NCAA Basketball rewind: Most impactful coaching hires after 2014 season

7. Craig Smith (South Dakota)

Though they had excelled at the D2 level, South Dakota had only been playing D1 basketball for a few seasons by the time they were hiring a new head coach in 2014. Since joining the Summit League three years earlier, they had yet to field a competitive team, winning no more than 12 games in any of those seasons. New blood was brought into the program, and the Coyotes made one of the best hires they could make.

Craig Smith had already bounced around quite a bit in the coaching world over the first two decades of his career. He had worked at several D2 schools as an assistant, and also been head coach at Mayville State at that level. He spent eleven years on the staffs of Tim Miles across four different schools, with the last two seasons coming as an assistant at Nebraska in the Big Ten. An alumnus of North Dakota, he was ready to begin his D1 head coaching career in the neighboring state.

Smith made an immediate and certain impact on the Coyotes, as the program won 17 games and finished in the top half of the conference for the first time in his first season. By 2017, he had taken South Dakota to a regular season title and an NIT bid, while his fourth and final year ended in 26 wins, which remains their top mark in D1. Smith departed for Utah State that offseason, but the upwards projector of the Coyotes is clearly due to his hard work for those four years.