After 4 years of our 10-year college basketball coaches draft, it’s reboot time

By Brian Bennett, Eamonn Brennan, Seth Davis, Brian Hamilton and Dana O’Neil

In the fall of 2019, we started a contest among five writers at The Athletic based on a simple premise: Which men’s college basketball coaches would you take for the next decade? 

Or, at least, it seemed simple back then. Back before a pandemic that canceled that season’s NCAA Tournament and gave players an extra year, before the free one-time transfer rule created roster chaos, before NIL and before legendary coaches like Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams and Jay Wright all retired, while some other big names ran into other issues. How much have things changed? The very last of our 25 picks was the most valuable coach on the board in 2022-23: UConn’s Dan Hurley. Meanwhile, six of the 25 coaches picked were no longer on the sidelines.

So we thought it was time for a mulligan of sorts. After all, it’s been four years — the length of a recruiting cycle, or at least what used to be a recruiting cycle before the very nature of roster-building changed. We allowed each writer to replace up to two of the coaches he or she drafted in 2019. (No one was happier about this than Brian Hamilton, whose team included three men who are no longer coaching). That means it’s time for a redraft.

But first, let’s review the standings after four seasons. Our scoring system goes like this: 0.5 points for every win, 15 points for a conference regular-season or tournament title, 20 points for a Sweet 16, 50 points for a Final Four and 100 big ones for a national title. (Note: the scoring is not cumulative. So if a team wins a conference regular season and tournament title plus a national title, the coach would get 115 points, plus .5 point for each victory).

To make things fair, we reversed the order of the original draft, so Brian Bennett got the first pick in our snake-style, two-round optional redraft:

Redraft pick No. 1

Bennett adds Duke’s Jon Scheyer and drops Chris Mack

Mack seemed like such a solid second-round pick in 2019, coming off a highly successful run at Xavier and heading toward a possible No. 3 seed in the 2020 NCAA Tournament That Never Was. Life comes at you pretty fast.

The top replacement pick is not entirely risk-free, as Scheyer has spent all of one season as a head coach. No one can say for sure how his career will go. But I was encouraged by how the Blue Devils improved as the 2022-23 season went on, and Scheyer — who turns 36 in August — won’t be going anywhere the next six years as long as Duke continues to win big. Given next season’s loaded roster and his continued recruiting prowess, that should be no problem. Since I had the last pick in the original draft, I went for younger guys with upside in the original draft, and Scheyer is the ultimate example of that.

Redraft pick No. 2

Brennan adds Alabama’s Nate Oats and drops Oregon’s Dana Altman

When we first ran this draft four years ago, Altman was a perennially solid performer in the Pac-12, with the occasional group good enough to go toe-to-toe with Arizona (and a nascent UCLA) for conference title honors, always a threat to make a tricky, deep run in the NCAA Tournament. Maybe the Ducks will get back to that place, but right now the noises out of Eugene, including from Altman himself — he criticized fans for lack of attendance during an NIT home game, at a Matthew Knight Arena environment that has occasionally become a mausoleum — aren’t encouraging. The vibes are all wrong. Sure, the vibes at Alabama weren’t exactly pristine this past season, either, but the sheer fact is that Nate Oats is a young-ish and extremely effective coach that has the Crimson Tide rolling with top-level recruitment and a modern system of play. Oats’ program looks likely to be anywhere from “good” to “extremely good” for the foreseeable.

Redraft pick No. 3

Davis adds Houston’s Kelvin Sampson and drops Michigan’s Juwan Howard

This might be a premature jettisoning of Howard, but the vibes are not great in Ann Arbor right now. Meanwhile, they’re off the charts in Houston. It’s interesting that nobody tapped Sampson in our original draft, probably because he was already 63 years old. Well, now he’s 67, and if anything he seems to be getting younger. I like my chances that he lasts another five or six years. Sampson has built a remarkably sustainable program at Houston, and his ability to keep the Cougars relevant on the national landscape will only increase with their move to the Big 12 next season. I used to think that Sampson’s time at Houston was limited by his desire to have his son, Kellen, succeed him, but now I think he has warmed to the idea of Kellen beginning his head coaching career elsewhere. At any rate, this man isn’t going anywhere sometime soon, and he’s going to win a lot of games — and very possibly a national championship — before he’s done.

