There are now 363 D-1 NCAA Basketball programs in the nation and each of them are led by a head coach. Let’s undertake the crazy task of ranking them all!
We’re nearing closer to that magical time of the year when the NCAA Basketball season finally begins. Months of offseason madness have been filled with news from the coaching carousel, transfer portal, and conference realignment scene. Players have waited all these months to get back on the court and prove their mettle. Some are doing it from new colleges while many freshmen or first-year players are eager to make their mark on the sport.
Looking forward, it should be another great NCAA basketball season, as it always is in this fantastic sport. The 2022-23 season should feature some standout performances and give us fantastic moments and memories. Another thing each season shows us is the talent, skill, and patience of the head coaches of these programs. It’s hard enough to build a winning roster, but keeping them together while the transfer portal spins all while putting them in a position to succeed is no easy task.
Some of basketball’s very best coaches are here in the college game, even with some major changes in recent years. Mike Krzyzewski and Jay Wright both retired after last season, and both had led their programs to the Final Four in their swan songs. Replacing legends is never easy, but we’re going to take a look at a few of the people who have done this task in recent years.
For the fifth straight year, we will be undertaking the magnifying task of ranking every single head coach in D-1 NCAA basketball. There are now 363 head coaches to consider and every single one was painstakingly ranked in today’s feature. There’s no formula or strict method for ranking these coaches, though they aren’t just put in order randomly. Things like experience, the ability to win games, the recent success of their program, and the ability of their teams to perform in the postseason help us determine these rankings. A young head coach with only a few years of experience who has exceeded expectations, especially in the postseason, could find himself much higher than someone a few decades into his career.
Let’s not kid ourselves; there is no reason to believe these are perfect rankings. Someone associated with every single coach or school on this list could see issue as to where their head coach (or perhaps their rivals) is placed on this list. This was a multi-month effort to evaluate 363 D-1 coaches and it’s not an easy process by any means. Resources like Sports Reference were used heavily, as was information from nearly every D-1 school’s athletic sites. With all of this in mind, let’s start the arduous process of running through all of these coaches. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll learn something today, especially about some of these coaches near the bottom of the rankings in the slides immediately to follow.