NCAA Basketball: Ranking best head coaching hires from the year 2001
By Joey Loose
Take yourselves back to the year 2001. Mike Krzyzewski has just led Duke to their third national championship, riding the backs of players like Shane Battier and Jason Williams. Players like Troy Murphy and Tayshaun Prince are big names in the sport, while NCAA Tournament runs by double-digit seeds Temple, Gonzaga, and Georgetown grab the NCAA Basketball headlines.
When that season came to an end, it was time for a change for several of the basketball programs in the nation. Even in spite of some of their best efforts, several coaching changes took place, though of course not all of these were performance-based. Denny Crum retired after a Hall of Fame career at Louisville, while programs like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Villanova attempted to fill the top spot in their programs.
It’s hard to properly convey how important a good head-coaching hire is for a program, regardless of the state of the program. A program humming along with success can fall apart as a result of one bad hire, whereas mid-majors need to nab the right guy after losing their leader to one of the more prestigious open jobs.
We’ll be taking a deep dive into some of the coaching hires made in 2001, with our focus being on the ten best from that cycle. We can’t cover every single good or solid hire made from this offseason, but we’re merely looking at ten that really stood out.
Without further ado, let’s start running through the list of these coaching hires.