists. In fact, Hornseth ranked 34th in assist percentage this year among players 6-foot-8 or taller.

Let’s not get too confused about Hornseth, he’s not Nikola Jokic out there. A lot of his assists came from quick handoffs (he was credited with assists on the two UNI clips shown in the Five-Out Offense section). You also have set plays like this which the Panthers ran quite a bit where Hornseth was the final pass (and screen, let’s not pretend he had nothing to do during the play).

Even with that said, though, there’s an element of creation that Hornseth did have through his passing. For one, there’s the good ol’ fashioned backdoor cutter that a 6-foot-8 big is going to have no issue dropping a pass over the defense to.

And when you have a big that is on the scouting report as having these kinds of passes in his arsenal, you can end up with situations where said big will be able to create open shots for his teammates just by that threat. Here, we’ve got a couple of simple pump-fake passes that made the defense hesitate just enough to generate open 3-pointers.

Getting back to the handoffs. Even though they can sometimes be assist fodder, they also have a great role as essentially a pick-and-roll with a different coat of paint. Go back to the compilation from Basketball Film Room and you can see how effective the screening big can be as the roll man. Hornseth got a somewhat steady source of shot attempts out of these situations. 

By the way, these also become opportunities to make passes on the short roll, and Hornseth had a few nice passes in these situations as well.

Templin would be great in a role like this, especially in how it would elevate his passing. It’s a trait where he’s a bit underrated. Templin showcased some pretty solid passing at times, he just did do it in volume.

Pretty much all of Templin’s other strengths fit the offense as well. He’s a good screener, solid cutter and attacks the basket well. He’s even developed a nice bunny floater in the short mid-range. The only trait he’s missing is a solid back-to-the-basket game, which has at times been a notable emphasis for UNI. Even in lacking that, Templin would easily find a niche in Jacobson’s offense. And with his improving 3-point shooting capability, he would cause problems for defenses that try to play drop coverages against the pick-and-roll and handoff actions. Jacobson hasn’t often had bigs who can shoot the three at an above-average level like Templin did last season (41.7% in nearly two attempts per game in conference play). When he did, it was in 2015 where, as mentioned above, his offense ranked 18th nationally.

There are others who could very likely thrive in an offense like this. Elijah Perryman, with his vast pick-and-roll scoring and passing potential, might be one of the biggest. Brayden Boe fits in very well as a player who fits the same jump-shooting archetype of several previous UNI scoring leaders. And Boe was also recently announced as someone who is returning for this upcoming season.