NCAA Basketball rewind: Most impactful coaching hires after 2012 season

6. Wes Miller (UNC Greensboro)

UNC Greensboro was not in the best shape in 2012. Fresh off three straight seasons with no more than eight wins, things had gotten bad enough that head coach Mike Dement had stepped aside from the Spartans midway through the season. Fortunately, the Spartans had a pretty solid young coach take over as the interim and made an even smarter decision in making him the full-time leader a few months later.

Just seven years earlier, Wes Miller won a national championship as a player at North Carolina. His playing career ended very quickly after graduation, beginning his coaching career as an assistant at Elon. He’d spend a year apiece there and at High Point before joining Dement’s staff in 2010. After just over a year, he was promoted to interim head coach and the Spartans have never looked back.

In that interim year, the Spartans actually finished atop the SoCon North standings, but the best was coming. Miller led Greensboro to a pair of NCAA Tournaments and a pair of NIT appearances, winning at least 21 regular and 13 conference games in each of his last five seasons with the school. After that fantastic run of success, Miller took the Cincinnati job this past offseason, leaving this program in way better shape than what he inherited nearly ten years ago.