College Basketball Coaching Carousel: Head Coach Scores

The coaching carousel’s in full gear. Familiar names are on the move. Will Wade. Fran McCaffery. Sean Miller.

Whether a hire is good or bad is a subjective question, and we don’t mind answering it subjectively. In an attempt to introduce some objectivity, though, we tried to “score” some head coaches’ career-to-date performance. What do we mean? We looked at how their teams performed at different schools, and how that performance compares to the school’s long-term average. Some methodology notes:

• We used final kenpom rankings as our measurement of a team’s quality.
• We weighted by how long a coach was at a given school. Will Wade was at LSU longer than he was at McNeese. The LSU portion of his score is a bigger deal than the McNeese portion.
• For the school’s “long-term average,” or baseline, we did not include years the coach in question was coaching at the school.
• We compared performance proportionally. Colorado State’s average final kenpom ranking without Niko Medved is 117.8. With him, it was 84.1. That’s a 29% improvement. Josh Pastner at Memphis? Memphis’s non-Pastner average ranking is 51.7. Pastner’s Memphis average was 55.1. That’s a 7% underperformance.
• We didn’t include anything outside Division I (sorry, Ben McCollum, but this still doesn’t hurt you). We also only included the kenpom era, which began in 1997.

There are plenty of shortcomings to this approach. In Ross Hodge’s case, it makes no caveat for a coach who inherited a good situation. In Niko Medved’s at Furman, it gives no credit for handing a good situation to the next guy. We’re working across different eras of recruiting and resources and conference alignments. This is flawed.

For whatever you want it to be worth, though, here’s how every prominent new head coach with prior head coaching experience shakes out:

Some takeaways:

Sean Miller gets hit hard for his performance at Arizona, which gets compared primarily to Lute Olson’s and Tommy Lloyd’s. At the end of the day, though, Miller’s Arizona tenure was frustrating and unsuccessful. He also wasn’t as good at Xavier as Texas fans might want to think. Thad Matta coached better Xavier teams than Sean Miller. Skip Prosser coached better Xavier teams than Sean Miller. Chris Mack had one team better than Miller’s best and another which tied Miller’s best. These are tough comparisons again, but just as Arizona’s a good job, Xavier’s a good job. Subjectively, Texas fans shouldn’t be excited about Sean Miller. It’s hard to see why he’d do any better than Shaka Smart.

Sticking with Xavier: Richard Pitino gets weighed down by his Minnesota tenure, but even if we isolated for his time at New Mexico alone, he’d only pass Medved. Subjectively again, Xavier fans should be wary. It’s not a bad hire—and like Miller, Pitino will probably help maximize NIL resources—but there are better coaches than Richard Pitino whom Xavier could have hired.

Again, Medved’s Furman tenure gets a really bad rap by this system. But even if you only include the pre-Medved years in Furman’s baseline, Medved doesn’t pass McCaffery. Colorado State has rarely been bad. Minnesota fans should be excited about Medved, but it’s unlikely he’ll be good enough to overcome one of the Big Ten’s worst jobs to the degree Gopher fans would like him to.

It’d be interesting to see Darian DeVries’s number without his son.

Phil Martelli Jr., Bryan Hodgson, and Ross Hodge each offer only two years of data. Ben McCollum only has one year of Division I data. To be honest, this probably isn’t a red flag. With the exception of Hodge, each dramatically overperformed their predecessor. Yes, even McCollum. Input DeVries’s average Drake team as Drake’s baseline, and McCollum’s still in fourth place on this list. (See: Tucker DeVries allusion in the preceding one-second paragraph.)

It’s worth considering the school doing the hiring. Different jobs require different skillsets. McCollum’s going from one naturally sympathetic fanbase to another (though they might get unfairly sick of him after a few years). DeVries is going to experience a lot more pressure than he experienced at Drake. Medved won’t have the easy wins on the schedule he had at all three of his previous stops. Odom’s going to be dealing with bigger-money donors than he had at any of his previous stops. Martelli has a culture to maintain. McCaffery is suddenly an Ivy League coach.

We’ll close, then, with some one-word verdicts on these hires. There are other hires, but we don’t know assistants as well as we know these guys.

• McCollum (Iowa): Great.
• Hodge (West Virginia): Good.
• Wade (NC State): Great.
• Hodgson (South Florida): Great.
• Martelli (VCU): Good.
• DeVries (Indiana): Fine.
• Odom (Virginia): Great.
• McCaffery (Penn): Great.
• Medved (Minnesota): Great.
• Pitino (Xavier): Fine.
• Pastner (UNLV): Fine.
• Miller (Texas): Suspect.

For the most part, good work by all involved. But because I can’t help myself…

• Hodge: I’m concerned about how he’ll navigate scrutiny and a rowdy NIL base.
• Martelli: VCU has a lot of expectations. Bryant didn’t.
• DeVries: I don’t know if he’s a good coach or if he just raised a good mid-major basketball player.
• McCaffery: Penn could not have done better, and not worrying about transfers fits McCaffery’s preferred style. Added benefit: He’s used to coaching super-cocky white guys. That’s half the Ivy League right there.
• Medved: Minnesota could not have done better.
• Pitino: The tradeoff is that Xavier generates excitement in exchange for coaching prowess. It’s not that risky, but the ceiling’s probably low.
• Pastner: It could work. The connections should be helpful, and maybe in the New Mountain West (a much less competitive conference than the current Mountain West), recruiting will be enough to generate more support and thereby more recruiting, etc. Basically, maybe UNLV can win under Pastner on talent alone. Get some 13-seeds.
• Miller: We already covered this, but it seems like Texas wants to get a lot of 4-seeds. If I were a Texas fan, I’d be pissed Texas didn’t find a way to get Will Wade. Sean Miller is the house with bricks facing the street but siding on the other three sides.

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