NCAA Basketball: Top 10 impact head coaching hires from the year 2004
By Joey Loose
6. Mark Fox (Nevada)
As previously mentioned, coach Trent Johnson led Nevada to the Sweet Sixteen in 2004 before departing for Stanford. Thus, he left the Wolf Pack in pretty solid shape, though of course the program wasn’t just going to keep chugging along on its own. Nevada didn’t have far to look to find their next man.
Mark Fox didn’t have any head coaching experience, but he had plenty of experience in college basketball. After playing at unheralded Eastern New Mexico, his coaching career took him to the staffs of Washington and Kansas State, two major conference programs. He joined Johnson’s Nevada staff and spent the last four years as an assistant.
He took over the program in 2004 and sustained that success for the Wolf Pack. In each of his five seasons, Nevada won at least 21 games, including four straight WAC regular-season titles. Nevada also made three NCAA Tournaments and won a game in two of them. Fox departed for Georgia in the SEC in 2009 and the Nevada program became a struggle for the next few seasons. There’s no guarantee this wouldn’t have happened had Fox stayed, but the man won nearly 75% of his games and was a great leader for this program.