The overachiever B-sides: worst performers, best talent accumulators, fast risers, and potential second chances
A wide variety!
Hi! If you didn’t read the main article of this series, in which I explored which coaches have done the best with what they’ve got over the last seven seasons, I would read that first. It’s free to read, as is everything posted in the offseason/summer.
This post aims to answer a variety of questions that didn’t fit with the original piece, as well as explore some deeper cuts that perhaps weren’t optimal for Wednesday’s notes. It’s already 2,500+ words, so on you go. Subscribe if you haven’t!
Who was the worst coach, or the worst coaches, in each category surveyed?
This isn’t a fun one to do, for pretty obvious reasons, but hey, I am here to please. Or something like that. As a reminder, we did four categories:
Wins Above Bubble, 2017-18 to now;
Average Torvik rating, 2017-18 to now;
Average talent over/underperformance, 2017-18 to now;
Average KenPom preseason projection over/underperformance, 2017-18 to now.
And now, a short piece on each. Perhaps unsurprisingly, not many seven-year head coaches who are bad get seven years to show their stuff. Most who put up bad numbers are in really bad situations to begin with. Even so, there were some pretty rough outings among our 200+ game qualifiers.
Wins Above Bubble: No one had a harder seven-year run than poor Edward Joyner, formerly of Hampton. Joyner posted a brutal 75-132 record overall, a 52-68 conference record, and was worst both by WAB (103.5 wins below what the average bubble team would have done) and by
Average Torvik Rating, where he was a hair worse than current Sacred Heart HC Anthony Latina. I’m not 100% sure this is all fair, however, considering both were in pretty tough situations. How about the worst in a routine multi-bid conference? That would be poor Scott Pera, whose 81-127 (45-81 AAC) record versus Division I competition at Rice was unsurprisingly not enough to keep him around for an eighth year. He won 81 games less than would be expected of an average bubble team.
Among those in Actual Real Power Conferences, it was a rough seven years outside of one terrific month for Wayne Tinkle at Oregon State, who won 51 games less than a bubble team would’ve. A 96-123 record and 45-89 in-conference will do that. Functionally no one who started and ended this seven-year sample at a school with actual money had that terrible of a run, but perhaps the winner of the You Just Now Got Fired? Sweepstakes is Jerod Haase, who went 112-110 and posted a -33 WAB with a top-40 basketball budget at a school with a tremendous 15+ year run in its other money-making sports.
Average Talent Underperformance: Again, people who are alarmingly terrible don’t get to hang around for seven years, but no one had a harder seven-year run than Robert McCullum at the eternally-underfunded Florida A&M. FAMU has a dire lack of talent and of performance; McCullum’s best output in his seven years at FAMU was either a 277th-place finish (2020-21) or a 13-17 finish (2021-22). It’s obviously not an easy job, but considering FAMU has posted 14+ wins seven times in the last 20 years and McCullum registered zero of those, even they can point to some unfulfilled hope.
The better way to do this is hunt those who have talent and still did poorly. Among the top 50 recruiters in the sport, no one did less with more than Jim Larranaga at Miami, a school with consistent top-20 talent that has one (1) top-25 finish to show for it. Of course, it goes to show how hard it is to truly be a negative at this level. Larranaga merely has a Final Four and an Elite Eight to show for some metric underperformance the last seven seasons.
The true worst performer, relatively speaking versus their accumulated talent, is Bobby Hurley at Arizona State. I’ve got them as a consensus top-40 recruiter over the last seven seasons. They have zero top-40 finishes and zero NCAA Tournament wins. They’re moving from a middling Pac-12 to a horrifying Big 12. Instead of being able to out-talent bad Pac-12 competition from time to time, they’re more like a mid-pack side in terms of talent with an obvious net negative at HC. Good luck?
Average KenPom Projection Underperformance: The 2021-22 and 2022-23 NCAA Tournament runs have done a lot of work for the resume of Jim Larranaga, who has underachieved KenPom’s preseason ratings by an average of 4.52 points per year since 2017-18. Again, though, maybe he’s not the main story. That probably should be John Calipari, who was second-worst over the last decade at -4.06. And, as mentioned in the full story, Mike White at Georgia (and formerly Florida) has not beaten a KenPom preseason projection since 2016-17. He was the only coach in the 125-coach sample not to do it at least once.
Who are the best/worst small-sample performers?
For this, I’m looking for guys who didn’t meet the 200-game threshold but also coached five or fewer seasons in the last seven years. This does indeed eliminate such heroes as Dusty May, but it allows us to focus on some underheralded gems of the last seven years.