Can Tommy Lloyd rule a new-look Pac-12? (Ethan Miller / Getty Images)

Redraft pick No. 4

Hamilton adds Arizona’s Tommy Lloyd and drops Roy Williams

Here are some fun numbers: Three, as in the number of my original selections who did not coach a single college basketball game this year. Zero, for the number of points those coaches earned me. And, lastly, two — the maximum amount of names I can drop during this little redraft. I don’t know much about math, but it appears I need to more or less bullseye multiple national championship winners who aren’t already on someone else’s squad to have the slightest chance to not finish last. So I might as well take some educated big swings, starting with a guy who has two years of head coaching experience, total. But Lloyd has an easier path to league titles than some other coaches I considered — particularly when UCLA flies away to the Big Ten — and his program has as much Final Four upside as any of the ones left unclaimed. I have to believe the Wildcats’ first-round bow-out in March was an exception and not the start of a career-defining trend. No, really: Look at my point total. I have to believe this.

Redraft pick No. 5

O’Neil adds Arkansas’ Eric Musselman and drops Mike Krzyzewski

I am going to do something no one in the history of college basketball has done: relieve Mike Krzyzewski of his duties. Daring, isn’t it? OK, maybe not. And after reading and re-reading my brilliant colleagues’ picks just to make sure I didn’t miss anything — and shockingly I did not — I’m going with the Muss Bus. Why? Because in the last three years Arkansas has been to two Elite Eights and a Sweet 16, and last I checked the Bus is the size of an aircraft carrier, loading up transfers desperate to enjoy the garden spot of Fayetteville, and all that Wal-Mart has to offer.

Can he sustain it, of course, is the big question. To be determined, but I’m operating under the assumption that the portal is here to stay, that by the time the NCAA gets its arms around NIL this exercise will long be over. Musselman has mastered the art of new age college basketball … and knows how to coach. He’s also only 58. Gimme.

Redraft pick No. 6

O’Neil adds Maryland’s Kevin Willard and drops Mike Brey

Maybe Brey comes back after his foray into the NBA, but I’m not trusting it. As for the pick, I had a long list to consider — including up-and-comers at mid-majors, high majors and even some very good coaches at established programs. Willard is a calculated risk, but I’m operating under the assumption that there is room for some new blood in the Big Ten. Willard went to five of his last six NCAA Tournaments at Seton Hall, and people don’t understand how hard that is. The Pirates practice in a basement gym. For real. They have so very little to offer it’s nearly negligible and yet.

Now Willard has everything he needs in terms of support at Maryland, and the very rich DMV area to recruit from. He’s already making inroads there, with the 20th-ranked class coming in this year. And look … the Big Ten is always going to get a bunch of teams in. So there are always going to be points.

Redraft pick No. 7

Hamilton adds Creighton’s Greg McDermott and drops Jay Wright

The effect Jay Wright’s unexpected retirement had on my collection of picks in this project has gone woefully under-discussed. It was the one pick that had no chance of being bad, and it turned out to be bad. It’s like holding a bar of gold in your hand and watching it dissolve into dust against all rules of science and nature. Anyway, we’re on the hunt for a coach who has the chance to make deep runs, because the programs with definitive national championship upside are few and far between at this stage, if not entirely grabbed up already. Without a pandemic getting in the way, Creighton has a real chance to have made three Sweet 16s, at minimum, in four years. I’m not sure the Bluejays make another regional final next March — but they can. And the way McDermott has the thing built, they can do it more than once. While McDermott may never leave Omaha, there’s also a chance he jumps for a truly massive, blue blood-like gig in the later stages of his career. Which could position him even better for a national championship run. All the same could be said for Dusty May, who was also in consideration in this spot, but it’s just easier to make the NCAA Tournament from the Big East than it is from the American. And I can’t afford more zeroes in any category

