NCAA Basketball: Purdue, Vols with head coaching hires from the year 2005

Take yourselves back to the year 2005. Back home, Roy Williams has just led North Carolina to their next NCAA Basketball championship, outmatching a very talented Illinois squad in the title game. Georgia Tech and Wake Forest are both top 5 teams, while many of the big names in the game have long since endeared themselves to NBA audiences, such as Chris Paul, Andrew Bogut, and J. J. Redick.

As another college basketball season came to an end, it was time for some of these programs to make some difficult choices. A number of head coaches were dismissed, while others retired or moved onto other schools. The coaching carousel spun round and round, with schools like Cincinnati, Tulsa, and Virginia among the biggest names looking for a new coach.

As previously stated, it is vital to nail your head coaching hire; it can set the program back for many years if you hire the wrong guy. Every program, Blue Blood and low major alike, can easily screw up a head coaching hire. Back in 2005, we saw several different openings and we saw schools take different approaches to fill those openings. In the end, the hires were made.

We’ll now be looking at the best hires made from that year, looking closely in particular at the ten best. We don’t have time to look at every hire, good and bad, but the ten we’ll examine are certainly all important.

Let’s get right into these coaches, looking back at the best coaching hires from sixteen years ago.