When the time nears to flip the calendar from February to March, the college basketball world tends to focus the bulk of its attention on Selection Sunday and the opening weekend of the NCAA Tournament. But for a number of coaches whose reputations and job security are based heavily on making the tournament or winning conference championships, these next two weeks are actually the most important of the season.
The 8 coaches with the most to lose or gain before Selection Sunday
This is the time of the year where everyone wants to talk about the NCAA Tournament, but for a handful of college hoops coaches, the final two weeks leading up to Selection Sunday are far more important.
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Some coaches like Matt Painter and Mark Turgeon have already done enough to ensure that their 2014-15 work will be viewed in a positive light, while others like Brian Gregory and Kevin Willard already seem to be too far gone to save. For these eight, however, the next 17 days are going to, in one way or another, have a huge effect on their careers.
1. Rick Barnes, Texas
Last season was supposed to be Barnes' make-or-break year on the hot seat, and the Longhorns wound up exceeding everyone's expectations by winning 24 games and advancing to the NCAA Tournament's round of 32. This season, on the other hand, was supposed to be Barnes' shot at a national title. Instead, Texas has gone from a team that spent most of the first half of the season ranked in the top 10, to one which is on the verge of being left out of the field of 68.
Barnes and company have a chance to make a huge splash with a win at Kansas on Saturday. If that doesn't happen, then they're likely going to have to take care of Baylor and Kansas State at home as well as do some work in the Big 12 Tournament in order to hear their name called on Selection Sunday and, potentially, ensure that Barnes keeps his job in Austin.
2. Steve Lavin, St. John’s
Guys who had seemingly coached their way off the hot seat but have now slid back down on it has been a bit of a trend in 2014-15, and there might not be a more visible example than Lavin.
This is Lavin's fifth season at St. John's, a tenure which began with the former UCLA coach guiding the Red Storm to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2002. Since then, however, nothing has gone as smoothly. He coached just four games during his second season while battling prostate cancer, and has led the Johnnies to just two postseason wins -- one in the Big East Tournament and one in the NIT -- heading into his fifth March with the program.
An 11-1 start in which the team’s only loss came at the hands of No. 3 Gonzaga seemed to provide security for Lavin, who has just one-year left on his current contract, but Big East play has brought the Red Storm down to earth. SJU is 8-7 in the league and squarely on the bubble heading into a final stretch of the season that includes a chance for huge wins over Georgetown (at home) and No. 6 Villanova (on the road). With plenty of rumors already swirling in New York that Lavin will be bought out of the final year of his contract if he fails to make the dance, this would seem to be one of the most critical junctures of his coaching career.
3. Andy Kennedy, Ole Miss
If the tournament began today, the consensus is that Ole Miss would be pretty safely in the field of 68. That’s good news for Kennedy, a coach who has been to the dance just once despite spending the past decade in charge of a major conference program.
Kennedy has done a terrific job with this team, but Wednesday's home loss to Georgia put him in a position where he has far more to lose than gain over the course of the next two weeks. The Rebels have tough road games at LSU and Alabama before they end the regular season by hosting a Vanderbilt team that seems to be hitting its stride. If Mississippi were to somehow ride a 4-game losing streak into the SEC Tournament and get bounced early enough to land on the wrong side of the bubble, it would almost certainly be a death blow for the Kennedy era in Oxford.
4. Shaka Smart, VCU
Smart makes this for an entirely different reason than most of the other names here. The VCU front man has been one of the hottest coaching names in the game for what feels like about a decade now (it’s actually been just since the 2009-10 season), but there’s been one thing that has always escaped him: Smart has never won a regular season conference championship.
It’s a fact that was known by few at the start of the season, but which has been shared more liberally as the heavily favored Rams have slipped back into a four-way tie atop the Atlantic 10 standings. VCU doesn’t completely control its destiny when it comes to winning the league outright, but games against fellow 11-4 squads Dayton and Davidson give it more command than the other three members of the quartet.
Smart and the Rams are a lock for the big dance, and the 37-year-old’s reputation is too solid to be shaken significantly by anything that happens this March. As far as being able to avoid an annoyingly well-known fact that gets brought up every season around this time, though, these next three games are big for Smart.
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5. Anthony Grant, Alabama
The man Smart replaced at VCU finds himself on significantly shakier ground as his sixth season in Tuscaloosa approaches its end.
Grant may already be too far gone to save, as his injury-riddled Crimson Tide team is just 7-8 in the SEC, and appears poised to miss the NCAA Tournament for the fifth time under his watch. Still, Bama has an opportunity to revive some of its old bubble chatter by winning its last three regular season games -- a stretch which includes tilts against the formidable pair of Texas A&M and Ole Miss -- before heading to Nashville for the SEC Tournament. Anything less may result in the exit door for Grant, who is 11-61 against RPI top 50 teams at Alabama, including 3-38 over the last three seasons.
6. Tom Crean, Indiana
No coach’s perception has been more up-and-down this season than Crean’s. It started in the fall when he was lambasted by the media for both his on-the-court work and his players’ off-the-court actions. Then after some surpsing mideason success, he became a guy defended by other members of the media who blasted the previous group of media members for writing what they did months earlier. Now, after an extremely shaky February that has the Hoosiers at 9-7 in the Big 10, Crean is back to being characterized as a coach who might need to do a little work down the stretch in order to save his job.
Indiana still seems like a safe bet to make the NCAA Tournament, but losing to Northwestern earlier this week as well as having not won back-to-back games since Jan. 22 certainly hasn’t helped the program’s outlook or Crean’s reputation. The Hoosiers will close the regular season by hosting the good-but-not-great duo of Iowa and Michigan State. Winning those two games isn’t going to leave anyone propping Crean up for Big 10 Coach of the Year, but it will result in at least temporarily silencing the growing number of folks, both nationally and in Bloomington, who are calling for his job.
7. Steve Alford, UCLA
Alford’s contract guarantees him $10.4 million if he’s let go before finishing three seasons on the job, so that’s almost definitely not going to happen this spring. That said, the number of longtime Bruin fans who are irate over both the lack of energy inside Pauley Pavilion and the lack of caché attached to the program at the moment is only going to grow if Alford fails to lead this group into the big dance.
The Bruins end the regular season by hosting Pac-12 cellar dwellers USC and Washington State, which puts Alford in a huge risk, little reward situation ... especially if it’s the hated Trojans who seal UCLA’s NIT fate on their home court.
8. Larry Davis, Cincinnati
Davis’ situation is completely different from every other head coach on this list in that, well, he isn’t actually a full-time head coach.
In late December, Mick Cronin, who is in his ninth season at Cincinnati, was diagnosed with a tear in the inner wall of an artery, which was detected after he went to the hospital complaining about persistent headaches. In order for the tear to heal, Cronin was ordered to rest, take medication, and control his blood pressure, which meant he had to sit out the rest of UC’s season ... sort of.
Cronin still attends practice on most days, he’s with the team during talk-throughs before games, and he chats with Davis, now the interim head coach, multiple times a day. But he watches the games from home. Davis is the man calling the shots during the games, and Cronin makes it a point to refer to him as “coach” during any and all conversations between the two, but it’s still Cronin who is controlling things, making changes to the starting lineup, and telling his players what they did right and wrong after games.
It’s an extremely odd relationship, but for the most part it’s worked out pretty well, as the Bearcats have done enough to land squarely on the bubble heading into the final week of the regular season. If Davis is able to lead UC to a surprising tournament appearance and maybe make some noise there, it might revive the likelihood of him landing another D-I head coaching gig. That’s something he might not have been able to envision when he was let go by Furman after serving as the head coach there from 1997-2006.
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