NCAA Basketball: Top 10 head coaches from past decade (2010-19)

3. Jay Wright

The argument can easily be made that Wright deserves higher on this list, especially when you consider what he accomplished in this decade at Villanova. At the start of the decade, his Wildcats were one of many contenders in the old Big East, but things certainly changed for this program in the last ten years.

Since the start of the new Big East in 2013, the conference has been completely dominated by Wright’s Wildcats. Villanova is 90-18 in Big East play, finishing in the top two spots in every season. They are the absolute juggernaut of the Big East, with Wright pulling in fantastic players like Kris Jenkins, Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart along the way. Unfortunately, only twice as Wright’s crew made it past the opening weekend of the NCAA Tournament in that time.

Obviously, both of those occasions ended spectacularly, as Villanova won the national titles in both 2016 and 2018, already putting Wright in rare air among the realms of head coaches. The 2016 run was punctuated by Kris Jenkin’s championship-winning buzzer beater, while the 2018 team’s run was much more of a dominant march to success. Either way, Wright has built incredible consistency in the new Big East and twice put this team in a position to go down in history.

Winning a pair of titles at a school like Villanova, without a Blue Blood history, is clearly a fantastic accomplishment. Expecting titles on a regular basis was not possible when he took over the program nearly two decades ago. The elevation of Villanova is due to Wright and he’s kept this team in a position to compete at the very top of the Big East for years to come, though the future looks bright for the conference as a whole.