Tennessee's Scott Daughtry is a behind the scenes name you should know

The college basketball landscape has changed massively in just the last three years, yet Tennessee, with one of the most veteran head coaches in the game, has stayed on the cutting edge of the sport. Behind the scenes hires like Scott Daughtry are one under-the-radar reason why the Vols are excelling in this new era.

Daughtry was just recently promoted to the newly created position of Director of Strategy by Rick Barnes. In that role Daughtry works closely with Director of Player Personnel/Recruiting Coordinator Lucas Campbell to manage and build Tennessee’s roster.

Daughtry brings a variety of skills that make him well-suited for his new role in the program.

For starters, he’s intimately familiar with the program. He spent his first three on campus as a manager, the last two as Tennessee’s head manager. During this past season’s Elite Eight run Daughtry served as a graduate assistant.

Daughtry is also well-positioned to help shape Tennessee’s recruiting efforts in this new age as analytics play not only a larger role in game preparation, but increasingly in recruiting as well.

Daughtry is a young man who arrived in college with a plan, and his career goals have dovetailed nicely with Tennessee’s direction as a program in this new age.

His dream job is to run an NBA front office, in line with that, he spent last summer as an intern with the Indiana Pacers organization that just pushed the Oklahoma City Thunder to seven games in the NBA Finals.

“I interned for the Pacers for 14 weeks last summer,” Daughtry said of the experience. “I knew I wanted to work in an NBA front office, and I didn’t think there would be any of that type of work in college basketball.”

So when he returned to Knoxville last August following a summer with the Pacers Daughtry was prepared to run it back in his role as the Vols’ head manager.

Fate intervened, as it has several times in his journey already.

Tennessee ended up with a grad assistant opening after the academic year had started last fall. Filling the position from outside at that time would have been awkward, so Barnes asked Daughtry if he was interested in changing hats and taking on more responsibility.

He was.

That kind of break is in keeping with how Daughtry even ended up working with Tennessee basketball to begin with.

A native of Anderson, S.C. he knew he wanted to work with the basketball team wherever he ended up in college. His first choice was North Carolina, but when that didn’t work out, he looked towards Tennessee because of a high school acquaintance (and because Clemson was just too close and he ‘never liked South Carolina’).

Daughtry had an acquaintance, I.J. Poole (currently an assistant to Mike Schwartz at East Carolina) who was working at Tennessee at the time (in 2020).

Through Poole Daughtry got a job working basketball camps at Tennessee in the summer before his freshman year.

Then COVID happened. And there were no basketball camps. And no need for new managers once the school year started and a weird season began.

Daughtry’s hopes of getting his foot in the door in college basketball were put on hold. Until the kind of stroke of good luck that would become common in his story hit.

While he was jogging on campus one day in the fall semester of his freshman year he bumped into Poole for the first time in Knoxville. Daughtry chased him down, they struck up a conversation, and stayed in touch.

Then in April, after that weird Covid season, Tennessee was suddenly short on managers heading into the offseason because they hadn’t taken on any new ones during the pandemic year.

Daughtry, was working part time in Sports Information just to try and be involved in athletics to see if he was interested. Poole was leaving with Kim English for George Mason.

Tennessee needed managers. Was Daughtry interested?

You bet he was.

Daughtry dove enthusiastically into the grind that can be the life of a basketball manager. Even with that ’foot-in-the-door’ position, it wasn’t long before he had earned a reputation inside the program as someone that got things done.

The grad assistant job followed, which Daughtry once again aced, and he was fully prepared to run it back in the G.A. role one more time this upcoming season.

But Barnes had other ideas.

Despite what some outsiders might think because of his age, Barnes is not at all adverse to employing technology and an analytics.

When the head coach decided he wanted to lean in even more towards the analytics angle on the recruiting and player evaluation side, Daughtry’s internship and experience with the NBA’s Pacers made him the logical choice to pop into the new role.

Daughtry got the news after he got back from this year’s Final Four in San Antonio.

“I came back from that (Final Four)and coach called me that afternoon and he said, hey, I’m gonna hire this position. Would you be interested? And I was like, absolutely,” Daughtry recalled with a smile.

“It was super exciting. It was a big surprise that coach wanted to move me into a full time role and just, excited. I mean, it’s really similar to kind of the work I think I was doing as a grad assistant, but still, it’s, you 
know, super cool.”

Unlike virtually every young man who lands a coveted graduate assistant at a program like Tennessee, Daughtry has no desire to coach. None. Zero.

Ultimately, he wants to build NBA rosters.

It’s incredibly fortunate for him that he’s getting the chance to basically build Tennessee’s analytical recruiting models from scratch.

Clearly Daughtry, who is getting his MBA from the Haslam School of Business, is interested in more than just basketball.

After his experience with the Pacers last summer Barnes told Daughtry he wanted him to start building out analytics models for players like NBA teams do for the draft.

Barnes’ thinking was driven by the fact that college rosters are now similar to NBA teams in that in the NIL era, you have finite resources to allocate towards roster construction.

