California Basketball: 7 candidates to replace Mark Fox as head coach

After four seasons in charge at California Basketball, Mark Fox has recently been fired by the Golden Bears. His four seasons had not been prosperous and the Golden Bears truly bottom out this past season, winning just three games and flailing again in Pac-12 play.

A native of Kansas who played his collegiate ball at Garden City CC and Eastern New Mexico, Fox became a collegiate coach right after graduation, spending time on the staffs of Washington, Kansas State, and Nevada. When Trent Johnson took the Stanford job in 2004, Fox was promoted to replace him and had significant success with the Wolf Pack. He took Nevada to three straight NCAA Tournament appearances, two Tournament victories, and four consecutive WAC regular season titles.

In 2009, he was hired by Georgia and spent nearly a decade as head coach of the Bulldogs, leading the team to a pair of NCAA Tournaments and a few appearances in the NIT. He was fired by the Bulldogs after nine seasons and was brought to Berkeley after a year out of the game. Fox was entrusted with turning around a program that had faltered in recent years under Wyking Jones, but he did not accomplish that mission.

Fox won just 38 games across his four seasons leading the Golden Bears and his first season was his best, tying for 8th in the Pac-12 and finish 14-18. The next two seasons were drearier, but this past year was by far the most dismal. California finished just 3-29 and finished in last place in the Pac-12 for the second time under Fox’s leadership, making this change understandable from a basketball perspective.

Winning at Cal is not the easiest thing in the world, and we won’t be too hard on Fox despite that rough record. The Golden Bears don’t have the resources or relative interest in building a competitive basketball program at the higher level, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t an attractive job. Even with the uncertainty in the Pac-12 and with conference realignment, California can still attract a decent name to take over the program and become their fifth head coach in the last ten years.

We’ll be looking carefully at some early candidates for this job, most of whom will have already been directly linked to the opening, or perhaps when the job was open in the past. The Golden Bears are desperate for new leadership and a miracle turnaround, but can one of these seven names get the job done?