Interesting, but probably too long as it list a ton of coaches I've never even heard of.
Chris Beard ranks in tier 2A, which is only below tier 1...which has only 8 names in it.
Texas Tech fans are very butt hurt, but I think they may have a good gripe. Their guy was listed in tier 4.
Mark Few remains in pursuit of his first national title but there’s little reason to doubt what he’s done at Gonzaga. (Jamie Schwaberow / NCAA Photos via Getty Images)
Jim Boeheim’s place in college basketball is of some question. (Brad Penner / USA Today)
Chris Beard ranks in tier 2A, which is only below tier 1...which has only 8 names in it.
Texas Tech fans are very butt hurt, but I think they may have a good gripe. Their guy was listed in tier 4.
Men’s College Basketball Coaching Tiers 2022: Who is now on top in the sport?
Sep 28, 2022
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The best men’s college basketball head coaches are the top Xs and Os savants. The best coaches are the best recruiters. Or the best player development gurus. Or the guys who win over the long haul. Or the coaches are those who can conquer the brackets in March and April.
Or, in a word? Yes. To all of it.
Welcome to The Athletic’s Men’s Basketball Coaching Tiers for 2022-23, our effort to sort out who does the best job across the college hoops landscape in the first season without Mike Krzyzewski and Jay Wright.
The criteria? Intentionally vague. Definitions of success vary from person to person. So we created a list and contacted multiple sources around the sport — from search firms to agencies to those involved in the game — and asked for input to arrive at something resembling a consensus.
“I think there are some really good young coaches out there, and some older guys who aren’t as good as they used to be,” one search firm source says. “That’s what makes this so hard. I’m sure you’ll hear from a lot of coaches. Good luck with that.”
Because tiering 350-plus coaches would be folly, we culled the list according to the following qualifications:
• All head coaches from the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC;
• Any head coach from a non-“power” conference who has led his team to the NCAA Tournament or won a regular-season conference title in the last three seasons (so high-profile names like Archie Miller and Steve Prohm actually don’t qualify);
• Must have already coached a full season at the Division I level (Jon Scheyer and Jerome Tang, et al., wait ’til next year);
• Must be an active Division I head coach.
Please read and review this multiple times before lunging into the comment section (or submitting a question for our forthcoming coaching tiers mailbag), because not everyone is of the exact same mind about any one coach, and there is bound to be disagreement and debate. There was within the people we called. There was within The Athletic’s staff. That’s the fun of it, no?
In fact, there’s only one certainty here.
“It’s a really hard exercise,” one coaches’ agent says. “You guys are going to get blistered.”
Tier 1COACH | TEAM |
|---|---|
| Tony Bennett |  Virginia |
| John Calipari |  Kentucky |
| Scott Drew |  Baylor |
| Mark Few |  Gonzaga |
| Tom Izzo |  Michigan State |
| Rick Pitino |  Iona |
| Kelvin Sampson |  Houston |
| Bill Self |  Kansas |
Maybe this would be better classified as the “if you know, you know,” list because it is, perhaps, the one group of coaches everyone agreed with. “Overall, I don’t think you can argue with those eight guys,’’ one former coach says. This is, in essence, the dream team, the group that you’d cull from if you were an athletic director and you could hire anyone in the country.
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It is also beautifully representative of college basketball. In what other sport could you have the Iona coach on the same list as the Kansas and Kentucky coaches and no one would argue? “If you polled every head coach in college basketball and asked them if they could have one coach to coach their team for one game, who would it be — I bet over 50 percent of them would say (Pitino),’’ one agent says. “The respect he has among his peers — even the ones that don’t like him — is pretty ridiculous.” In what other sport could two guys who’ve not won a national title (Mark Few and Kelvin Sampson) not only make perfect sense to be included, but earn votes from some as best of the best? When asked whom he would rank first, one former coach says, “It’s Mark Few, but I’ll tell you what, Kelvin isn’t far behind.’’
If anything, this top tier shows that the term “blueblood” is no longer applicable to program; it’s about the coach. You can build a powerhouse anywhere if you have the right man.
No doubt John Calipari, Bill Self and Tom Izzo, the guys sitting in college hoops’ penthouses, rank as the no-brainers, but don’t mistake that for guys just running on cruise control. The battle for elite players is harder than ever, what with the alternate options of the G League and Overtime Elite available, and crafting consistency at the top might be harder now than ever. “For Bill Self to do what he did in that conference, and win it that many times in a row — it’s almost undoable,’’ one former coach says. Managing expectations is also no picnic. Calipari, who took UMass and Memphis to a Final Four, has coached in the fishbowl of Kentucky since 2009, which ought to be counted in dog years. He’s won one title and reached four Final Fours, and for the insatiable appetite of Big Blue Nation, that’s almost not good enough. “Everyone likes to say Cal’s not a good coach,’’ an agent says. “But he’s also like, what? Fifteen plays away from winning like five national championships.’’
