NCAA Basketball: UNC, Kansas among top head coaching hires from 2003

8. Oliver Purnell (Clemson)

The ACC has always been a dangerous league; one of the absolute best conferences in all of college basketball. With just a mere handful of NCAA Tournament bids scared across their history, Clemson was certainly not the reason the ACC was held in high regard. When they were looking for a new head coach in 2003, they had lost no less than 11 of 16 conference games for five straight seasons and needed a new voice.

In came Oliver Purnell, who starred at Old Dominion three decades earlier before beginning his coaching career. He spent time on Lefty Driesell’s staff at Maryland before beginning his head coaching career in 1988. Purnell served as head coach at Radford, Old Dominion, and Dayton, taking the latter two to the Big Dance, making a whole host of postseason bids with those two programs.

It didn’t happen overnight, but Purnell turned things around at Clemson, with the program taking a step forward in each of his seven seasons. The Tigers made three NIT appearances in his first four seasons before advancing to the NCAA Tournament in each of Purnell’s final three seasons at Clemson. Purnell left for DePaul after that third season, but this was just the second time in Clemson history they had made three straight trips to the Big Dance.