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

8. Will Brown (Albany)

One of the trickiest aspects of head coaching searches is what happens when a coach is fired midseason or just before it begins. This Albany program was still in relative infancy as a D1 program when Scott Beeten was cast aside after a 1-7 start. As the offseason began in 2002, the Great Danes could have gone in any number of directions to steady the basketball program, but decided to let that interim coach take control of the program.

Will Brown was very inexperience by the time he became Albany’s interim head coach, especially at the D1 level. He played at Dowling and spent time coaching at Saint Rose and Sullivan County CC, all smaller colleges in the state of New York. He’d join Beeten’s coaching staff in 2001, but rode that bench for only eight games before being thrust into the head coaching job at the age of 30.

In the long run, Brown’s promotion was a great call for the Great Danes. By 2006, Brown had led Albany to their first NCAA Tournament appearance. In his twenty years in charge, he led the Great Danes to five total NCAA Tourney bids and had one of the best programs in the America East since the turn of the century. Progress became slow in recent years, leading to Brown’s firing this offseason, but there’s no denying his importance to Albany basketball.