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When Baylor’s Scott Drew, Gonzaga’s Mark Few, Houston’s Kelvin Sampson and UCLA’s Mick Cronin gathered in Indianapolis for the 2021 Final Four, it was an unquestioned assemblage of four of the finest and most respected coaches in men’s college basketball.
What it wasn’t, however, was a reunion of former playing greats — three of last year’s Final Four coaches never played a second of college basketball. Few and Cronin suffered high school injuries that prevented them from pursuing college hoops. Drew played tennis in college. Sampson played basketball but was neither a star nor a household name during his playing days at UNC Pembroke.
If two Final Fours can really be called a trend, and we say they absolutely can, it would be appropriate to note that seven of the past eight Division I Final Four coaches did not play Division I college basketball. Chris Beard, late of 2019 national runner-up Texas Tech, did not play at Texas. Bruce Pearl, who nearly got Auburn to the 2019 title game, didn’t play high school basketball. Michigan State’s Tom Izzo, also in the ’19 Final Four, was a Division II standout at Northern Michigan. The outlier in that group of eight? Virginia’s Tony Bennett, who starred at Wisconsin-Green Bay and is one of only five men to play meaningful minutes in the NBA and also win a national championship in college basketball (Kevin Ollie, Billy Donovan, John Thompson, Al McGuire).
But Bennett is not in the 2022 NCAA tournament. The other seven guys mentioned above are.
The wide disparity between the coaches at the top and bottom of the list below is but another curiosity of an eternally curious game. The ability to sink a 3 or catch a lob is proven to have no relationship to winning as a coach at the highest level, but it is fun to examine nonetheless. As always, our rankings of the 68 NCAA tournament coaches as players list was devised in largely unscientific fashion by the writer, who still has not discovered a method to reliably compare a Division…
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Source : espn
