With the ever-changing nature of college basketball, it’s as important as ever to have the right head coach leading your program. The Transfer Portal has made offseason recruiting an even bigger activity and obstacle for programs all across the country, though recruiting is only half the battle for a good head coach. It’s important to find the right players, even if they aren’t always the best ones, and a good head coach knows this.
We’re not talking about recruiting today, we’re focusing specifically on head coaches, and we all know that on-court results are far more important than who a coach gets to fill out the roster. Identifying the important pieces, the starters, and who gets the key minutes in a rotation are all important duties for head coaches, especially important at the major conference level.
The ACC in particular has been one of the sport’s best conferences and has had some of the very icons of the college basketball world roaming its sidelines. However, this league has shed some of those legends in recent years, with Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, and Jim Boeheim all retiring in recent years. Rick Pitino was also somewhat recently in the ACC as well. Have all of these programs made wise decisions about who helms their programs to replace these legends?
We’re not focusing just on replacing legends today but looking at the wider scope in ACC Basketball. Today, we’ll be ranking the fifteen current head basketball coaches in the ACC. This is not a ranking of the teams or their most recent seasons, but a general ranking based on what these coaches have done in their careers. While there will be a bit more focus on more recent seasons, we’ll be considering their whole body of work, especially their years at their current schools. Let’s get right into the breakdown, starting at the bottom of the list.