NCAA Basketball rewind: Most impactful coaching hires after 2016 season

Take yourselves back to the year 2016. In one of the iconic moments in NCAA Basketball history, Kris Jenkins’ 3-pointer at the buzzer delivered a national championship for Villanova, stunning North Carolina in the title game. The stars of the game included familiar names like Buddy Hield, Ben Simmons, and Denzel Valentine, with Hield taking home many of the Player of the Year awards, also leading Oklahoma to the Final Four.

Another year came and went, leading to another busy offseason for most of the college basketball universe. In addition to player movement, several programs were dealing with coaching changes, whether through firing their head coaches or losing them to other programs. The list of open jobs included Georgia Tech, Oklahoma State, Pittsburgh, and Vanderbilt, though there were certainly several positions to be filled by the time the offseason ended.

Whether that program was a power conference team like those mentioned above, or a low major just trying to make ends meet, it’s important for any program to hire the right head coach. The wrong coach could do long-term damage to a program while the right one could take any team to the highest heights.

We’ll be taking a closer look at how that dynamic worked back in 2016, taking a look at some of the best coaching hires made that year. We’ll be limiting our focus to ten, meaning a number of pretty solid coaches will get overlooked.

Still, we’ve got plenty to get into, naming the ten best coaching hires made five years ago.