Stanford Basketball: 10 candidates to replace Jerod Haase as Head Coach

Leon Rice

There are great head coaches all over the country at the collegiate level and we’ve clearly not even been restricting ourselves to regional matches for the Cardinal. They need to find someone who can pluck hidden talent from all over the place, though it wouldn’t hurt to have someone from the West Coast who knows California as well. Rice fits the bill, especially as a great head coach.

An alum of Washington State and native of that state, his coaching start was as an aide at Oregon in the late 80’s. He was a junior college head coach before joining Mark Few’s first coaching staff at Gonzaga way back in 1999. After eleven seasons, Rice left for his big opportunity, becoming head coach at Boise State. Rice led the program into the MWC, making a couple of early trips to the NCAA Tournament. Now, he’s in the best stretch of his career and will lead the Broncos to a third straight Tourney appearance this season.

We can count his experience at Oregon, though it came more than thirty years ago, but Rice hasn’t really done this at the power conference level. Obviously his work at Gonzaga came in the early days of a prosperous program and he has done wonders with the Broncos in recent years. He’d be a fine addition to Stanford, though there might be questions about the double learning curve of life in the ACC. There are many worse choices out there, but would Rice depart Boise after fourteen years for a challenge like this?