Vanderbilt Basketball: 12 candidates to replace Jerry Stackhouse as Head Coach
By Joey Loose
Following five seasons as head coach of the Commodores, Jerry Stackhouse has been fired by Vanderbilt. A longtime former NBA player, Stackhouse’s first collegiate coaching experience had come with the Commodores for this last half decade.
A native of North Carolina, Stackhouse starred at the high school level and would later star under Dean Smith at North Carolina in the mid-90’s. He was a First Team All-American as a sophomore and was a lottery pick a few months later in the 1995 NBA Draft.
Stackhouse would spend nearly two decades playing in the NBA for eight different franchises. He was a two-time NBA All Star who contributed on several great teams over the years. A few years after his retirement, he got into coaching on the bench of the Toronto Raptors.
His first head coaching gig came a year later as he’d spend a pair of seasons helming Raptors 905, Toronto’s G-League squad. After an additional season as an NBA assistant, Stackhouse was lured to Vanderbilt as their next head coach in 2019, his first non-professional coaching job.
Stackhouse inherited a Vanderbilt squad that had gone 0-18 in SEC play, though he also inherited a few talented roster pieces. He rode Scotty Pippen Jr. to success in the middle of his tenure, with a tie for 4th place in the SEC just last season. However, he finished well below .500 in three of this five seasons, including a 9-23 mark this past season.
Additionally, Stackhouse won just 31% of his games in league play and never led the Commodores to the NCAA Tournament. Vanderbilt is left picking up the pieces and looking for a new leader for their program, hoping to find the right guy to make them competitive in a tough SEC.
While time will tell what direction Vanderbilt will hunt for their next coach, we’ll be considering a number of different candidates here today. There are names not on this list that will certainly be considered; we’re just diving deep into ten names that could be intriguing fits in Nashville. The Commodores need new blood and someone to take them to the next level. Could one of these ten coaches accomplish that feat?