NCAA Basketball: Ranking best head coaching hires from the year 2000
By Joey Loose
Take yourselves back to the year 2000. Michigan State was fresh off their second NCAA Basketball national championship victory, the first under Tom Izzo. Lower seeds Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin make Final Four runs and set themselves up well for the rest of the decade to come. Some of the stars of the game included Mateen Cleaves, Marcus Fizer, and Kenyon Martin, whose injury derailed Cincinnati’s fantastic season under Bob Huggins.
As the season came to an end, several programs were not doing quite as outstandingly, leading to a number of coaching changes. There actually weren’t a large amount of power conference teams making changes, though Indiana and North Carolina were forced into coaching searches. Illinois and Miami were replacing head coaches heading to the NBA, while teams like Houston, Memphis, and Nebraska were just trying to be relevant again.
The role a head coach plays in the program cannot be understated and it’s very important to nail your head coaching search. Not all searches are created equal, but a bad hire can set a program back for several years. We’re going to be taking a deep dive at some of the hires made in 2000, focusing on the ten best from that cycle. There are of course some great impacts made by some of the coaches, not on our list, but these are ten that certainly stood out.
Without further ado, let’s get right into running through these best coaching hires.