Al McGuire was not afraid to shake up the status quo by any means necessary.

Usually it worked — the Marquette University basketball coach retired with a 295–80 record and an NCAA championship.

But to get there he was often a “renegade,” as one pupil described him. I once heard a story from his former player Jim Boylan about a peculiar motivational technique.

One night, McGuire entered the locker room with his team losing big at the half. But he decided against giving a speech. He didn’t say a word.

Instead, he got into a knock-down, drag-out brawl with a player. The way Boylan remembers it, assistant coaches had to pry the two apart. Just when it looked like they had calmed down, they went at it again.

Then they returned to the court and blew out their opponent in the second half.

It’s probably not advisable to get into fisticuffs with your team, employees or colleagues. But this episode helps illustrate the unorthodox methods of the legendary and colorful coach.

McGuire could be wild, unpredictable and in his own words “arrogant and obnoxious.” Sometimes he made impromptu decisions to blow off practice.

Above all, he wasn’t afraid to be disruptive.

Case in point: The new ESPN 30 for 30 short “Untucked” provides a study in McGuire’s willingness to try anything — even down to his team’s uniforms.

If you haven’t seen the mini documentary, I highly recommend taking 15 minutes and watching it now.

“Untucked” is directed by Marquette alum and “Community” star Danny Pudi. It’s funny, entertaining and provides cultural insight whether or not you care about basketball history.

Pudi appeared on Keith Olberman’s show to discuss the documentary and talked about the effect of him seeing Marquette’s throwback “untucked” jersey during a game in 1997.

“I thought, This is wild!” Pudi remembered. “Who does that? How do they let them do that?”

So why would something as mundane as uniforms matter? Why did Grantland write that the “controversial jersey design helped lead (Marquette) to a national title”?

McGuire knew that in order to recruit the best talent, he had to differentiate. One way to stand out was to literally look different than everyone else. Their style got noticed.

So McGuire’s teams started wearing bold and unique uniforms in an era of cookie-cutter courts. They incorporated shapes and stripes. They looked like bumblebees.

McGuire would experiment and test. Each year the team tried new designs.

Boylan’s other job (besides point guard) was to film the team practicing in each uniform style to see how they would show up on camera. They innovated then improved through iteration.

This process culminated in a famous untucked jersey, which had the team name running along the flowing bottom outside of the shorts. Marquette won a national championship while wearing their signature uniform in 1977.

Marquette players said they felt more freedom in the jerseys, and could shoot better and feel more like themselves. And they just looked cooler.

“Other players are reported to have gawked in envy,” Wesley Morris writes on Grantland. “Coaches at rival schools supposedly carped that the uniforms were too cool, that they gave Marquette an unfair recruiting advantage.”

But this story would have turned out differently if McGuire was a lone mad scientist in an isolated lab.

Innovation is a group activity. It takes a collective to catch on. And that’s where the genius of Al McGuire shines.

McGuire trusted his assistant coaches and players. He let them be themselves. He wasn’t afraid to let others shake up the status quo.

It wasn’t McGuire who made all those unique Marquette uniforms. Those were created by star center Bo Ellis, who told McGuire that he wanted to pursue a major in fashion design.

The temptation for McGuire may have been to tell the freshman to stick to basketball.

He could have said that fashion would simply be a distraction.

Instead, McGuire found a program for Ellis to take at a nearby all-women’s college. That’s how Marquette’s secret sartorial weapon was born.

It’s only in retrospect that this looks like a brilliant move. At the time it was just another disruption.

“When I was losing they called me nuts,” McGuire observed. “When I was winning they called me eccentric.”

It takes a disruptor like McGuire to see the same potential in others.