NCAA Basketball: Top 10 best coaching hires from 2024 offseason
By Joey Loose
Another year of college basketball has come and gone, though the first month of the offseason is certainly providing a share of fireworks. Plenty of action has occurred since Connecticut won the national title, with much of that ado coming from the Transfer Portal, but that hasn’t been the only action in this sport.
One of the most exciting parts of the offseason is the action from the coaching carousel. Several programs will inevitably part ways with their head coaches, while others will retire, resign, or leave for other jobs that have opened. This creates quite the carousel of action in the offseason and that was certainly the case this year.
We won’t do a full dive into the coaching carousel, but some of the later moves this season were pretty extraordinary, including several power conference programs hiring from each other’s staffs. There could still be moves in the coming months if a coach suddenly resigns, but the main action from the portal has died down and we’ll be identifying the best hires from the offseason.
More than sixty D1 programs have new head coaches going forward and he can’t mention them all, though there’s a few names that didn’t quite make today’s list that deserve some recognition. A few mid-major programs made some sneaky hires, with Southern Illinois luring Scott Nagy from Wright State or Cuonzo Martin heading back to Missouri State after more than a decade as a high-major coach.
While Mark Pope is a big name that won’t be on this list, fellow power conference hires like Mark Byington (Vanderbilt) and Danny Sprinkle (Washington) could also turn out to be dynamic additions. It’s simply too early to know how each of these hires will work out, but we’re going to give our opinion on the best fits and hires.