Pitino’s first year at Minny was 13-14.
I don’t think your point is mutually exclusive of my initial point that Holtmann is a good coach but the depth of the conference makes it seem like he is not as successful of a coach as he is. JMO
I think the B10 coaches mirror the league. Lots of good coaches that are going to beat each other up all season but no coaches you’d truly say are elite with the exception of Izzo. Deeper, no glaringly horrible coaches (though I am staring at you Collins & Pitino).
As for OSU, a significant majority of their fans just don’t care about basketball. They want to be relevant and have the money (and scruples) to fire and hire at will…but there just isn’t the passion.
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We still have Izzo and Painter now.
Also I feel like there’s some revisionist history going into this. If you go back 8 years to January 2013, all of those guys are still coaching in the B1G. However Beilein had still never been to a Final Four or had a top 20 team at Michigan according to Torvik (it took until the 2012-2013 season for both those to happen, or 6 seasons).
Bo Ryan had some top 10 teams on Torvik and KenPom, but it took him 13 seasons to make a Final Four and he didn’t make his first until after 2012-2013.
Tom Crean had made a Final Four so he technically counts on that list, but that was a decade before the 2012-2013 season and at a different school. His 2012 and 2013 teams were both top 10 level teams, but in 5 other years at Indiana he only cracked the top 35 on Torvik once. During the 2012-2013 season Crean stock was at its peak, but I don’t think anyone now is sitting around going “I bet Indiana regrets firing Tom Crean”, especially with where he ended up after the fact.
It’s easy to look back on the B1G from 5-10 years ago and say look how great all the coaches were, but at that time we weren’t all sitting around saying the same thing. We knew we had some nationally elite ones (Izzo and Matta), but no one thought the rest of the B1G was littered with elite coaches who were going to be Final Four contenders most years.
We only started thinking that once those coaches got there. Right now that hasn’t happened with this current crop, but that we could be looking back in 5-10 years and this could be the equivalent of the 2012-2013 season. There’s a very real chance it’s not, realistically overwhelming odds are that it’s not. But it took Beilein 6 years to reach an elite level, Bo Ryan over a decade to get to a Final Four, Tom Crean 4/5 years to get to an elite level. And if you look at the current crop of coaches in the B1G, most of the elite teams are guided by coaches who are really early on their stops at each school (Howard’s in year 2, Underwood’s in year 4, Gard’s in year 5, all top 10 KP teams currently). Even guys like Archie and Holtmann are in year 4 and have had positive track records (improvement every year for Archie to the point where he’s now got a top 25 team on KP, and OSU had a top 10 team last year). Plus all of the current guys have one less tourney to compare success around.
I’ve gone on record as saying that I don’t think someone like Holtmann is as good as someone like Matta, but at the same time I could be very wrong about Holtmann’s ceiling. I just think that when we look back at the previous set of B1G coaches we say “look how good they all were and how strong the B1G was”. But we have the benefit of knowing what their entire career’s looked like and can pick out the peaks, even when they didn’t overlap. Trying to compare that to the current crop, when we’re working with limited info, seems unfair. Even if they do end up being relatively worse long term, which they probably will be.
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“The B10 is the best league in the country, and no league plays out of the post more than the B1G.”
Yeah maybe it’s unfair but who is the third best coach in the Big Ten? 4th? 5th?
The fact that there are no obvious answers means to me there are a lot of good coaches in the league maybe more than elite coaches.
That’s a hard question to answer, which kind of proves your point I guess. But at the same time I don’t think many people would have said Beilein in January 2012-2013, but by the end of 2013-2014 there were people ready to say he was in the top 2.
I think the real answer won’t be known for sure for another 5 years. Part of that is because that gives us more info, but it’s also because we have so many coaches who are in the early stages of their careers or at a high major school, we need more time to really know how good they are.
So what’s the consensu here on the coaches in the Big Ten?? Guys like Gard/Howard/Holtmann will have a longer opportunity to eventually make a Final Four. Right now Izzo is the only coach in the conference to have made a Final Four correct?? Certainly the only one to win a national title. If we even go back to guys like Crean/Beilien/Matta/Ryan neither won a national title, 6 or 7 Final Fours between them?? Yes after Izzo in this conference it’s all jumbled up but I don’t think the Big Ten has the best coaches out of any conference.
I would agree with that. Now some of these coaches are older than the rest of this group in the Big Ten but the ACC is loaded. They have 4 coaches that have won a national title, 5 that have been to a Final Four. Two other coaches that are probably knocking on the door of a Final Four, even though for that one coach time is probably running out.
