While the NCAA Tournament and other postseason play dominates the headlines in March that’s also the time of the year when the coaching carousel does most of its spinning. This isn’t always the case and here at the very end of June a mid-major program is seeing their head coach departing the school right in the middle of the offseason.
Tennessee State will be heading in a new direction after the recent announcement that head coach Brian Collins would depart the school for a gig in the NBA. Collins was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee and has spent a significant portion of his basketball career in his home city. He won’t be too far away as a new assistant with the Memphis Grizzlies.
Collins played collegiate ball at Belmont under Rick Byrd and helped take the Bruins to the NCAA Tournament as a senior in 2006. A brief professional playing career was cut short as his coaching career actually began as an assistant at Tennessee State. Collins has spent nearly all of his coaching days in his home state aside from a brief stint on staff at Illinois State before the Tigers brought him aboard as head coach in 2018.
He had spent three seasons as head coach at Columbia State CC so this wasn’t his first head coaching gig, but leading a D1 program is clearly a different story. Collins was far from perfect at Tennessee State but was certainly building momentum in recent years. The program had a tough start and struggled in the first season after the pandemic but put up three straight seasons over .500, while claiming Top 5 finishes in the OVC for four years in a row.
After just under 100 wins, Collins heads to the NBA and leaves the program in better shape than when he took over seven years ago. Assistant Erik Buggs has been named interim head coach and himself is a Memphis native with experience coaching in the state. We’ll have to see how the Tigers handle that transition and if any players leave the program before next season, but Collins earned the step up with his hard work in Nashville in recent years.