NCAA Basketball: UNC, Kansas among top head coaching hires from 2003
By Joey Loose
Take yourselves back to the year 2003. Following an impressive season, Carmelo Anthony has just led Syracuse and coach Jim Boeheim to their very first NCAA Basketball national championship, knocking off a talented Kansas team in the finals. Aside from Carmelo, names like T. J. Ford, David West, Kyle Korver, and of course Dwayne Wade were among the biggest stars of the game. Additionally, Kentucky coach Tubby Smith won all the major coach of the year awards.
With the end of the 2003 season, changes began at several programs, specifically at head coach. The coaching carousel has a way of opening up more jobs as bigger ones get filled and this was certainly the case back then. Openings at jobs like North Carolina and UCLA got the headlines, though a long list of schools would have vacancies to fill before the next season was underway.
As has been seen time and time again, it’s very important for a program to get the right head coach in town to run the ship. This is very true no matter what kind of program it is; a low-major with limited success or one of the nation’s prominent Blue Bloods. In 2003, both of these types of schools had openings with eyes on them.
As such, we’ll be diving deeply into some of the coaching hires made that year, identifying the ten best from the cycle. Just ten hires will be noted, meaning some pretty good coaches will go without mention.
Without further ado, we’ll get right into some of the best coaching hires from eighteen years ago.