DePaul Basketball: 8 candidates to watch for potential HC opening

We’re in late November and the college basketball season is only a few weeks old, so it’s definitely time to overreact to the early results from the season. We usually don’t break out these kinds of speculative pieces until after the regular season, especially since there are no current head coach openings in the nation. However, we’re looking ahead at one of the programs that’s really in a bad place right now.

Basketball at DePaul has been consistently overwhelming for decades. This isn’t stemming from some individual incident in recent years; the Blue Demons simply have failed to build a competent or contending program, especially during their time in the Big East. Basically every head coaching hire made by this school hasn’t worked out in one way or another and this latest is failing just as spectacularly.

Back in 2021, DePaul faced an opening after the firing of Dave Leitao and began their hunt for their next head coach. Spurned by a few other choices, the Blue Demons opted to hire Tony Stubblefield. Though he had been an assistant at Oregon for the last eleven seasons, Stubblefield had never been a full-time head coach and had spent much of his life playing and coaching a bit west of Chicago, with extensive time in Omaha, Arlington, and Las Cruces.

When he was hired, DePaul had hoped that Stubblefield would bring in a new more successful era for the Blue Demons. He had been revered as a great recruiter, having helped lead the Ducks to the Final Four back in 2017 as an assistant. There may have been some concern about his lack of head coaching experience, and there’s certainly general concern right now.

Stubblefield’s first two seasons at DePaul weren’t exactly noteworthy, winning 15 games in his first season but just 10 last year, including a 3-17 mark in Big East play. This current season, albeit still just a few weeks old, has been significantly worse.

It’s not just that DePaul sits at 1-5, it’s the way they’ve gotten there. They’ve already lost home games to Purdue-Fort Wayne, Long Beach State, and Northern Illinois and didn’t fare well in neutral-court losses to San Francisco or South Carolina either. Their lone victory came nearly two weeks ago at home against South Carolina and the number of winnable games on the rest of the schedule is not a high number.

Remember that Stubblefield is the current head coach at DePaul and will continue to hold that role for the immediate future. There are no specific rumors that he’ll be fired in the middle of the season, even with such a bleak outlook for this program. That being said, we’re going to look at a few potential candidates should this job open up at the end of the year. It’s actually a pretty different list than a few seasons ago when Stubblefield was hired and worth a few minutes of thought.