Mark Few remains in pursuit of his first national title but there’s little reason to doubt what he’s done at Gonzaga. (Jamie Schwaberow / NCAA Photos via Getty Images)
Gonzaga, Houston, Baylor and Virginia are places where basketball expectations never consistently existed until their coaches came along and created them. Few has taken Gonzaga from little engine to locomotive, building a program with facilities that rival any in the country and results that rank at the top (no worse than the Sweet 16 since 2015, 30 of the last 69 weeks ranked at No. 1) save for the niggling missing piece of a national title. “He hasn’t won it all, but he will,’’ one insider says, parroting the opinion of many. Houston had its Phi Slama Jama days, and then a vast expanse of nothing until Sampson came in. Now the Cougars, who have gone Sweet 16, Final Four, Elite Eight the past three years, enter this year as a national championship favorite. Similarly, the Ralph Sampson wonder years were a minute ago when Tony Bennett arrived at Virginia. He brought a pack-line defensive scheme as the great equalizer for the Cavaliers in the competitive ACC. People hated it, and carped Bennett would never win in March with it, especially after he lost to UMBC. His answer? A national title the next year.
And then there’s Scott Drew. “It’s funny because, I know he belongs there with what he’s doing, but it still seems strange to me to see Scott Drew as a Tier 1 coach,’’ says one agent. That was the overriding sentiment of the Scott Drew Can’t Coach crowd, who have since been silenced as the coach completed his resurrection of Baylor not by gobbling up five-stars, but by taking sit-out transfers and unheralded recruits and winning a national title.
Team 2ACOACH | TEAM |
|---|---|
| Dana Altman |  Oregon |
| Rick Barnes |  Tennessee |
| Chris Beard |  Texas |
| Ed Cooley |  Providence |
| Mick Cronin |  UCLA |
| Leonard Hamilton |  Florida State |
| Sean Miller |  Xavier |
| Eric Musselman |  Arkansas |
| Matt Painter |  Purdue |
| Bruce Pearl |  Auburn |
The on-the-cusp group. Put a national championship on the resume of any of these names, and there’s almost certainly an addition to Tier 1. But there aren’t national championships on the respective resumes. Which left a lot of room for debate, as to who might deserve a spot among the highest echelon of men’s college coaches.
Take, for example, Chris Beard, who supercharged Texas Tech and was an overtime away from a national title in 2019. Beard has operated for only one season with the seemingly endless resources at Texas, with the sparkling Moody Center opening this fall as the Longhorns’ new home floor. “Chris Beard is really close,” an industry source says. “He’s really consistent. He seems all over the map, but the things that are really, really consistent with him are toughness, defense, work, preparation, recruiting personality. Watching film from last year, knowing about (Tyrese) Hunter, seeing how they improve, seeing what they could improve — he could win a national championship this year.”
Is Beard on the verge? It naturally depends on what direction Texas takes from here. “I’m a wait-and-see guy with Beard,” one agent says. “Not that he’s been bad. He hasn’t been at all. He’s been really good, but in five years are we going to be saying he underachieved at Texas?”
And yet the notion of national titles as a springboard to a place among the elite of the elite brought about some debate with other Tier 2 names, simply because a couple guys one tier up haven’t had the confetti fall on them in April, either. Purdue’s Matt Painter might have one of the best basketball minds in the country, and his program wins almost metronomically at this point. How does falling short in March affect the calculation? “What he has had to do is evolve, and he has evolved so many times,” an industry source says. “He’s evolved with his offense. He’s evolved with his players. He’s been able to have tough years and turn back around and win again. He’s done it consistently. He hasn’t had a lot of issues in his program He’s built that fan base and took it to another level. If Kelvin Sampson is on that list, and Few is on that list, then I almost think Matt Painter (has to be).”
Likewise, does the comparison game favor Auburn’s Bruce Pearl? “Kelvin has done a great job, but is he any different than Pearl?” an agent asked. Well, Pearl has won nearly 67 percent of his games with 11 NCAA Tournament bids and one Final Four appearance. Sampson has won 67 percent of his games with 18 NCAA Tournament bids and one Final Four. Eye of the beholder stuff.
Providence’s Ed Cooley may not immediately come to mind as one of the nation’s elite coaches, mostly because of the shadow cast by the Jay Wright-era at Villanova. But Cooley’s degree-of-difficulty points, relative to the results at Providence, earn him his spot. “When you look at some of the other jobs in these (top) tiers, Providence is not this great job,” one agent says. “And he’s been extremely competitive in the Big East. He’s a really good basketball coach that has done more with less for a long time.” What Cooley accomplishes now that he’s out of the aforementioned shadow pretty much will be legacy-defining. “He and (Danny) Hurley have to make a real jump now that Jay is out, because (Villanova) is going to change,” one industry source says. “It just is.”
A run at a long-awaited Final Four and national title is about the only missing element for Sean Miller, now back for a second stint at Xavier. “There’s really no weakness to what he does,” the industry source says. “He’s one of the top 20 coaches in the country. Easy. Maybe higher.” Or as one agent put it: “He’s a really good coach. He won at Xavier, won at Arizona and he’s going to win at Xavier again and never leave.”
And then there’s Eric Musselman, who has delivered at a high level both at Nevada and Arkansas … but maybe just not at the highest of high levels. The Razorbacks might be poised to do so in short order, however, which could change Musselman’s personal narrative. “Arkansas is one of the hottest teams in the country,” an industry insider says. “They’re on a rocket ship. They’ve really capitalized on NIL, and he’s a really, really good coach.” Like it or not, apparently. “He’s done a really good job, but I just wish for one game he’d act like he’s been there,” an agent says. “That stuff, it can count against you. If they had somehow beaten Duke and ended Coach K’s career, would he have run around like a moron? He would have been like the only guy who could make everyone like Coach K. But he’s a good coach.”
Jim Boeheim’s place in college basketball is of some question. (Brad Penner / USA Today)
