NCAA Basketball: Top 10 impact head coaching hires from 2006
By Joey Loose
6. Donnie Tyndall (Morehead State)
Not since 1984 had Morehead State been in the NCAA Tournament, though the program wasn’t awful for that entire stretch of time. However, 2006 had ended with an abysmal 4-23 mark and new blood was needed to get these Eagles back on the winning track. Obviously, there were a number of directions the program could have gotten, but they nabbed a winning name in the end.
Donnie Tyndall hadn’t yet been a collegiate head coach, save for a single season at a small junior college a decade earlier. He had worked closely with Kermit Davis on the staffs of LSU and Middle Tennessee in recent years, possessing nearly a decade of D1 assistant coaching experience. Now, he was set to inherit a struggling Eagles program, but Tyndall was the answer.
Morehead State began trending upwards as soon as Tyndall arrived and by his third season had the Eagles back in the NCAA Tournament, snapping that 25-year drought. He won more than 63% of OVC games in his six years, with the clear highlight being the program’s upset win over 4-seed Louisville in the 2011 NCAA Tournament. Tyndall parlayed his success into the Southern Miss job and certainly led the Eagles program to an unexpected level of success.