NCAA Basketball: Best head coaching hire from each of last 25 seasons

The importance of having a great head coach at your NCAA basketball program is as important as ever in today’s game. Not only are these men responsible for managing games, training players, and devising strategy, but they are constantly recruiting to fill their rosters, a responsibility even more time-consuming with the recent explosion of the Transfer Portal. Head coaches are often forced to completely redesign their programs on a regular basis, especially with all the transfers in recent years.

When it comes to those head coaches, it’s important to hire the right coach. We’re not quite complete, but the major moves have already been completed in this year’s version of the coaching carousel, with a number of high-profile programs making major changes. It’s easy to look at some of the moves and call certain programs winners or losers, but we simply don’t know what to make of these hires after just a few weeks. It genuinely takes a few years or at least a full recruiting cycle to truly know what you have in a head coach.

We’re not looking at this year’s hires, but it’s good to reflect on them for a moment. Every offseason, there’s a decent number of these 363 D1 programs that makes a head coaching change. Some coaches have been at the same schools for decades, while other programs seem to spin through head coaches at an alarmingly high rate. We’ll be looking back at somewhat recent history in regards to these hires.

Today, we’re looking back at the last 25 offseasons and identifying the best head coaching hire from each of them. Obviously, each offseason has been different. For some, there’s a runaway choice who rises the top, while other offseasons have provided less successful hires, or perhaps a much harder choice to make. We’ll be running through the last quarter-century, starting way back in 1998, and in the process identifying many of the top coaches in the game today.