Anyway, the greatest small-sample performer in the study was Rick Pitino at St. John’s, a guy you’ve never heard of. Pitino, with three of his four years taking place at a MAAC school, has a superior WAB to guys like Tad Boyle (Colorado), Mike White, and more. He’s 84-35 with largely middling rosters. In terms of Value Over Expectation, he’s averaged a +2.39 effect per year post-COVID, which would have put him second overall behind Randy Bennett had he put that up for a full seven years. He remains the king.
Other standouts are obvious. Josh Schertz at Indiana State sits at +1.92 a year, or near the level of a Chris Jans type. There’s Andy Kennedy at UAB, who’s averaged +1.85 a year in Birmingham. Or, perhaps, there’s the premier Rising Star in coaching: Danny Sprinkle, who averaged +1.69 a year at Utah State/Montana State the last three seasons with relatively light amounts of talent.
Underperformers: among top-50 recruiters over the last three seasons, no coach has done a worse job than Leonard Hamilton at Florida State. Ham has had at least four former top-100 recruits on all of his last three rosters and hasn’t finished above .500 in the ACC during that time. Among active coaches, the second-worst…well, close your eyes if you’re of a certain fanbase. It’s Mike Woodson at Indiana, who has averaged the sixth-most talented rosters by HS recruiting ranking in his tenure and has one NCAA Tournament win to show for it. I think we’ll learn a lot about his future this year, in which he merely has the third-most talented roster in the sport, per Torvik.
Speaking of talent!
Who’s been the best talent accumulator over the last seven years? What about post-COVID?
The last is first here because it’s very interesting. Over the last three years, the two best talent accumulators (by Torvik Talent Rating) have been Hubert Davis and Jon Scheyer at UNC and Duke, respectively. The average player on those rosters - the AVERAGE - is a top-60 high school recruit and borderline five-star. Pretty insane stuff, and that’s before getting into how both have plundered the portal pretty usefully in their short HC careers.
Unsurprisingly, the best over the last seven years was John Calipari at Kentucky, whose average roster member was a top-100 recruit. Nothing too groundbreaking there. Behind Cal are some fellow usual suspects: Bill Self, Tom Izzo, Mick Cronin, and Mark Few to round out the top five.
An intriguing post-COVID trend, aside from UNC/Duke, is actually Calipari leaning away somewhat from the recruiting trail. I have Cal ranked as merely the 10th-best recruiter of the last three years, which isn’t some massive falloff but is pretty notable for the One and Done Guy. Of course, as we’ve said many times, talent is a key part of the equation but it’s not everything. Ask Juwan Howard, the third-best recruiter of the last half-decade, who’s now jobless.
Who are the rising all-stars in the post-COVID era?
Once again, it’s complicated. Here’s how I’d personally break it down.
BEST OVERACHIEVER: Grant McCasland, Texas Tech/North Texas. This is the one that works the best overall, both from a talent overachievement perspective and a KenPom-beating perspective. McCasland is #1 in our wacky Total Over Expectation metric from 2021-22 to now, #14 in the KenPom overachiever metric, and #34 in average Torvik rating despite routinely rating in the 200s in talent at North Texas and having the 54th-best roster a year ago.
BEST GUY WHO’S FOUND HIS LANE: Richard Pitino, New Mexico. Pitino, last three years: #2 in KenPom overachievement. New Mexico’s roster is now top 40 in talent basically every year, which is possibly more of an off-court win than on-court but it still counts. He’s fully recovered his resume from his Minnesota tenure.
BEST DIVISION I COACH WHO WASN’T A DIVISION I COACH BEFORE COVID: Josh Schertz, Indiana State. This is still a pretty crazy rise. Schertz won multiple national championships at D2 Lincoln Memorial, but there haven’t been many programs that have taken chances on the D2 types. Indiana State was one and they should be forever grateful for it. The only post-2020 coach with a better three-year run who didn’t coach D1 from 2017-March 2020 is Rick Pitino.
BEST POST-COVID TURNAROUND: Pat Skerry, Towson. From 2017-18 to 2020-21, Towson went 28-37 in a pretty middling CAA, and through 10 years of Skerry, Towson had finished top three just four times. Over the last three years, Towson is 38-16 in the CAA and has consistently knocked on the door of the NCAA Tournament.
BEST ELITE RECRUITER AND ELITE IN-GAME COACH: I mean, duh. This is a three-way tie, more or less: Kelvin Sampson, Matt Painter, and Dan Hurley. In the Total Over Expectation metric, they were all within 0.1 points of each other. All three were +5.5 or better. Only two top-50 recruiter HCs (Scott Drew, Rick Barnes) even cracked +4.
