NCAA Basketball: Most consistent head coaches in NCAA Tournament since 2000

The NCAA Tournament is where head coaches define their NCAA Basketball legacy. Which has had the most success recently?

How do we evaluate who are the best NCAA Tournament Coaches? Do we look at who has made it to the most Sweet 16’s or Final 4’s or won the most national championships? Or do we take a more analytics-based approach like I did here. Barttorvik has an outstanding tool that measures how coaches have performed in the NCAA Tournament relative to expectations (based on KenPom rankings and tournament seeding). As a reminder, here are some of the NCAA Basketball top coaches by this measure.

(All statistics used in this article were found via Barttorvik)

But what if we looked at NCAA Tournament performance another way, although an imperfect one: which coaches have been able to consistently win at least one tournament game? Why focus on this? Not only is losing the first game in the tournament “the worst,” but avoiding first round losses also means avoiding any cringeworthy first round upsets. Coaches, players, and even fans often talk about how winning brings more relief rather than joy. Losing, especially being a victim of an upset, can be devastating. As a result, I think there is real value to a coach that is good enough to win at least one game every tournament. And if a coach manages to consistently win tournament games without the advantage of being a top-seed, this might suggest there is something quite special about the coach.

I used Barttorvik and went back to the 1999-2000 season. I looked for coaches that had been in at least three tournaments in this time span and won at least one game in every one of these tournaments. Here’s what I found:

Roy Williams, Chris Holtmann, Frank Martin, Chris Beard, John Groce,and Mike White all have perfect first round records with >=3 opportunities. Chris Holtmann’s appearances spanned over both Ohio State and Butler, Roy Williams at UNC, Frank Martin at Kansas State and South Carolina, Chris Beard at Arkansas Little Rock and Texas Tech, John Groce at Ohio and Illinois, and Mike White at Florida.

What jumps out from this? Even with 9/19 1st round victories as one-seeds, the NCAA Tournament consistency Roy Williams has shown is extremely impressive. Frank Martin and Chris Beard have both turned this 1st round tournament success into recent Final 4 runs, making one wonder whether this first round success could be predictive of broader tournament success. Additionally, it’s interesting that as good as John Groce has been in the tournament, he was only able to get there once with Illinois and is now coaching at Akron. The Akron program is in decent shape, so it will be interesting to monitor whether Groce gets another chance to keep his perfect first-round tournament record alive.

I can’t forget about Chris Holtmann, who is starting to be regarded as one of the better coaches in the sport and certainly deserves it based on this measure. His seedings of 11, 5, 4, 9, and 6 have far from guaranteed 1st round tournament victories, and Ohio State’s 1st round victory over 6-seed Iowa State was the most recent demonstration of Holtman’s tournament capabilities. The Buckeyes had struggled towards the end of the season and faced a Cyclone squad that was red-hot coming off a Big 12 tournament championship. Nevertheless, Ohio State and Holtmann pulled off the victory.

Next, I decided to be less strict and looked for coaches that met the same criteria but over only the 2010-19 seasons.  Coaches evolve, and managing to pull this off would still be very impressive. Here’s who was added to the list (all six above coaches obviously still qualified for this as well).

What stands out? Both Bill Self and John Calipari have had solid decade runs of earning high seeds and avoiding first round losses. Few has had a few recent teams that earned 1 or 2 seeds, but he’s also won five 1st round games in this stretch as a 7-seed or greater (very impressive). Kennedy might be surprising to see on this list, but he’s come up with victories in March.

We can’t forget about Dana Altman, who along with a Final 4 run as a 3-seed in 2017, has far from easy first round victories as a 7-seed, 8-seed, and a 12-seed twice. Just this past season, Altman led the Ducks to a Sweet 16 with victories over Wisconsin and UC Irvine.

It’s unclear just how much past 1st round tournament success is predictive of future first round success, but it has to be some sort of positive predictive factor right? Many of these coaches will likely be in the NCAA Tournament again next season, so it’s worth keeping in mind which coaches have a perfect track record of racking up first round victories.