1st Year Coaches Check In

We’ve made it through exam week and Christmas is approaching. With it will come the completion of the OOC portion of most schedules. I think this is a good time to check in on the progress of our new 1st year coaches this season.

All teams are now a 3rd of the way into the season and these are the current NET rankings from this season of the 1st-year coaches.

Biggest Positive Movers from Last Season

The Good

I believe any of these P5 first year head coaches currently in the Top 65 are doing good jobs in season one. Willard, Jans, Matta, and Gates have all engineered impressive turnarounds already from last season. Certainly the better the team is the more impressive the jump is, as it gets harder the higher ranked you go. That said what a guy like Pat Chambers has been able to accomplish in year one is equally impressive if not more so. We profiled the transfer classes both assembled, and it has clearly paid off in a positive way. Anytime you can improve a team hundreds of spots in the rankings it got a chance to be one of the better turnarounds I can recall. The UTEP turnaround with Billy Clyde might be the only one off the top of my head that stands out as more significant outside of the P5. UTEP has a much stronger program though and are more capable of a turnaround like that. It’s impressive stuff regardless to do it at Sacramento State.

The Bad

I can’t really blame some of these programs taking a large stepback like Chattanooga, Saint Peter’s, and Murray State who lost most of their best players. When you are successful and a coaching change happens, it’s usually starting over in those situations. Just being competitive like Chattanooga and Murray State managed to rebuild is probably solid work considering what they lost. These are the kind of considerations that an end of the year re-grade would need to be taken into account.

Louisville, SMU, and South Carolina are just as bad as you will ever see from programs supported at the level they are financial. There is really no excuse for programs supported at that level to ever be this bad. Coaches like Chris Mack and Frank Martin aren’t looking so bad now I bet. Rhode Island paying what they paid to get Archie Miller, the early returns aren’t looking much better either.