The Last Three Basketball Hires At Each SEC School

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With the SEC’s two coaching vacancies filled, we can now take a look back to see where most league schools have turned when coaches have left (or been asked to leave).  Is there a pattern?  Do proven big-school coaches work out better than unproven mid-major guys?  Better than promoted assistants?

We went back over the last 36 basketball coaches — three per school — hired into the SEC.  Interim coaches (like Don DeVoe at Florida) weren’t included in our list. 

Below are the results of the last three coaching searches for each league program.  You’ll see each coach’s years of activity at the school, where he came from (including the number of NCAA/NBA head coaching jobs he’d held before his hiring into the SEC), and the result of his tenure (including any NCAA issues that aided in his exit):

First things first, one man’s “fired” is another man’s “forced to resign.”  We tried to use the most often used media description of the time in our chart.

So what do we find from all those hirings?


1.  Unless we’re doing the math wrong, 11 of the 36 hires came from BCS conferences.  The reigns of Ellis, Sloan, Gillispee and Boyd ended badly.  Kruger and Smith would be considered the positive hires out of the BCS bunch (so far).

2.  Six assistants were promoted to head coach — Hobbs, Brown, Williams, Stansbury, Evans and Barnes.  Most of those hires resulted in success with only Hobbs and Barnes being clear-cut disappointments.

3.  That leaves 19 mid-major hires to fill out our list.  Stallings, Calipari, Donovan and Fogler (at Vandy) all turned out well (so long as Calipari’s current Final Four banner doesn’t come down at some point).  Others — like Fox and Grant — appear heading in the right direction.

4.  Twenty of the 36 hires wound up being fired for forced out.  Five of those 20 left amid NCAA scandals — Pearl, Harrick, Sloan, Ellis and Brown.  Brown’s situation was questionable, but the NCAA had been after him for years. 

So you want a pattern?  Good luck.  There are hits and misses regardless of the background of the man being hired.