Obviously, those programs that use their resources the most efficiently are going to have a leg up. That’s where Daughtry comes in.

“The role has developed and as college basketball changed to needing more of the kind of work we did at the Pacers and that kind of strategy,” he said.

“As the house case came about and as we realized we were going to have similar issues and need to, you know, be strategic in those ways, it was really cool that Coach Barnes has decided to kind of create that position too.”

Daughtry’s job isn’t to decide how to allocate NIL resources, but he and Lucas Campbell are the tip of the spear when it comes to evaluating prospects and producing a ‘big board’ or tiers of prospects for how those resources might best be used.

It’s not surprising the Daughtry has built a model to evaluate college prospects who might be hitting the portal. Due to the competition level, even if it’s not high major, that data could pretty obviously be useful.

But Daughtry has also built an analytic model to apply to players playing in high school and also on the summer travel ball circuits.

“So we separate it by a circuit. So like I actually can quantify how much better let’s say like Nike EYBL is rather than UAA with Under Armour or Puma 
Pro 16. We take all five, New Balance, Puma, Under Armor, Nike, Adidas and use the data,” Daughtry said.

“If a high school player plays in 17-U (under) games the summer before their senior year and they play enough of them, our minimum games right now is eight. And I think players can play up to like 25 in that circuit. 
 
So if they can play enough, then we can rank them, but we can also model them.”

Daughtry points out that using these models to project what a mid-major player may do in the SEC is going to be a more accurate exercise. But using the tool on high school players provides a baseline for comparison across classes with the ability to project how similar players from different years may develop.

Additionally, as you’d expect, the models are getting ‘smarter’ as Daughtry feeds more data into them based on how a new class of players performs; ‘the more data we have the stronger the prediction power.’

“What we can pick up is there’s some traits that transfer from mid major to high major statistically over the last couple years and there’s some traits that don’t.”

Daughtry uses the format he learned from his summer working with the Pacers for Tennessee’s models, but he built what the Vols use from scratch himself.

He’s also ‘tweaked’ things to emphasize what Barnes and his staff value in the program. Which is the same thing that NBA teams do in building their boards, assigning more weight to a different skill set or physical trait.

In Barnes’ program the computers are never going to trump the human touch, or the simple act of the head coach trusting his gut.

But as Daughtry points out, Tennessee has found a healthy marriage between the old school and the new school approach, and it’s tough to argue with the results.

“Look, (Tennessee assistant) Greg Polinsky was a brilliant scout for a long time in the NBA, but even he can evaluate a player incorrectly,” Daughtry said as an example.

“But when Greg Polinski can watch a player and say that he thinks he’d be a really good high major player and then an AI model trained on the past four years’ data can also confirm that is when we start to have some good evaluation.”

Tennessee hasn’t been perfect in the transfer portal, but the Vols have been pretty darn good. Arguably no one in the country has hit two back-to-back home runs like the staff did with Dalton Knecht and Chaz Lanier.

What we see in those two stars are prizes Tennessee landed from the portal. What we don’t see—but which is also part of their effectiveness—are the guys that they don’t go after, for whatever reason; be it NIL demands, chemistry and fit or talent evaluation.

But Daughtry’s models have a hand in that as well.

The whole concept is interesting, and the fact that Barnes is incorporating into recruiting evaluations is cutting edge for the college game. Daughtry doesn’t have an exact count, but estimates that ‘only a couple of other college programs are using similar statistical models.’

Daughtry is new to the role, so it’s a little early to say how the analytical evaluation of high school recruits is going, but that might be the most interesting aspect of it all. That’s simply because evaluating high school players has always been an inexact science, and a big part of that is the competition that they typically face which obviously varies wildly.

If Daughtry can take some of the guess work out of that exercise he’s going to be a well-known name in coaching circles.

For the time being he’s not completely unlike a kid in a candy store.

For a young man with a dream of building NBA draft boards and rosters, being given the tools to do the same thing for one of the most successful college basketball programs in the country qualifies as a pretty fantastic opportunity for a 23 year old.

“I don’t think we have a perfect scorecard, but I do think it’s pretty good,” Daughtry said of Tennessee’s evaluations, particularly in the portal. 


“I think what has helped us, and this is all Coach Barnes, he wants us to be as much like an NBA front office as we can be in our recruiting. We don’t just evaluate qualitatively, we also evaluate quantitatively. 

“Overall, a lot of information goes into this. And I do think that Tennessee, because of some of our tools, has more tools going into our decision making than some other programs do when you talk about roster construction but Coach Barnes is the ultimate call.”

There’s no question that Tennessee has been at forefront of college basketball when it comes to not just landing talented transfers, but the RIGHT guys, that can be incorporated into the culture.

Barnes absolutely deserves a ton of credit for that. But this winter, when you’re watching Ja’Kobi Gillespie carve up SEC defenses, don’t forget to give a tip of the cap to the young redhead on the bench behind Barnes. He and his keyboard had a hand in all that too.