Lastly! BEST NEXT MAN UP? Brian Wardle, Bradley. I am a little surprised that Wardle seems to generate little buzz for bigger jobs. He owns two of Bradley’s four Arch Madness championships, their only regular season crown since 1996, and has five 20+ win seasons in the last seven years. Bradley’s last five-in-seven run like that was in the 1960s. He did similarly excellent work at Green Bay - 48 wins his final two years there - and just…keeps winning. He’s 44, so he’s not old. He has the two best KenPom finishes in Green Bay history and the best run of play for Bradley in 15+ years. So…what’s the holdup?
McCasland finished #1 in the Torvik overachievement metric over the last three years, but Wardle was #2. He’s ninth-best at beating the KenPom preseason metrics. Bradley’s 2021-present run of play is 76th-best nationally, per Torvik, despite rosters that rank in the mid-200s in recruiting talent. (Notable surrounding schools: #75 LSU, #77 Syracuse, #79 Pittsburgh.) I feel like most of the mid-major stars have gotten new gigs, and it could just be that a guy who grew up in Illinois would like to stay in Illinois. I guess I’d just like an explanation from someone. DePaul couldn’t check in on a guy who grew up in the Chicago suburbs?
What were the best individual seasons?
This is a simple one: in that Total Over Expectation goof I’ve come up with, what were the five best seasons in the last seven years?
5. Nate Oats, 2018-19 Buffalo (+3.61). Long before he became the guy you know at Alabama, Oats was merely a mid-major darling who was coming off of a thrilling beatdown of 4-seed Arizona in the previous NCAA Tournament. He entered this season 72nd in KenPom, which is very good for a MAC team. He blew it out of the water, as Buffalo went 32-4.
4. Josh Schertz, 2023-24 Indiana State (+3.71). Again: a team of total no-names and a star player that looks like a plumber. One of the greatest mid-major coaching jobs in modern history.
3. Mark Schmidt, 2020-21 St. Bonaventure (+3.73). This is one of the best coaching jobs in a while; a shame it got lost to time thanks to a shortened season. The Bonnies went 16-5, finished 32nd in KenPom, and did that without a single senior on the roster. They overachieved so heavily that the next season, where they posted a second straight top-80 KP finish for the first time since 2001, felt like a gigantic failure in comparison.
2. Todd Golden, 2021-22 San Francisco (+3.74). A top-25 KenPom finish after the school had never finished higher than 61st before. Next.
1. Mike Young, 2018-19 Wofford (+3.91). This alone would have earned Young his chance at a higher level, even though it hasn’t been peaches and cream with Virginia Tech yet. Wofford - WOFFORD - won 30 games, went 18-0 in conference play, finished top 20 in KenPom, and won its first NCAA Tournament game in school history.
Lastly: any guys who could use a second chance?
Always, but a few stood out from the data:
Southern Illinois’s name has far exceeded its actual on-court product for over 15 years now, so what Bryan Mullins did there wasn’t uniquely bad. Context-wise, he did fine: three straight .500 or better finishes in MVC play for the first time since 2017-2019, a 23-win season for the first time since 2007, the school’s two best KenPom finishes since 2010. His last three years of performance versus Torvik’s Talent Rating ranks alongside that of Rob Senderoff at Kent State, as a comparison. At just 37, he has a lot of mileage left.
The extenuating circumstances here are very extenuating, so YMMV. But someone will give John Brannen another shot eventually. Brannen owns the three best seasons in Northern Kentucky history - seasons Darrin Horn has yet to really touch, by the way - and did win the AAC in his one full go at it as Cincinnati’s HC. Of course, his dismissal at Cincinnati was about way more than on-court stuff, so, yes, we’ll see. Apparently he runs a house painting company in southern Ohio so he may be fully done.
Would you like a deep pull? You’ll get one. Jack Owens, formerly of Miami (Ohio), gave that program three top-200 KenPom finishes in a five-year tenure. They hadn’t cracked the top-200 since 2011-12. They also never won more than 16 games overall or 9 in MAC play, but both were the highest the school had posted since 2010-11. Considering the struggles his replacement (former Xavier HC Travis Steele) has gone through, posting a best finish of 257th thus far, I think he got a bad deal here. Along with Mullins, he is also on DePaul’s staff this year. Holtmann must like these types.
Impressive pull of data and situations. Well done!