NCAA Basketball: Best head coaching hire from each of last 25 seasons
By Joey Loose
2022: Jerome Tang (Kansas State)
When you consider what Tobin Anderson accomplished in his lone season at Fairleigh Dickinson, it makes this closer than it seems, but this most recent spot on the chart belongs to Tang. It’s impossible to make any kind of firm conclusions about head coaches after just one season, but both of these guys have gone above and beyond in year one; Kansas State certainly has no regrets.
Tang was a high school coach for a decade in Texas, but it’s his work at Baylor that brought him to attention. He was hired by Scott Drew when he built his first Baylor staff way back in 2003 and was Drew’s right-hand man throughout nearly two decades of success. Tang helped lead the Bears to the national title in 2021 and began his own collegiate head coaching career one season later with the Wildcats.
Kansas State finished below .500 each of the three seasons before Tang’s arrival as a complete afterthought in a tough Big 12. In year one, Tang took Kansas State to a Top 10 national ranking, a 26-win season, a 3rd place finish in that tough conference, and a trip to the Elite Eight. Simply put, Tang accomplished an incredible number of things in that first season as a collegiate coach and might just have Kansas State as a program to watch in future years, even in the nation’s toughest league.
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We’ve completed our long look at the best coaching hires of each of the past 25 years. Do you agree with the coaches we selected for each offseason, or were some of our honorable mentions more worthy to be mentioned instead? Who will be the breakout hire of 2023?