Providence Basketball: 10 candidates to replace Ed Cooley as head coach

Matt Langel

As we’ve already said about some of these other coaches, Providence might do well to hire one of the hot mid-major names and here’s another one doing great work in the northeast. You could argue that the jump from one of the weaker mid-majors to the Big East could be significant and end poorly for the Friars, but Langel has shown that he’s a fantastic coach who has built a winning program.

Langel played his college ball at Penn under Fran Dunphy and joined the coaching staff a few years after graduating, playing briefly overseas before that. Langel then joined Dunphy’s staff at Temple a few years later before beginning his own head coaching career at Colgate back in 2011. Progress was slow, with the Raiders finishing below .500 in each of his first six years, but the last five seasons have been outstanding. Colgate has won the Patriot League the last five seasons in a row and been in the last four NCAA Tournaments, an amazing accomplishment for any mid-major in a one-bid league.

These last five years have proven that Langel is ready for a new challenge in a harder league, having already turned one of the toughest jobs in the Patriot League into the program’s best team. Whether he’s ready to jump all the way to the Big East is a big question, but he knows how to recruit in the area and to just win. Providence will likely look in a different direction, but it’s hard to turn away from a coach who sits 63-23 since the pandemic.