NCAA Basketball: 10 college assistants poised to become head coaches

Each year sees a new wave of talented NCAA Basketball assistant coaches accepting their first head coaching jobs. Which of these coaches are most likely to make that jump next season?

With each passing season, there seems to be a great number of head coaching changes in NCAA Basketball. Many of these changes seem to be caused by a domino effect of hires, with one team replacing a head coach that takes a different job. There’s always a great deal of attention paid to high-profile mid-major coaches as well as retread hires. Experience is valuable to many of these athletic directors, but we can’t discount assistant coaches.

Former assistants like Amir Abdur-Rahim (Georgia), Greg Gary (Purdue), and Rob Lanier (Tennessee) all accepted head coaching positions in the past few months, just a few who made the jump this past season. There were many other assistants with high pedigrees mentioned but not hired for some of these open jobs. We’re going to attempt to identify some of the assistant coaches who are ready to make the jump to head coach.

For the sake of this list, we are going to take some limitations. Only one assistant will be listed from each program, though it can effectively be argued that certain places have multiple talented assistants ready to lead a program. The list will also be limited to coaches who have never been D-1 head coaches, meaning Greg Gary and Rob Lanier would not have been eligible for this list. There’s a surprising amount of talent on the benches of some of the country’s brightest programs and we’re going to dive into some of these bright young men.

It’s extremely unlikely that all ten of these men will have head coaching jobs next season; there just aren’t enough openings on a yearly basis that would attract them all. That being said, this is exactly the kind of list of names that will start coming up on an annual basis for openings in the next few years. Without further ado, let’s dive into the names, doing our best to rank them on likeliness of becoming a head coach.