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

There’s no denying that Larry Brown was an excellent head coach at the college level, though he is better known for bouncing around from job to job, including a lot of NBA stops. He won an NBA title leading the 2004 Detroit Pistons and took the 2001 Philadelphia 76ers to the NBA Finals, but we’re going to focus solely on his collegiate accolades.

Brown played for the North Carolina Tar Heels and embarked on a brief professional playing career before coaching became his lifeblood. Amidst his bouncing around, he landed his first college coaching gig at UCLA in 1979. He’d spent just two years with the Bruins but led them to a (now vacated) national title game appearance.

A few years later, he took over at Kansas, winning the 1988 NCAA Tournament with a talented Jayhawks squad. He recently spent four years building SMU, but let’s maintain our focus on Kansas.

Sandwiched between NBA jobs, Brown made a pair of Final Fours with the Jayhawks, riding Danny Manning to that title in 1988. We can certainly ignore Brown’s propensity for jumping from job to job, but we can’t ignore the allegations that tarnished his college coaching legacy to some degree.

The championship at Kansas remains intact, but violations shadowed his years at both UCLA and SMU, the latter of which led to his resignation in 2016. It’s undeniable that he built immediate success at all three schools, but at what cost?

The bottom line is that Brown spent just 11 years as a college head coach. His three Final Fours in that time are impressive, even if one of them was vacated for using ineligible players.

Regardless, he won a championship at Kansas (which Roy Williams couldn’t do) and he jumpstarted SMU’s return to legitimacy in the AAC. He’s a Hall of Fame coach and it makes you wonder what he could have done had he stayed at the college level for just a little longer.