Ranking College Basketball Coaches
I'm looking for an article or a spreadsheet that I'm almost positive I saw on this site during the tourney run last year. It ranked each active coach based on their actual tournament wins vs. their expected wins based on seeding. I have done several different searches on this site, and multiple searches of the broader internet, and for the life of me I cannot find what I'm looking for. The closest thing I came across was an article that gave historical win percentages by for each seed number, and then a ranking of total conferences on actual vs. expected wins, but nothing about coaches. Could someone please help me out? I'd love to see where Beilein ranks after last year's run. Thanks!
December 5th, 2018 at 9:31 PM ^
1. Beilein
2. Beilein
3. Beilein
4. Beilein
5. Beeline
December 5th, 2018 at 9:32 PM ^
I’m sure that Beilein is one of the bigger overachievers. Coach K and Izzo are fighting it out for the underachiever title.
December 5th, 2018 at 9:36 PM ^
This is what is inherently flawed with the "Mr March" or whatever title.
Coach K has 5 titles. He has been such a good coach in his career, his average seed is a 2 seed. But because he doesn't win it every year, he is an underachiever?
Completely disregarding regular season success drives me nuts when it comes to college basketball.
December 5th, 2018 at 11:52 PM ^
If you’re a 3 seed and you lose in the 1st rd to Mercer you underachieved. How is that unfair?
December 6th, 2018 at 12:37 AM ^
Who cares? The man has FIVE national titles. FIVE. TWELVE Final Fours. The most wins in the history of D1 basketball.
You cannot tell me coach K has under achieved. What the hell are the standards?
I'm done entertaining this argument. Clearly you don't have reason.
December 6th, 2018 at 12:45 AM ^
Keep in mind that I hate Duke. I have never rooted for them once in my entire life.
But coach K is an underachiever? He can't win it every year. The tournament is incredibly hard to win. I mean the B1G doesn't have a champ since 2000!!
And I am sorry, but "wins above expected/seed" or whatever is a flawed way to look at best coach in March. How about most wins? Most titles? Most final fours? Frequency of final fours? I look at that. A guy that has his team play so well in the regular season that his team is a 2 seed and therefore "underperforms" when they don't win is a flawed way to look at things. I mean John Calipari's numbers are inflated by undercoaching the unanimous #1 preseason team to an 8 seed, then making the title game.
It's just a dumb argument.
December 6th, 2018 at 11:07 AM ^
yes, it's a dumb argument.
if a team is a one seed and doesn't make the final four it didn't perform to its seed. we're not making subjective arguments here, we're talking about, you know, math. you're arguing with a spreadsheet.
December 6th, 2018 at 9:45 AM ^
Agree - exactly what I was thinking. However, I guess this table is wins over expected. That doesn't translate into best coach. Part of coaching is building a program and winning in the regular season.
December 5th, 2018 at 9:37 PM ^
Izzo yes on the last 4 years. Coach K? Lets not confuse our dislike for results.
December 6th, 2018 at 9:51 AM ^
Holy fuck - reading this thread and people calling Coach K an underachiever? That is absurd. Izzo totally is overrated. But Coach K? I don't even care for the guy and cant stand Dook, but come on, lets be objective here.
Now, as far as the best coach - you really have to do a lot of homework and research on this. You have to really do something like, compare final average rankings of every coach when they were at a University, and compare it to their recruiting rankings during that same time.
An elite coach gets a lot out of nothing. A shit coach gets nothing out of a lot. This would be a fairly good way of assessing all coaches, but would be extremely difficult and time consuming to produce.
December 5th, 2018 at 10:26 PM ^
Duke has had probably more early round upsets than they should have but they've had so many deep tourney runs too. I wouldn't consider them an underachiever overall on a 30-35 year time span.
Izzo significantly overachieved from about 98 to 09 and since then the last decade has been pretty lame for them.
Also, remember, this is underachieving relative to ELO projections, not relative to talent. So if Izzo fails to develop his team of 4 and 5 stars as usual, MSU just flows into ELO as like a #10ish type team which is similar to how Beilein's team will be ranked even though he's molding 3 stars. The model just captures how good you are, not how good you should be based on raw talent. Obviously Izzo was a great coach for about 15 years but he has been coasting on his rep and the talent his name brings for a decade now without doing much to convert talent to quality team play.
