Georgia reportedly firing basketball coach Mark Fox after 2 NCAA tournaments in 9 seasons

Georgia is firing men’s basketball coach Mark Fox, ESPN’s Jeff Goodman reports.

Fox was the head coach in Athens for nine seasons. During that span, his Bulldogs made two NCAA tournament appearances and didn’t win a game in either. They never developed into a top-tier contender in the SEC, either, not that UGA was one before Fox’s arrival.

Fox’s total record with the Dawgs finishes at 163-133, a .551 winning percentage that wasn’t much out of line with the program’s history. Only two men have coached more games than Fox at Georgia, and only one of those — longtime boss Hugh Durham, who ran the program from the 1970s into the 1990s — did any better. Athens is a hard place to win in this sport.

This year’s Dawgs went 18-15. They made a nice little run in the SEC Tournament, winning two games before getting dispatched by Kentucky in a quarterfinal on Friday.

Before his time at Georgia, Fox was a successful head coach at Nevada. He took the Wolfpack to an impressive three NCAA tournaments in a row from 2005 to 2007 and won four WAC regular season titles and a conference tournament in his five years there.

Fox’s teams haven’t tended to be exciting or much good at all on offense. They’re inefficient at scoring, and they take long, plodding possessions. But Fox has consistently coached great defense throughout his career, and that should help him land another gig sometime.