While there’s still plenty of excitement to come, another NCAA basketball season is starting to wind down. There are only a few weeks left of regular season play before March Madness begins. Clearly, the best of the season is still ahead of us, but this leaves us some time to reflect on what we’ve seen already.
The ending of the regular season leads to each conference announcing individual awards prior to the league tournaments, and this will start happening in just a couple weeks. We’ve seen nearly four months of teams winning and losing; proving themselves, outshining expectations, or failing to live up to preseason honors.
Life in each of the 32 NCAA Basketball conferences is different, thus why each conference gives its own awards. We’re thinking about one of those awards today: the Coach of the Year. Expectations can be drastically different from program to program but a lot of the onus for these seasons falls on the coaches. We’re not just talking about the X’s and O’s, but the recruiting, the developing of talent, and how teams handle adversity.
Today’s task is to hand out Coach of the Year honors in each of the conferences in the nation. While things could still change in the final weeks of the season, this is solely a prediction based on what we’ve seen from more than three months of basketball. Many of these coaches have shined in initial seasons at program, exceeded expectations, or stood out in other ways. Without further ado, let’s run through all 32 leagues and the coaches who deserve that honor.