By now, Fran Fraschilla is mostly Texan.
The Brooklyn, N.Y., native first set foot in the state in 1985 when his travels as a coach sent him here. He married an SMU alum from Highland Park. They’ve lived a mile from the campus since 2002. Their sons played for the Scots, just a few years behind Matthew Stafford and Clayton Kershaw.
Tex-Mex is great. The airport’s close. A once-a-year snow is fine.
“It’s the old story. I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could,” he said.
And along the way, he fell in love with the Big 12.
The league has been his baby since he left coaching and was hired by ESPN to cover the conference 15 years ago. The former Manhattan College, St. John’s and New Mexico coach knows the league’s coaches and players as if he’s one of its coaches or players. The veteran broadcaster watches every game, in person or on tape, and will be part of ESPN’s Big Monday presentation of TCU’s home game against Kansas.
It’s the life.
“I love the league. There’s no question,” Fraschilla said in an interview with PressBoxDFW.com. “As much as I love coaching and all of college basketball, I have an affinity for the league. I know the coaches in this league. I knew them before they became coaches in the league.
“I kind of find myself somewhat connected to the league, even though I can’t show any partiality. Probably my favorite thing about covering the Big 12 is just watching all these young guys come through every single year. Everybody’s got their own story to write, the kids from different backgrounds, different countries. Watching a Buddy Hield as a freshman or a Frank Mason or a Georges Niang. It’s so much fun to watch those guys grow up.”
As a broadcaster, Fraschilla has done the same thing with ESPN. Elevating himself from what he thought would be a brief side gig until he got back into coaching, the veteran analyst is now a leading authority on the game for viewers and a chalkboard source for opinions and insight to his more than 163,000 followers on Twitter (@franfraschilla), where any tweet that begins “Coaches:” heralds an instant lesson.
“I still consider myself a coach and a teacher,” said Fraschilla, who put together five 20-win seasons in nine as a head coach and won two Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference titles in his first three years at Manhattan, his first job. “Whether it’s been running the Steph Curry Under Armour camp or their All-America high school camp or coaching clinics or social media, I really try to be a teacher of the game. I do love helping coaches. That’s something I take a great deal of satisfaction in.
“The crazy thing is I learn something new about the game of basketball virtually every week. You never really know it all. When I see something that I find interesting that I think can help coaches, I pass it on.”
Fraschilla is clearly plugged into the Big 12. People across the country have long known that. If say, a coach at, ummm, say, Pitt in the late 2000s wanted to know what was going on with TCU basketball, he’d know who to ask.
“He likes to tell the story that I would check in and ask him, ‘How’s TCU look?’ when I was at Pitt,” Jamie Dixon says and smiles.
Fraschilla tells the story because it’s true.
“I’ve known Jamie since he was an assistant at Pittsburgh, and we got to be fairly friendly,” Fraschilla said. “I would get a call from him every so often or see him out on the road. It was very casual, not calculating at all. He’d ask, ‘Hey, how’s TCU? What do you think of that job?’ There was one occasion I said, ‘Not yet.’ They might have been in the Mountain West back then. But I kept him abreast of what was going on in the Big 12 and how you got to the top of it and why Kansas was so good.”
Don’t misunderstand. Fraschilla is not the reason Dixon is at TCU. It was TCU’s commitment to basketball that brought the former Frog back home to Fort Worth. TCU sold itself. Fraschilla merely talked about how nice the store was getting.
“When TCU was taken into the Big 12, it made a commitment, with Chris Del Conte, to upgrade all of the facilities, including basketball,” Fraschilla said. “And as someone who lives in Dallas, I know how good high school basketball is in the Metroplex and how good it is in the state because I have two sons who played high school and AAU basketball here.
“That’s another reason TCU was a very attractive job for Jamie, and I kind of let him know all these things. And really, I honestly believe even now that if you take away Kansas’ dominance, there’s not that much different from two to 10. Every one of the teams has been in the tournament in the last three years.
“And I always credit Trent Johnson. Because while he didn’t have the success that he would have liked, Trent Johnson left behind a great nucleus,” Fraschilla said. “Not just because they were good players, but they were incredibly good kids. Brandon Parrish, Kenrich Williams, JD Miller, Vlad, A-Rob. Trent brought them here, and Jamie polished them up.”
Dixon smiles when he remembers meeting Fraschilla.
“There were rumors he was going to get the Pitt job at the time. Known him that long, since I went to Pitt,” said the veteran coach, who joined Ben Howland’s staff as an assistant in 1999 and became head coach in 2003, winning 328 games until coming to TCU in 2016. “We’ve really become good friends since I’ve gotten here, really good friends with his wife and family. I’ve had him talk to our players.
“He brings value. I think he brings even more value today than a couple of years ago because of social media. It’s so important to kids. For us, we have great respect for him because he’s a coach, and he coached at all different levels and loves the game and just wants to be around it.”
Fraschilla’s advocacy for the Big 12 on ESPN and media appearances isn’t lost on Dixon, either.
“He’s awesome for the league, and I think he’s very fair. He doesn’t protect everybody,” the Horned Frogs’ third-year coach said. “And he has a good product to be an advocate of. We’ve been the No. 1 league in the country. With our locations, you need somebody fighting for us. because we don’t have the population bases or we’re in the flyover states. So we need somebody who’s respected and knows the game.”
There’s no denying that about Fraschilla. He has been an assistant under Gary Williams (at Ohio State) and Rick Barnes (at Providence). In his second head coaching job, he got St. John’s to 22 wins in his second year, pulling the program out of a brief tailspin. His career winning percentage is .640.
“I grew up in New York City, in Brooklyn, and our sports were seasonal — baseball in the summer, football in the fall, basketball in the winter,” Fraschilla said. “But Brooklyn basketball’s a very big part of the New York City culture. I got addicted to basketball when I was probably 12 or 13, and I knew right away I wanted to be a college basketball coach. Literally from the time I was 13, that was my total focus.”
The focus must be hereditary. Fraschilla’s older son James, 26, walked on and played four years at Oklahoma, then spent two years as an assistant in the G League and one year as a graduate manager for Tom Crean at Indiana. Last year, he joined the staff of the Orlando Magic.
Younger son Matthew, 23, is in his second year as an assistant at defending national champion Villanova after a playing career at Harvard under Tommy Amaker.
“They got into coaching by osmosis,” their father said. “It was never discussed. It was almost like they saw their dad was doing something he had a lot of passion for, whether it’s coaching or talking basketball on TV. So I think by osmosis they gravitated to the game.”
They haven’t completely followed the old man’s lead, however. They’re missing something. They grew up in Texas, but they haven’t gotten back as fast as they can.
