Georgia Basketball: 8 candidates to replace Tom Crean as head coach

Following four seasons in charge, Georgia has relieved Tom Crean of his duties as head coach of the Bulldogs. A Michigan native and former student at Central Michigan, Crean arrived at Georgia Basketball back in 2018, marking his third head coaching position at the D1 level, with more than twenty years of head coaching experience under his belt.

His coaching career started as an unheralded assistant who caught on as a graduate assistant at Michigan State more than thirty years ago. After time on staff at Western Kentucky and Pittsburgh, Crean joined Tom Izzo’s first coaching staff in 1995. Crean was a vital part of the Spartans’ staff for the next four seasons, helping to recruit most of the talent that led Michigan State to a national championship in 2000.

But Crean was not along for that ride, having taken over as head coach of Marquette in 1999. Across the next nine seasons, he would build success for the Golden Eagles. The clear highlight was the recruitment of Dwyane Wade, who helped lead the 2003 team to the Final Four, the most recent trip for Marquette. In all, Crean led the Golden Eagles to five NCAA Tournaments and three NIT bids, parlaying that success into the Indiana job in 2008.

After three painstaking years of rebuilding a fallen Hoosiers program, Crean got Indiana back on track, making four NCAA Tournaments and three trips to the Sweet Sixteen. He also led the Hoosiers to a pair of Big Ten regular-season titles, though the program failed to live up to high expectations at times during Crean’s tenure. He was fired in 2017, taking the next year off before accepting the Georgia job four seasons ago.

Crean’s first recruiting class at Georgia included future #1 draft pick Anthony Edwards, but none of this translated to on-court success. In his four seasons, the Bulldogs never finished higher than 10th in the SEC, never won more than 16 games in a season, and struggled all the way to a 6-26 mark this past season. Crean has always been a great recruiter everywhere he’s been; he just couldn’t get the results in a tough SEC, even with that NBA talent on the team.

Georgia is a football school first and foremost; they just won the CFP national title after all. However, this is still a power conference job and a school that can absolutely make some noise if they get the right people in the building. We’ve seen programs like Alabama, Arkansas, and Auburn really come alive in recent years after making the right head coaching hire; the same could be true down the line at Georgia, no matter how stagnant things have been. We’ll be taking a closer look at eight potential candidates for this position, presenting them strictly in alphabetical order.