March Madness is here, and the coaching face of college basketball is … well … hmm

On3 imageby:Eric Prisbell03/16/23

EricPrisbell

Casual college basketball fans who tune in for the first NCAA tournament games broadcast today and Friday will notice two recognizable faces: West Virginia’s Bob Huggins today and Michigan State’s Tom Izzo on Friday. In that initial CBS window each day, the two Hall of Fame coaches will have the national stage all to themselves.

Don’t think that’s a coincidence. Larger-than-life, iconic coaches have been integral to the identity of the sport the past five-plus decades. Only now, college basketball finds itself with a scarcity of coaching faces that resonate beyond college hoops junkies. That is especially true this year, the first NCAA tournament in four decades without Mike Krzyzewski, and in the wake of other notable recent departures: North Carolina’s Roy Williams, Villanova’s Jay Wright and Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim. The quartet combined for 11 national titles since 1991.

The days when many of the prominent coaches were household names to even casual fans – recognizable by a mere stare (John Thompson), sleep-deprived eyes (John Chaney), a sweat-soaked shirt (Gary Williams), a sweater (Lou Carnesecca), perfectly positioned silver hair (Lute Olson), unrelenting irascibility (Boeheim), towel chewing (Jerry Tarkanian) and chair tossing (Bob Knight) – seem long gone. While this tournament field is laden with outstanding tacticians, motivators and recruiters, it begs the question: Is the age of the larger-than-life coaching icon dead?

“You can argue that it is,” said Mike Aresco, the current American Athletic Conference and former Big East commissioner, told On3. “Who is the face right now? I would argue Kelvin (Sampson of Houston) and Bill Self. … But it’s not the same as Coach K, or even Lute. Think about the coaches you had. There’s no question we’ve lost a lot of the marquee value in the coaching ranks, and also just the stature.”

The winnowing of the collection of coaching characters has paralleled college basketball losing much of the grip it once had on the sporting landscape, except for a three-week stretch each March. Now, only a year-round college hoops-head may be familiar with the Australian pipeline Randy Bennett has fortified in – of all places – Moraga, Calif.; Pat Kelsey leaning on Division II transfers to build his College of Charleston roster; or Providence coach Ed Cooley being just one of many acclaimed coaches in the revamped Big East. The departure of four Hall of Fame coaches in such a short time frame feels like the close of a consequential chapter. 

“I don’t know if it’s the end, but I don’t know if I remember another time where so many iconic coaches announced they were stepping down so quickly,” said Mike Tranghese, the former Big East commissioner. “The bigger question: Are coaches going to stay at the same school as long as they used to? I don’t know if that’s going to happen. Plus, the whole game is changing because of the transfer portal and NIL – it’s having an incredible effect.”

Who’s in the running?

One of the few current coaching titans who has stayed in one locale is Kansas’ Bill Self, who arrived in Lawrence in 2003 and leads any debate about who is the current coaching face of college basketball. But despite winning two national titles  – and being well-positioned to claim a third this season – Self and his program were hit by the fallout of the lengthy FBI probe into college basketball corruption. He served a four-game suspension at the start of this season and the program received recruiting restrictions. 

Other names central to the discussion: Gonzaga’s Mark Few, who has made a once-obscure program in Spokane, Wash., a perennial national title contender; and Virginia’s Tony Bennett, one of the game’s classiest individuals and best floor coaches who fights the perception that the Cavaliers’ methodical style of play is unsexy.

Bennett is not yet a household name, even though he won a national title in 2019. Jerome Williams, who played at Georgetown in the mid-1990s for Thompson, said, “If you ask me who is the head coach of Virginia, I’d be like, ‘I don’t know.’ And it’s not because he’s not a good coach. … [The best] coaches used to be the brand, and then the university worked off of their brand. It was all coach-driven. Even the networks were coach-driven.”

They haven’t all departed – yet. Izzo’s name warrants mention, though it’s been 23 years since he won the national championship. And Izzo, 68, is one of only six current Division I men’s coaches with a national title. He’s joined by Self, 60; Kentucky’s John Calipari, 64; Iona’s Rick Pitino, 70; Virginia’s Bennett, 53; and Baylor’s Scott Drew, 52.

In terms of the broad familiarity with coaches, just consider commercials over the past year. There was Self narrating a Joel Embiid crypto commercial. But during this year’s tournament, you’re most likely to see TV spots featuring former college basketball men’s luminaries: There’s Krzyzewski and current South Carolina women’s coach Dawn Staley in an Aflac ad, and Wright in a commercial for Invesco. 

