NCAA Basketball: Ranking best head coaching hires from the year 2000

5. Steve Donahue (Cornell)

The Ivy League did not have a conference tournament until very recently, meaning to make the NCAA Tournament you basically had to win the regular-season title. We previously touched on how Princeton was doing very well around 2000, but the story was different at Cornell. The Big Red had made just a single NCAA Tournament in the last forty years, but change was on the horizon.

Steve Donahue took over the program after spending the last decade on Fran Dunphy’s staff at Penn, helping lead the Quakers to a number of NCAA Tournament appearances. The longtime Pennsylvania native had never before been a head coach but was certainly quite familiar with the Ivy League. He had his work cut out for him with the Big Red and progress was slow, but it paid off in the end.

It took Donahue seven years to get Cornell over .500 but by then they were competitive in the Ivy League again. The Big Red was back in the NCAA Tournament in 2008, the first of three straight appearances in the Big Dance, an outstanding run of success for a long-dormant program. The clear highlight was 2010, when Donahue led his 12-seeded Cornell program to the Sweet Sixteen, knocking off both 5-seed Temple and 4-seed Wisconsin by no less than 15 points.

Donahue moved onto Boston College weeks later and Cornell is still waiting for their next trip to the NCAA Tournament.