NCAA Basketball: Potential replacements for recent fired coaches

Wyoming

After a successful playing and assistant coaching career, Allen Edwards just couldn’t get the ball rolling with the Cowboys. His team actually won the CBI in 2017, but won just 17 total games the last two seasons. They pulled off a pair of upsets in this year’s MWC Tournament but it wasn’t enough to save Edwards his job in the long run. He’s a former assistant at schools like VCU and Western Kentucky and should have no problem finding an assistant coaching gig in the near future.

He leaves behind a Cowboys team that finished dead last in the Mountain West and struggled all year. Sophomore guard Hunter Maldonado had nearly 16 points per game and will be a great piece to build around next season if he doesn’t transfer out. Fixing the offensive woes for these Cowboys will be essential moving forward and that will certainly necessitate an influx of new talent. In fact, this has been one of the nation’s worst offensive rebounding teams for the last decade. Maldonado is a strong piece of the future but he needs help.

Enter Jeff Linder, who’s spent the last four years as head coach at Northern Colorado. His Bears won the CIT in 2018 and have followed that up with back-to-back second-place finishes in the Big Sky. Overall, he’s 80-50 in his head coaching career and the geography certainly matches up well. Linder’s teams have steadily improved on the offensive end while steadying a defense that was horrific before his arrival in 2016. Bringing aboard a coach with experience in the area and the potential to win at the mid-major level would be a great step forward for a seemingly dormant Wyoming program.

There’s no telling who these eleven programs will hire as their next head coach, we’ve merely given ideal suggestions. As the coaching carousel begins to spin, even during this unprecedented time in the sport, it’ll be interesting to see who ends up at which school.