After a fantastic coaching career spanning five decades, Lon Kruger recently announced his retirement, leaving Oklahoma Basketball after ten years as their head coach. Kruger was born in Kansas and played guard at Kansas State back in the early 1970’s.
His coaching career began soon after and by 1982 he had accepted his first head coaching job at Texas-Pan American. Throughout an impressive career, Kruger took five different teams to the NCAA Tournament and also spent three seasons helming the Atlanta Hawks.
Kruger won while at Texas-Pan American and Kansas State; took Florida to their first Final Four, and won plenty of games at both Illinois and UNLV. He took over the Sooners program after Jeff Capel III was fired in 2011 and took the Sooners to new heights. Kruger led Oklahoma to seven NCAA Tournament appearances, including a Final Four run in 2016. He brought fantastic talent like Buddy Hield and Trae Young into the program and certainly left his mark on this Sooners program.
Since that Final Four run, the Sooners haven’t made the same kind of impact on the national stage, though Kruger’s team has still been very talented. This past season, Oklahoma went 16-11, falling to undefeated Gonzaga in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. The Sooners played some impressive basketball earlier in the season, at one point knocking off three consecutive top 10 opponents in a very tough Big 12.
After ten brilliant years under Kruger’s leadership, the Oklahoma job is open and whoever is hired next will be inheriting a much better program than ten years prior. The Sooners have competed year in and year out in a very tough conference; and a Big 12 coaching job is certainly attracted to many names in the coaching circles. This team is an NCAA Tournament contender on a yearly basis. They may not currently be in the same stratosphere as a Kansas or Baylor at the moment, but with the right hire and the right recruiting, there’s no reason this team can’t compete for Big 12 championships.
We’re going to be taking a close look at a number of potential candidates to take over as head coach at Oklahoma. This is an impressive position and the Sooners will not consider just anyone to take over what Kruger started. We’ll be focusing on six candidates for now, but don’t be surprised to see a lot more names pop up for the position in the coming days, including one of Oklahoma’s current assistants like Carlin Hartman. Without further ado, let’s get right into the list.