2024 college basketball coaching carousel

DePaul could hire Will Wade.

It's hard for every private school these days in a sense. State schools have larger alum bases to leverage for NIL.

 

For a long time, the knock on DePaul was its inability to recruit because of its subpar facilities almost an hour from campus.

They opened Wintrust Arena much closer to campus a few years ago, just in time for the NIL arms race to start. I'm not sure they can ever get back to being a regular Top 25 team, but they should be able to at least compete night in and night out in the Big East, just given the built-in advantages of being a major conference team in one of the best recruiting areas of the country.

 

He's got another year left on his show cause order. Can't see anyone hiring him away from McNeese while that is still active.

 

The arena is indeed newish and a huge improvement over the Horizon, but it's still not super convenient to campus. They've also started to plan and fundraise for a new on-campus practice facility. But from what I can tell their NIL apparatus is almost nonexistent.

The DePaul women's team has been a near-annual NCAA tournament team over the past two decades, except for the past few years. I realize it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but the men's team should at least be occasionally good. It never is.

 

Holtmann out at Ohio State:

 

One of the nicer guys I had a chance to cover in my time as a reporter. Racked up a couple of good seasons at Gardner-Webb before leaving for an assistant job at Butler, which some people thought was strange. But you don't just go from the freaking Big South to a power conference gig without an intermediate step, and he managed to be in the right place to take over when Brandon Miller had to take a medical leave of absence. Nice start at Ohio State but it has grown stale. He's only 52 so he's still young enough to land on his feet at a mid-major somewhere.

 

Hope to see a guy like him in the "Tulsa" of college basketball coaching, as I've landed in my own career. Sounds like a good guy.

 

He used to randomly email me just to check in on things and shoot the shit. Helped that I was one of the few writers who actually traveled in the Big South, so I made a few trips down to Boiling Springs when he was there. Guess all I'm saying is that OSU needed a change and he's a good coach who has plenty of gas left in the tank. Both can be true.

 

Blowing an 18-point lead to a very mediocre Indiana team at home last week was a big red flag that not all was right in the Buckeye universe. It was a capitulation of the highest order.

Not only that, but Value City Arena was a mausoleum. Half-empty and that place is so vacuous in the first place, that it had the vibe of a conference tournament game involving two non-local teams.

His postgame afterwards had the feel of a dead man walking. Some wondered whether the buyout would get in the way, but obviously it didn't.

His teams of recent ilk have been very weird. Last year, the Buckeyes were 47th nationally in 3-point percentage, but were 306th in 3-point attempts. They were 190th in two-point field goal percentage, but 43rd in 2-point shots attempted.

Holtmann doesn't strike me as a bad coach. Maybe he's not cut out for the portal era? (Though Ohio State wasn't shy in the portal, see Jamison Battle from Minnesota.)

Plenty of good coaches that liked to develop their teams through the traditional way of four-year roster construction are being left behind by the new ways.

 

It didn't help his cause that a new sheriff, one who just got down whacking his football coach at ATM and who apparently likes to whack coaches so he can court new ones, is on board or about to be on board at Ohio State.

 

Ohio State is a flawed gig (who wants to be the forgotten stepchild at a football-obsessed school?) but there are fucking studs lining up for that one.

 

Ross Bjork still has egg on his face from the Jimbo Fisher fiasco in College Station. There seems to be little many ADs enjoy more than showing who the new sheriff is in town.

I mean, we used to think a $14 million buyout was a whopper. Then we remember how much Bjork and company forked over to Fisher so they could fire him ...