Seth Davis passes:

Redraft pick No. 8

Brennan adds Marquette’s Shaka Smart and drops Michigan State’s Tom Izzo

It feels a little wrong to do this, not least because Izzo looks like he’s going to have a good, veteran, guard-led team in East Lansing next season, the kind of team Izzo routinely takes on deep NCAA Tournament runs. (They weren’t far off from another Final Four in March.) But Izzo was 64 when I drafted him, he’s 68 now, and he’s increasingly grumbling about the state of Our Game in ways that make you think he could just get totally fed up one day and decide to retire out of the blue.

That makes this the perfect time to replace Izzo with another Midwestern native coaching in his home state, another who has found his programmatic home. Things didn’t entirely work at Texas for a variety of reasons, but Smart seems to have relocated his coaching identity in Milwaukee; the cultural fit here is as snug as it gets, and Smart’s willingness to assess everything he does every offseason means he is still getting marginally better every year. The 2022-23 Golden Eagles were probably his best ever team. This core could be even better next year. Meanwhile, Marquette is all-in on hoops as an institution. You can win big there. Smart looks like he is going to do exactly that for a good long while.

GO DEEPER

Who owns the Garden? Right now it's Shaka Smart's Marquette

Redraft pick No. 9

Bennett adds Georgetown’s Ed Cooley and drops Washington’s Mike Hopkins

Sorry, Hop. I really thought you had something going in Seattle after you won the Pac-12 in 2019 and were bringing in multiple five-star recruits. It’s not you, it’s me. Well, OK, it’s kind of you. But best of luck the next six years.

So here I am again with the final pick in this exercise. That worked out pretty well with Hurley, who helped me post the highest score last season and climb out of the basement. I wrestled with so many options here, including Dusty May, Missouri’s Dennis Gates, Kansas State’s Jerome Tang and even Rick Pitino. And suddenly, Izzo was available to me if I wanted to roll the dice. I really wanted to draft Pitino for the fun of it, but it’s probably going to take a couple years for him to really get St. John’s going, and I don’t have that kind of time. (Does he? I hope so.). May and Gates perfectly fit my young-guys-with-upside criteria, but neither is at a school I can count on making a Final Four run — sure, May just did it, but the odds of Florida Atlantic repeating that magic seem astronomical. Both could be in bigger jobs in the next six years, but that seems risky. Tang might have caught lightning in a bottle with Markquis Nowell this March, and the expanded Big 12 — possibly with Gonzaga at some point in the near future — is going to be absolutely brutal.

That’s why I’m going with Cooley. We know he’s a fabulous coach who has done great things at Providence, and now he gets even more resources at Georgetown. He’ll turn 54 before the season, so he should stick around a while. The early days in D.C. could be a bit bumpy; if you go to the Hoyas’ 2023-24 roster page on their official team site right now, the only person listed is Ed Cooley. Not ideal! But we know he can work the transfer portal with the best of them, and I think he’ll get Georgetown back rather quickly. In fact, I’m counting on it.

The full squads

Dana O’Neil: Mark Few, Buzz Williams, Mick Cronin, Eric Musselman and Kevin Willard

Brian Hamilton: Chris Holtmann, Mike White, Steve Wojciechowski, Tommy Lloyd and Greg McDermott

Seth Davis: Tony Bennett, Bill Self, Matt Painter, Bruce Pearl and Kelvin Sampson

Eamonn Brennan: John Calipari, Scott Drew, Sean Miller, Nate Oats and Shaka Smart

Brian Bennett: Chris Beard, Penny Hardaway, Dan Hurley, Jon Scheyer and Ed Cooley

(Top photo of Dan Hurley:  Ben Solomon / NCAA Photos via Getty Images)