NCAA Basketball: Ranking the last 25 national title winning head coaches

Rollie Massimino helped deliver one of college basketball’s most thrilling underdog stories and earned his place in the College Basketball Hall of Fame.

He broke through at Villanova decades before Jay Wright would add a few titles of his own. It’s hard to argue against Massimino’s body of work, though he did experience very limited success outside of that magical 1985 NCAA season with the Wildcats.

His coaching career began at the high school level before brief stops leading Stony Brook and as an assistant at Penn. In 1973, he was hired as the new head coach at Villanova, beginning a journey that would lead towards greatness.

Massimino would be in charge of the Wildcats program as the school joined the Big East and helped lead them to 11 NCAA Tournament appearances. However, his most impressive work came in 1985.

The Wildcats entered the NCAA Tournament as a No. 8 seed and remain to this day the lowest seed to win a national championship. Led by Ed Pinckney and Dwayne McClain, Villanova marched their way through the Tournament, knocking out top-10 teams like Michigan, North Carolina and Memphis along the way. They faced No. 1 Georgetown in the title game and shot their way to an incredible upset victory, securing the program’s first national championship.

Massimino stayed at Villanova until 1992, when he departed for UNLV. He spent two years in Las Vegas and another seven at Cleveland State, but both tenures ended following off-court issues.

Only once did he bring a program to the Final Four and he never even made an NCAA Tournament in his nine years after Villanova. He spent the last decade of his life coaching at Keiser University before passing away in 2017 after a battle with cancer. He died a legend of Villanova athletics, leaving behind an incredible legacy.