December 5th, 2018 at 9:44 PM ^
Beilein, Beilein,
Beilein, Beilein,
Beileim, Beilein
December 6th, 2018 at 7:07 AM ^
Agree with every word, even the punctuation marks.
December 5th, 2018 at 10:14 PM ^
The partisan pick is Beilein for #1. The real #1 for the best CBB coach is Jay Wright. To Coach Beilein's credit, I think he has paid attention here...this team is certainly playing in a Wrightesque manner. Onward and upward.
December 5th, 2018 at 11:58 PM ^
Keep in mind though that Villanova has flamed out early a number of times. Nova made the Final Four in 2009. They didn't reach the Sweet 16 again until 2016, when they won the championship. In the interim, they missed the tournament once, lost two 8-9 games, and lost as a #1 or #2 seed in the second round three times. They also memorably lost to Wisconsin in the second round as the #1 overall seed in 2017.
Beilein took over a program with significantly less recent (at the time) success. He got to the tournament faster (2 years vs. 4), has missed only one tournament this decade (same as Wright), and has only been upset twice in the tournament (2012 vs OHIO and 2014 vs. very underseeded Kentucky). Beilein is also undefeated in 8-9 and 7-10 games, and won as a 14 seed while at Richmond. Beilein teams have a history of overperforming in the tournament and Jay Wright's Villanova teams generally don't.
December 6th, 2018 at 7:15 AM ^
My perspective here is simply from a basketball purist side...I am violating/ignoring the premise of the thread. When you watch Wright's teams play...they play the game so well. From the outside looking in, he is able to maximize and optimize the skills of his players. That they play so hard and so freely is...refreshing. And this is what I love about this year's Michigan team...they, as never before, are playing to win-as opposed to not to lose.
I will say that, here, I cannot overstate my appreciation for what Brazdeikis brings to the table. The physical skills this kid brings to the table plus his basketball intelligence and mental toughness and resiliency are playing a huge role in the path that this year's team is forging. Ignas, in my book, deserves a lot of credit on many fronts-including pushing Beilein further in the direction of Wright's gift of letting the players play the game-fearlessly.
December 5th, 2018 at 10:23 PM ^
I would have agreed with the take that since Beilein does more with less you could make an argument he is at or near the top. However as many of you made clear in my post earlier “stats” prove who the best coaches are, where stats is really jjst a euphemism for wins and national titles. So clearly JB isn’t even close to the best.....
December 6th, 2018 at 3:44 AM ^
"It ranked each active coach based on their actual tournament wins vs. their expected wins based on seeding."
I think Beilein is arguably the best coach but I wouldn't necessarily use this chart to figure out who the top coaches are
Mainly because a guy like Shaka Smart would be high up on the list of overperforming his seeding because of his success at VCU but now we see he is a pretty damn average coach at Texas. He thrived using someone elses "Havoc defense" and now that he's at Texas he should be producing even better teams considering all of Texas's resources but he isn't. A lot of Texas fans are beginning to be displeased with his lack of success
Mainstream "college basketball experts" will never claim Beilein is the best coach because he doesn't have the rings but relative to the talent he gets + results I say he can stand up to any coach in CBB
December 6th, 2018 at 6:49 AM ^
I think "Havoc" was his own defense. It's true though that VCU was a strong mid-major before he arrived. Interestingly, since going up against Michigan in 2013 he's not won another NCAA tournament game (0-5).
December 6th, 2018 at 6:21 AM ^
The 538 article is interesting. It was results after the first round of the tourney last year. Needless to say Beilein's record is better now. The method used to rank appears to rely on seeding, so if seeding is correct the purported results are valid. It is not the best coach, but the coach that gets the most out of its team in the tournament.
December 6th, 2018 at 8:56 AM ^
How about best head coaches who have never been an assistant?
I know this one!
December 6th, 2018 at 9:45 AM ^
I think Beilein just keeps getting better.
December 7th, 2018 at 11:23 AM ^
What I find most fascinating about this list is that Bill Frieder is in the top 25. I went looking for him expecting him to be near the bottom, given his reputation of flaming out in the tournament while he was here.
It also would be cool to see this data charted; Izzo's numbers have been dropping for awhile.