When Tom Crean is listed as a “better coach from a bygone era” 
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Crean’s Indiana teams were really good, especially in the Big Ten. He was insane, but his teams were good. Once he got the program on track, he had 3 top-11 KenPom teams in a 5-year span.
I’m too lazy to look it up but how many coaches in the Big Ten have coached a top-15 KenPom team?
I know…I was more speaking to the “he was insane” part. Obviously his 2013 team was loaded.
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Luckily, I have no life. This list includes 2021. Partly because the top 15 teams are very solidly top 15 so it’s realistic to expect that to continue, and partly because Howard looks better.
The list is the number of top 15 Kenpom teams coached regardless of school, noting the limitations of arbitrary choices like this (Noting this due to Howard, Hotmann, Hoiberg, and Turgeon all having years that finished at 16).
Tom Izzo: 14
Matt Painter: 4
Juwan Howard: 1
Brad Underwood: 1
Fran McCaffery: 1
Mark Turgeon: 1
Greg Gard: 1
Chris Holtmann: 1
Archie Miller: 0
Chris Collins: 0
Jim Ferry: 0
Fred Hoiberg: 0
Richard Pitino: 0
Steve Pikiell: 0
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So this would be the first season for Underwood, Howard, McCaffery and Gard?
Yes. With Howard having a previous finish at 16.
Looks like Underwood finished 22nd at OK State the year they lost to UM.
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I’m screwing something up here as Underwood never coached at A&M, but I listed him as finishing 16th there. Just a sec.
Ah, Turgeon was the guy with that result. My bad. So underwood doesn’t have a 16th finish.
Agree that the flukey one-off nature of the NCAAs doesn’t provide strong evaluative criteria. BUT all the more reason to salute Izzo’s achievement, dislike him though some of us might. And also to note how incredibly good Beilein came to be at prepping his teams for their next opponent on those two-three day turnarounds. (That DOES call for some chops, as well as a great staff.)
Is there a conference where more than three to five teams do recruit at such a level? I see four (?) such teams in the ACC. . .
This is actually pretty cool, the four contending teams have coaches who haven’t been this good before.
I made another B1G Efficiency Margin table by adding a couple columns:
[Opp Avg EM] is kind of like a strength of schedule and is simply the average of a team’s opponents’ efficiency margins.
[EM+OAEM] is kind of like how a team performs compared to their opponents strength and is simply the team’s EM plus its Opp Avg EM.
For example, Michigan has played 5 conference games, and the average of those 5 opponents’ efficiency margins is -11.5, but they’ve actually beaten teams by an average of 20.2 points/100poss, so they’ve overperformed by 20.2+(-11.5)=8.7.
| Team | Record | Off Eff | Def Eff | Eff Margin | Opp Avg EM | EM+OAEM |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Illinois | 5-2 | 112.5 | 96.3 | 16.2 | -6.7 | 9.5 |
| Michigan | 5-0 | 113.5 | 93.3 | 20.2 | -11.5 | 8.7 |
| Iowa | 5-1 | 118 | 103.5 | 14.5 | -6.9 | 7.7 |
| Minnesota | 3-4 | 102 | 107.9 | -5.9 | 11.4 | 5.5 |
| Wisconsin | 4-1 | 108.9 | 98.2 | 10.7 | -8.7 | 2.0 |
| Rutgers | 3-4 | 104.7 | 110.1 | -5.4 | 6.4 | 1.0 |
| Penn St | 0-3 | 104.8 | 115.6 | -10.8 | 11.8 | 1.0 |
| Northwestern | 3-3 | 101.7 | 110.7 | -9 | 8.9 | -0.1 |
| Ohio St | 3-3 | 107.7 | 99.4 | 8.3 | -8.6 | -0.3 |
| Purdue | 3-3 | 98.1 | 102.4 | -4.3 | 3.1 | -1.2 |
| Maryland | 2-5 | 99 | 109.6 | -10.6 | 7.3 | -3.3 |
| Indiana | 3-3 | 103.5 | 104.6 | -1.1 | -4.1 | -5.2 |
| Michigan St | 2-4 | 97.7 | 102.3 | -4.6 | -5.9 | -10.5 |
| Nebraska | 0-5 | 92.5 | 113.8 | -21.3 | 6.7 | -14.6 |
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Add opponents’ opponents AdjEm and you just created advanced RPI
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