Written by Pete Thamel at SI.com
When conference play began in January, the agents, search firms and athletic directors in the college sports industry projected a quiet year for college basketball coaching turnover. There were a few potential openings, but not enough to consider this an unusually volatile year.
In the past six weeks, that notion has changed radically. And with NC State firing Mark Gottfried on Thursday afternoon—a job few expected would open—the speculation of an active job market met the reality of what promises to be a chaotic next six weeks of firings, hiring and the endless drama that accompanies job turnover.
The NC State opening offers a perfect window into what could be one of the most intriguing trends of the 2017 hiring cycle. With coaches like Dayton’s Archie Miller and Xavier’s Chris Mack unlikely to take the job, it sets up perfectly for an established coach at a Power 5 school—or one that pays like a power conference school, like VCU or Wichita State—to make a lateral slide to that role in Raleigh.
Part of this potential trend is a dearth of established mid-major coaches on the market this season. The top-tier of that mid-major market—UNC-Wilmington’s Kevin Keatts, Illinois State’s Dan Muller, Chattanooga’s Matt McCall, Princeton’s Mitch Henderson, Monmouth’s King Rice, Vermont’s John Becker and Boise State’s Leon Rice—likely lack the résumés to make that big of a jump. Observed one industry source: “There’s not that many names of guys this year that are proven.”
That means proven coaches could end up as hotter commodities. Think of Jamie Dixon going from Pittsburgh to TCU last year or Kevin Stallings bouncing from Vanderbilt to Pittsburgh. While those moves haven’t been overly common in the past, there’s an expectation in the industry of an uptick—or attempted uptick—of those types of moves.
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