NCAA Basketball: Top 10 head coaching hires from the year 2002

Take yourselves back to the year 2002. Juan Dixon and the Maryland Terrapins have just won their first national championship, cementing the legacy of coach Gary Williams. Back then, it was names like Drew Gooden, David West, and Jason Williams who were stars of the NCAA Basketball game long before their NBA careers would begin. Times were so wild that the coach of the year was Ben Howland, back when he was still at Pittsburgh.

As the 2002 season came to an end, changes were made to several programs. There are coaches who were fired for poor performance, or retired after long careers, or of course jumped at the chance to lead other programs. There were openings at several intriguing schools, including Arkansas, Florida State, and West Virginia among others.

The importance of a good head coach cannot be understated, especially for a program that has been struggling in recent years. It’s equally important for a successful team to hire the right guy to take the baton and maintain the trajectory of the program. With these thoughts in mind, we’re going to dive into some of those coaching hires made in 2002. We’ll be looking closely at these hires and identifying the ten best from that cycle of the coaching carousel. Obviously, not every hire can be noticed, especially not all the good ones, but we’ll do our best to identify the ten that stood out.

Let’s get right into the list, running through these coaching hires from nineteen years ago.