NCAA Basketball: 2019-20 season vital for NBA legends turned coaches
By Brian Rauf
The recent trend of former NBA superstars becoming NCAA Basketball coaches is all the rage, and the 2019-20 season is extremely important for all of them.
Michigan became the latest NCAA Basketball program to hire a legendary NBA alum when they announced Juwan Howard would replace John Beilein as head coach.
The hire has largely been met with initial approval. Howard was the founding member of the Fab Five, Michigan’s star-studded 1991 recruiting class that included Chris Webber and Jalen Rose, which remains the most iconic team the Wolverines have had (it also signals the school embracing the group, something that never really happened until now). He also had a 19-year career in the NBA and followed that up with six seasons as an assistant for the Miami Heat.
Yet the hire has also been met with a bit of hesitancy.
Yes, Howard has strong ties to the school and was in line to become a head coach in the NBA at some point in the future. But there also hasn’t been a great track record of former NBA players achieving success coaching in the college ranks.
Several have tried and failed from Clyde Drexler to Isiah Thomas to, most recently, Chris Mullin. Making the jump from NBA stardom to college basketball coaching has almost never gone well.
Most of the time, the hire is made for relevancy purposes, drumming up fan support and excitement that a notable name is back in charge of the program. But most of these suddenly new coaches are just that – new coaches. They were hired with no prior coaching experience. In retrospect, it’s no wonder those experiments failed miserably.
Going from NBA coaching to college coaching doesn’t guarantee success, either. You can look at recent examples like Avery Johnson, Mike Dunleavy, and Mark Price as guys who came to the college game from the NBA but are now without a job.
Howard represents the latest in the new trend of guys returning to college with both notoriety from their playing careers to go along with previous coaching experience.
Georgetown’s hire of Patrick Ewing in 2017, who spent 15 years as an NBA assistant, was really the first of this mold. Memphis followed suit with Penny Hardaway in 2018 after the former All-Star spent three seasons as a high school and AAU coach. And, though not an alum, Vanderbilt brought in Jerry Stackhouse this spring after he spent the last four seasons as an NBA assistant and successful G-League coach.
This evolution of the NBA-to-college trend, though young, has had more success. Ewing has exceeded expectations through his first two years with the Hoyas and Hardaway is bringing in the country’s No. 1 recruiting class. But this 2019-20 season is going to tell us if the trend will take off or come crashing down like all the others who have made the jump before.