Also of note is that over the past decade or so, the sport lost some of its most familiar faces, among them Butler’s Brad Stevens, Florida’s Billy Donovan and Michigan’s John Beilein to the NBA. All were considered among the game’s most skilled coaches – with two national titles and seven championship game appearances among them – if not oversized personalities. The current coaching characters of the game are harder to spot, even in a social media age. Jordon Rooney, CEO of Jaster Athletes, a branding agency, told On3’s Pete Nakos that the dynamic today would be different if some of the prominent coaches were more adept at using social media. 

“(Arkansas’) Eric Musselman does a fantastic job on social media, just being self-aware,” Rooney said. “Just showing that he’s in on it and understands what’s going on. There’s a lot of these coaches that can build passionate fan bases. That can help them get jobs, retain jobs, get donor support, booster support, etc. Because, sure, wins and losses matter. But there’s certain politics involved in coaching and even just from a marketability aspect. The more people love you, the more opportunities are going to come your way.”

Ahh, the old days

One of the few unique personas in the coaching ranks is Texas A&M’s Buzz Williams, whom venerable sportswriter Bob Ryan recently called “one of the remaining old-fashioned characters left in college basketball.” In the past, Williams’ demonstrative demeanor was the norm among prominent coaches, to varying degrees.

Think of the late Chaney making an impromptu appearance during Calipari’s post-game news conference following a Temple-UMass game in 1994, threatening to kill him. Even more recently, coaches – albeit at a much lower temperature than Chaney – exhibited combustible moments. In 2014 at Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium, officials ejected Boeheim after a late charging call, triggering the coach to nearly tear off his jacket and jab his finger at them. 

Some 15 years ago, then-Clemson coach Oliver Purnell got a raw deal by officials at the end of a game at Cameron Indoor Stadium. But Purnell seemed nonplussed. When I later asked then-Maryland coach Gary Williams how he would have reacted had the Terps met the same fate at Duke, he dead-panned, “Oh, I would have been arrested.”

Williams, also a former Boston College coach, had roots in the original rough-and-tumble Big East, which featured the ultimate collection of cutthroat, brash and combative personalities. The offseason coaches’ meetings were R-rated and epic, sometimes lasting 14 hours a day. Topics du jour included game officials who were deemed too inferior to continue in the league, escalating coaching salaries and whatever newfangled, muddy tactics coaches accused others of stooping to in recruiting battles.

“Warfare,” Boeheim described those meetings to me years ago with a smile during an interview in his office. “There were fistfights almost in some of them. Can’t even describe those meetings compared with today.”

The sheer number of outsized personalities – from Thompson to Boeheim to Rollie Massimino to Carnesecca – made for a tinderbox, a high-stakes, intraconference turf war.

“If you were afraid, you couldn’t get in that room,” said Tranghese, then assistant commissioner under Dave Gavitt, the league’s visionary. “Simple. You’d get overwhelmed. Even Rick Pitino or someone like Jim Calhoun walking into that room for the first time, they’re staring at four or five Hall of Fame coaches. But you couldn’t be afraid. Everyone challenged everyone.”

A new kind of coach

The tenor is much different today. And a brave, new college sports landscape will likely give rise to a new type of coach. The basketball coach who thrives in the current era won’t necessarily need an oversized persona. But he will need to be expert in and embrace two things: NIL and the transfer portal.

Tom McMillen, current CEO of LEAD1 Association, which advocates on policy matters for athletic directors at all FBS schools, was an All-American forward for another colorful character, Lefty Driesell at Maryland. McMillen said a new type of coach will emerge who understands that success now is as much about signing and keeping talent as it is with mastering X’s and O’s.

“The transfer portal has made immediate success a requirement when it used to be several years,” he said. “And NIL has meant that it is almost a form of payola, what I call goodwill payments. If you’re not able to put together at your institution goodwill payments, you will not win. Transfer portal and goodwill payments have transformed college sports, which is fundamentally one of the reasons why I think a lot of these coaches are leaving.”

Before he died in January, Billy Packer, one of the iconic voices of March Madness, told On3 that if you’re going to coach nowadays, you’ve got to understand that the way to build a program is through NIL and the transfer portal. 

“I admire the coaches that have been able to go through everything, from the way it used to be building a team, to the one-and-done era, to now the portal and NIL,” Packer said. “It is just not a healthy situation. But that’s where it is, so don’t bitch about it.”

As the larger-than-life coaching characters become relics of a bygone era, a new breed of college basketball coach will emerge. And whoever the new coaching faces of the sport will be on the horizon, they may be less colorful but more attuned with the current coin of the realm.

“There’s very few places – very few – where you can win without embracing NIL and the transfer portal,” Tranghese said. “I think people who have been coaching a long time and are older look at this and say, ‘Why do I want to deal with this for? It is time for a new generation.’

“We’ve got different types of players than we had 40 years ago. We’re going to have a different type of coach, too.”