Washington Basketball: 8 candidates to replace Mike Hopkins as Head Coach

Leon Rice

Here’s another established head coach with ties to the state of Washington. We’ll have to see in the coming weeks how important those kinds of connections are to the Huskies, but they’ll certainly value someone with the kind of recent success that Rice has had, even if he lacks power conference experience.

Rice was born and raised in Washington and attended Washington State, later beginning his coaching career as an aide at Oregon. That would be his only experience at the power conference level, later becoming a junior college coach in Washington. Rice spent eleven years under Mark Few at Gonzaga before taking the Boise State job in 2010. He’s taken the Broncos to four NCAA Tournaments, including each of the last two seasons, and has them poised for a third-straight trip, with 21 wins already this season.

This hire would actually make sense for a number of reasons. While Rice doesn’t have that same type of major experience as someone like Hopkins had, he’s familiar with the state, knows how to recruit, and has shown that he can win with fewer resources and in a less fertile basketball community like Boise. Rice could be a fantastic addition to Washington, though it remains to be seen how he or the program would handle the transition into the Big Ten.